The Star Ledger, January 14, 2008
Kill State Tests
We've tried military-style discipline, standards and tests. We've tried vocational ed ... Could we now give inspiration a try?
By Robert Weisbuch
We are now approaching the possible end to the latest huge and reductive experiment with American K-12 education, the No Child Left Behind Act, passed by the Gradgrinds of both parties and promulgated in a particularly prosecutorial and penurious fashion by the current administration. No wonder the test-maimed and standards-blamed teachers have come to rename it the No Bad Idea Left Behind Act.
The spirit of Dickens' pragmatist Gradgrind -- "Now what I want is, Facts. Teach these boys and girls nothing but Facts" -- and his teacher-slave Mr. M'Choakum child, one of 140 such schoolmasters "lately turned at the same time, in the same factory, on the same principles, like so many pianoforte legs" -- has been deadeningly alive in American schoolrooms for several years now, to no great effect.
Yet NCLB is merely the latest (and at least refreshingly conservative and bracingly rigorous) fad that passes for a concept in K-12 where the Panacea-of-the-Month Club has been going strong for several decades. Search through all the educational-reform doctrines, though, and one makes a curious discovery. There's little or no mention of the life of the academic disciplines, in all their ongoing discoveries and controversies. Indeed, to its credit NCLB acknowledges the existence of reading and math, if only to turn them into whipping posts.
May I join with such distinguished educators as Bard President Leon Botstein to suggest something radically different? Having tried everything else, could we perhaps give Thought a chance? How about an approach that is directly and unashamedly intellectual, that imagines it is more to the point to engage students than to test them? Instead of force-feeding them via standards, how about offering them a delicious dinner of ideas?
This could happen in New Jersey if we will take the risk of being humane. Three events in the state in the last month could be conjoined powerfully. First, Mayor Cory Booker announced a search for a Newark superintendent of schools. Last month too, we announced a new Masters in Teaching program at Drew intended to model what a really deep liberal-arts emphasis might mean for K- 12; and Arthur Levine, my successor at the Woodrow Wilson National Fellowship Foundation, announced a Rhodes-style fellowship program to encourage superb students to become lifelong teachers in the public schools.
Add to these beginnings the longstanding commitment of public universities like Montclair State to partnering with the schools and we could create an alliance that might bring something like joy back into the classroom. It would mean trusting teachers and recruiting teachers who deserve that trust because they love their subjects as well as their students. That won't happen unless the schools and the universities make profoundly common cause.
But such an alliance won't be easy. The gap between public and higher ed, according to educational historians P. Michael Timpane and Lori S. White, is greater in the United States than anywhere else in the world.
That there was a time, in the establishment of the university system, when the dividing line between schools and colleges was hazy, only tells us that the gorge was not nature's creation but dug out as a fundamental principle of higher ed. Indeed, I don't think I would have become a college teacher (or rather, "faculty member" or "scholar-teacher") had this not conveyed a professional status at least partly defined by not being a high school teacher.
The two systems now house vastly different cultures based on unlike economies and pressures. University faculty sometimes approach their school colleagues like gods carrying grace to undeserving sinners. And teachers in the schools, enlisted time and again into partnerships with the colleges, have seen those alliances undercut suddenly when a superintendent or a department chair departs. The old Who rock song, "Won't Get Fooled Again," is the anthem for such once-idealistic teachers.
And on the college side, faculty whose own children attend public schools and who often are among the most vocal parents in complaining about the academic quality of those schools, can ask nonetheless what is in it for them professionally to create such collaborations.
If we are going to ford the gap and not fall in, we must first obey it and describe conditions in these two vastly different nations. We will need to create lasting incentives and place the alliance in a lock-box of base-budgeting, see it not as a frilly icing but as the cake itself.
To create this third culture, too, we must say clearly what is in it for the two sides. The universities provide the lifeblood of the academic fields. It is where discovery and controversy take place, where learning becomes something more than Gradgrind's facts and more like the very basis for deciding how to live in a democracy.
Yet the universities, in too many of their teacher-education programs, think they can tell the school faculty how to teach. In fact, I earned a doctorate in my field without ever spending a minute studying strategies of teaching, a scandal if one thinks about it. But that is where the schools can offer a great deal to the universities, for a skillful school teacher simply knows a lot more about the processes of learning than her or his college counterpart.
