The Great Education Debate

The devolution of thought.

This post has been percolating in my brainium since another discussion over at Balloon Juice about how Diane Ravitch has gotten off the charter school fan bus, because the evidence is in for charter schools, and well, they are going to have wait a little longer for Superman.

Charter schools are on average often underperforming regular public schools.  This is significant since charter schools can select their own students, though many do from a lottery.  Often this is because charter schools are top down driven affairs from some philanthropist who saw his civic duty and overdid it.  It usually involves some form of pedagogy that's real hip at the moment.  And it usually does very little to advance real learning.

I can sum up what would solve the problems in education in two words: teacher mastery.

First would come mastery of the subject matter.  Anecdotally, we are very happy with Things One and Two's public education in elementary school.  I think you can see how mastery of the subject matter in elementary school is easily accessible to most adults.  I dread the day when Thing One comes home with math homework that I won't be able to help him with.  Elementary schools generally do pretty good on satisfaction ratings.

Second would come mastery of pedagogy.  Simply knowing the material does not make you a good teacher. I had a number of math teachers in junior high who simply could not reach me.  That wasn't their fault, necessarily, as I was a tough nut to crack.  But my Algebra II teacher's pedagogical approach was to explain the reasons behind a problem as much as the methods to solving the problem.

It reminds me of something Baron Von Steuben said over 200 years ago at Valley Forge: "American soldiers are different from European soldiers.  You tell a European soldier to do something and he does it.  You must explain to an American why you must do it, and only then will he do it."

I imagine it works similarly in math.  Tell an Asian kid to memorize math properties, and that's good enough for her.  American students tend to need to know why they need to know the area of a circle.

Ed programs are very successful in churning out graduates who know how to teach elementary students.  High school students are probably more complicated.  Both the subject matter and the students are more complex.  This is certainly not to say that teaching elementary school age children is easy, but at least smart phones and accessibility to graphing calculators aren't an issue in class.

Third comes mastery of the classroom.  This has two parts.

Part A, the teacher must be able to own that classroom.  That means the students come to that classroom respecting the teacher and the control that the teacher has over the coursework.  Working in a private school, I don't have to worry about this as much, and frankly, it's not something that a school system can change.

Teachers need to be respected.  More than just appreciated - I think most people appreciate the difficulties and challenges of teaching - they need the respect of society.  Asian families always bring gifts when they meet with you, as a sign of respect.  When I travelled in Argentina, our translator insisted on calling me Professore, even though I was a second year teacher with no real clue what I was doing.

Oh, and when people constantly demonize teacher's unions, they're demonizing teachers.  Just an FYI.  This respect is not really something that can be done without society's active participation.

Part B is linked to the above.  The teacher is the one who knows the needs of the students.  At least ideally.  That means no faddish pedagogy imposed by someone who - odds are - never taught a single class but read about it somewhere.  It also means that class sizes need to be smaller.

I don't think I can stress the importance of class size enough.

I teach 13 kids in each of my AP classes.  I know which ones are bad at certain types of essays and which ones are rarely prepared for class.  I know which one had a concussion and won't be able to take her test this week.  I know which one needs structured notes from me to prepare for an exam.

I couldn't do that when classes have 35 kids.  With five or six sections.  Those teachers inevitably become assembly line workers.  Essays?  For 150 kids?  Probably ain't happening.

To have mastery over the class, the teacher has to be able to assert himself over the class.  And that means the community has to respect and value the teacher and the class sizes have to be small enough so that he can relate to his students as individual learners.

Finally, mastery over the curriculum is needed.  This isn't just about teaching to the standardized test, but let's stipulate that teaching to tests like that isn't very educational.  I teach to the AP test as an aside.  I'm really teaching US History and Comparative Government.  There are some tricks I need to impart to my students related to the test format, but ultimately, I'm teaching the material.

Nevertheless, the College Board requires that you submit your syllabus to get your AP course accredited.  My first submission for both my US and Comp Gov classes failed.  Now, generally speaking I have only one student each year get below a 3 on the AP.  One.  But my syllabus failed, because I wasn't meeting some arbitrary benchmark imposed by someone outside my classroom.

My US syllabus failed because I didn't do historiography.  Every other chapter in the book concludes with a page of historiography!  I discuss it.  It's not on the exam and has no relationship to the students actual understanding of history itself - beyond understanding that history is interpretation not facts.  So I tossed in a few book review assignments and we read about 40 pages in John Lewis Gaddis's The Cold War.  Nothing substantive changed in the course, but I had successfully jumped through their hoop.  Something similar happened with Comp Gov and quantitative analysis.  I also had to dump a really interesting essay on Mexican political art, because it wasn't part of the AP curriculum.  I would love to teach India in Comp Gov, but I can't.  So there!

If we meet teacher mastery of the subject matter and pedagogy, we can trust them to teach the material.  We don't need someone telling biology teachers that they have to teach creationism or that students have to learn or not learn the Ten Commandments.

What happens is that Mark Twain's perfect idiots - school boards, or their modern equivalent in charter schools - begin to impose uniformity on a process that really must be heterogenous.  As I like to say, the best part of teaching is that every day is different, the worst part is that every year is the same.  The first part is a function of having each class respond to how I'm feeling, how they're feeling, where we are in the material, what happened yesterday and where I want to be three weeks from now.

You can't plan that from a superintendent's office or a school board meeting.

And if we don't respect teachers as professionals, we won't get the necessary skilled, motivated people necessary to create masterful educators.

American education has always been failing.  The reason is that we educate everyone.  We have a complex, heterogenous society.  Wealthy school districts in the US, the ones that value education, compete with school systems anywhere in the world.  It is the poor community schools that drag down the average and drag down their students.  And the students - it must be said - are dragging down their schools. We have recently added the teacher's union as an all purpose bogeyman that must be slain!  MUST BE SLAIN!  But when a teacher feels constantly placed between the hammer and the anvil, of course they are going to want a union.  Hell, I want a union, too.

But the needs of sound-bite politics and crisis driven news outweigh the needs of our teachers and students.

You can't educate children without masterful teachers.  There is not short cut.  There is no magic bullet.