A Few Radical Proposals
First, consider a succinctly defined goal: “In the field of education we define best practice in teaching and learning as innovative, creative, research-informed, and learner oriented instructional practices that evidently produce learners who are not only engaged and motivated in learning but also possess high level of physical and psychological well-being.” Education and Learning, International Best Practice, Vol. 8, in Research on Sociocultural Influences on Motivation and Learning, 2008, Edited by Arief Darmanegara Liem and Dennis M. McInerney.
The United States is nothing if not innovative and fond of change. The youth oriented counterculture, civil rights, social movements, civil disobedience, liberal, anti-establishment, “anything goes” and “all ideas are valid” era of the 1960’s to the 1970’s gave birth to a number of pedagogical fads including the open classrooms’ focus on students’ “learning by doing”. This idea resonated with those who believed that America’s formal, teacher-led classrooms were crushing students’ creativity and impairing their real educational needs.
Open classrooms came into vogue which contained no whole-class lessons, no standardized tests, no detailed curriculum, no tests, no walls, no seats, no desks, no grades, and no responsibilities. Many classrooms had planned settings where children came in contact with things, books, and one another at what were called “interest centers” and learned at their own pace or sometimes with the help of the teacher. Teachers were not even called teachers. They became coaches who structured the classroom and activities for individual students and small work groups. In the good classrooms, they helped students negotiate each of the reading, math, science, art, and other interest centers on the principle that children learn best when they are interested and see the importance of what they are doing and are unhampered by supervision. Classrooms were arranged as workshops.
As the idea of open education gained momentum, thousands of elementary-school classrooms became home-like settings where young children moved from one attractive learning center for math then to another for art, science, reading, and writing lessons, etc. Children were no longer assigned to grade levels. In some areas alternative open education programs were created at the high-school level and gave teachers discretion to create new academic courses free of the old-fashioned academic rigor where students directed their own learning, worked in the community, and pursued intellectual interests largely unsupervised and without accountability. At both the elementary and secondary levels, open education meant teachers were acting more as interested onlookers in helping students than as bosses directing children in every activity.
The drawback was pretty much what might have been expected. On a wide scale, the American school system produced functional language and mathematical illiterates, and the country was humiliated by the miserable performance of American students when they took the same tests as foreign students took. The answer to that sound of alarm was the corporate model—choice and accountability as was embodied in the No Child Left Behind policy—the opposite extreme to the liberal school policies extant at the time.
“One of the most interesting new trends in international comparisons is the effort by some policy groups to compare individual states–rather than the United States as a whole–with other countries. This is seen as a way to pressure state governments to improve education. It also highlights the discrepancy in education that exists within the U.S.
The National Governors Association, the Council of Chief State School Officers, and Achieve, an education advocacy organization, are researching ways to compare states with other countries to tease out information on best practices and global competitiveness.” –YoExpert, Matters in Education, online magazine.
Dr. Ravitch, quoted earlier, is an historian, teacher, and policy maker who has come to a rather remarkable conclusion:
“As I flipped through the yellowing pages in my scrapbooks, I started to understand the recent redirection of my thinking, my growing doubt regarding popular proposals for choice and accountability. Once again, I realized, I was turning skeptical in response to panaceas and miracle cures. The only difference was that in this case, I too had fallen for the latest panaceas and miracle cures; I too had drunk deeply of the elixir that promised a quick fix to intractable problems. I too had jumped aboard a bandwagon, one festooned with banners celebrating the power of accountability, incentives, and markets. I too was captivated by these ideas. They promised to end bureaucracy, to ensure that poor children were not neglected, to empower poor children to escape failing schools, and to close the achievement gap between rich and poor, black and white. Testing would shine a spotlight on low-performing schools, and choice would create opportunities for poor kids to leave for better schools. All of this seemed to make sense, but there was little empirical evidence, just promise and hope. I wanted to believe that choice and accountability would produce great results. But over time, I was persuaded by accumulating evidence that the latest reforms were not likely to live up to their promise. The more I saw, the more I lost the faith.”-Diane Ravitch, The Death and Life of the Great American School System: How Testing and Choice Are Undermining Education, Basic Books, A Member of the Perseus Books Group, New York.
Jack Jennings at the Center on Education Policy in Washington, D.C.., wrote a book whose title pretty much sums up the status of reform programs as they exist in the American educational system of 2013– Reflections on a Half-Century of School Reform: Why Have We Fallen Short and Where Do We Go From Here?