Let's imagine we can create such an alliance. And indeed there have been beginnings. The Gates Foundation, through Woodrow Wilson and other intermediaries, has been attempting such for several years, in the Early College High School program. And the Carnegie Corporation, under Vartan Gregorian's direction, has established a Teachers for a New Era effort that requires universities to overcome the longstanding and fierce enmity between their liberal-arts colleges and their ed schools, so that new teachers will really know -- and love -- the subjects they teach.
But imagine Newark could collect Drew and Princeton, Montclair State and Rutgers, the great foundations like Gates and Carnegie Corporation, and create an alliance more thorough and permanent than any that had yet been attempted. What would that mean for the kids?
Step one is, paraphrasing Falstaff to Prince Hal, we kill all the state-based tests. Or at least make them an admittedly needful afterthought, rather than a substitution for Thought itself. "You don't fatten a hog by weighing it," presidential hopeful John Edwards has said pungently if not elegantly. Robert Hutchins, the famed president of the University of Chicago, wrote more positively in the last century, "The best education for the best is the best education for all," and even if one is made uneasy by Hutchins' equation of wealth and intellect, its democratic refusal of tracking is all to the point.
Diminishing the tests (because they are nasty and vindictive, because they mislead, because they are not human, but most because they distract effort from where it is efficacious and life-giving) is hard but possible. You thought you could never give up smoking but you did. You can lose the test addiction too. Take two pills of sense and a spoonful of dignity and the symptoms of a test-crazed era will be gone in the morning.
On this new morning, you will awake to a world where children of all kinds get dazzled by the academic disciplines, from preschool on. Can't happen? It's easy if you try. The late and superbly playful poet Kenneth Koch argued that children love poetry, that the babe bouncing on the parent's knee is a rhyme-and-rhythm adept from the start. An appreciation for poetry depends, he said, on unlearning whatever made it seem other than a natural pleasure, based in the pulsing of the blood. It's that way with all creative and analytic mental activity.
Yes but, skeptical school veterans are quick to say, try that in a classroom riddled with children from the mean streets, where the very act of calling a class to order is a challenge. How hopelessly effete and elitist an intellectual approach becomes in such a setting.
No! How desperately required it is -- because nothing else stands a chance. It may mean digging down into the early years as in France's école maternelle, government-sponsored preschools where humane learning begins with language acquisition. And it certainly will mean more money spent in the short-term -- and less in the long-term, once the nation can reduce its expenditures on every negative aspect of human control born of a failed education, from remediation to social services and welfare to prisons.
Which to me means that the arts and sciences must be seen not as an advanced course of study but as a lifestyle that in deed begins in preschool and extends to the end of life -- and as a politics that makes that lifestyle not simply possible but ubiquitous.
If you visit a school in an economically deprived neighborhood, it is not violence that you find in the building but a depressing boredom. The very leader of the search for Newark's new superintendent of schools, Clement Price, joined me once on a visit to such a school during the year when he was Woodrow Wilson's Distinguished Visiting Scholar. "Can you feel that heaviness?" Price asked me. Indeed, it is a heaviness than which any street life, however self-destructive, is superior in plain human interest.
We've tried military-style discipline, standards and tests. We've tried vocational ed, a whole subject in itself. We've tried using college admission as the carrot, so that our kids are always using the present to prepare, never quite inhabiting the present mo ment fully. Might we instead begin with the assumption that curiosity is a native aspect of being human? Could we now give inspiration a try?
There's a lot of it out there, probably not a single subject that doesn't have highly inspired teachers with great track records in schools that exist in the most unpromising areas. It matters less who will be Newark's next superintendent than whether she or he is willing to give teachers who will risk ideas and controversies and creative thought a chance.
If we get such a remarkably affirming individual, count us at Drew not simply as supporters but avid participants. We're looking for a first class of 25 individuals who want to learn how to create a classroom where discovery is as natural as breathing and as thrilling as a kiss. And we are also looking for the anti-Gradgrind school officials who have the courage to mention learning and joy in the same sentence.
