Editor’s note: This commentary is by Peter Berger, an English teacher at Weathersfield School, who writes “Poor Elijah’s Almanack.” The column appears in several publications, including the Times Argus, the Rutland Herald and the Stowe Reporter.
Everybody knows what a symptom is. That’s because we all have them. According to my New Century Dictionary, compiled when the new century was the 20th, doctors use symptoms to identify “a particular disease or disorder.” Here’s a collection of symptoms recently reported in and by America’s public schools. What do you make of them?
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Over the summer the Boston public school system announced plans to equip all its school buses with cameras and microphones “in an effort to combat bullying and other disciplinary issues.” Urban Boston isn’t the only school district to consider or to have already instituted surveillance on its yellow buses. Smaller systems, including rural districts like mine in Vermont, video-record student bus conduct on a daily basis.
The Boston Globe voiced its strong editorial objection to the plan. While acknowledging that video recordings have become “routine” and are “especially useful” for “identifying gross misconduct, like physical assault,” the Globe condemned audio recordings as “an extreme initiative” that “unnecessarily infringes” on students’ privacy.
The Globe editors are half-right. Electronic surveillance, whether it’s video or audio, is extreme. Unfortunately, I’m not sure it’s unnecessary. That’s because behavior on buses, just like behavior everywhere else in school, has continued to dramatically deteriorate. At the same time, the disciplinary power of school officials – bus drivers, teachers, and principals – has been dramatically undermined. Secretary of Education Arne Duncan and Attorney General Eric Holder, drawing on their utter lack of classroom experience, recently indicted schools that suspend students for what these two esteemed cabinet officers deem “minor transgressions” like “schoolyard fights,” repeated class disruption, and “willful defiance.” Parents of disruptive, often dangerous students routinely threaten lawsuits, and principals, acting on advice from lawyers and orders from superintendents, routinely back down.
The way matters stand, unless you can roll the video, unless you’ve got that threat or obscenity on tape, even if you have witnesses, there’s too often nothing school officials are permitted to do. That pathetic, reprehensible state of affairs can be made right. The first step would be to restore to teachers and principals the necessary authority to keep order and to keep children safe from the other children who threaten them. When adults in school are once again permitted to exercise reasonable judgment and authority, unreasonable, extreme measures like electronic surveillance won’t be needed anymore.
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When it comes to instruction, the education world is engaged in one of its many wars. The reading war arrays phonics fans against whole language advocates. The math war likewise pits contenders for basics opposite problem-solving partisans. In both fields the truth and the best way to teach lie somewhere in the middle. Unfortunately, schools, teachers, and students don’t get to spend much time in the middle but instead are required to ricochet back and forth between whichever extreme happens to be in fashion at the moment.
Curriculum is caught in its own dissociative, extremist tug of war. On the one hand, in addition to commending iPhones and Facebook as instructional tools, experts recommend graphic novels, also known as comic books, as appropriate materials even for honors and advanced placement students. Meanwhile, a recent Common Core high school assessment for all students included a passage from Ovid’s “Metamorphoses.”
Remember that the Common Core standards apply to every student and mandate what every student needs to know and be able to do to be “college and career ready.” I here confess that apart from a few random passages in Latin and English, this Ivy-covered, 64-year-old English teacher hasn’t read “Metamorphoses” yet.
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While curriculum rebounds between “Ovid” and Mark Zuckerberg, battle lines on the assessment front are drawn between proponents of standardized testing and educators who rail against what they deride as “drill and kill” education. There’s no doubt that standardized testing, including the assessments mandated first by No Child Left Behind and now by the Common Core, consumes unprecedented hours and days of what was once classroom instructional time. It should be equally plain, at least to impartial eyes, that these assessments typically generate heaps of often meaningless, unreliable data and, simultaneously, obscene transfers of public funds into corporate wallets.
Today, assessment fans and Common Core boosters prattle on about their data, while more and more of the time I used to have to teach my students is lost to tests that tell us either nothing or something we already knew.
In fairness, education’s obsession with testing is rooted in more than greed and the profit motive. For decades, dating back to the 1970s, education reformers have railed against teaching “facts” and content, the so-called “drill” aspects of instruction. Teachers were, and are, expected to teach their students to think without, of course, burdening them with anything systematic to think about. The flaws in this content-light approach, and the “student-centered,” lax discipline, pass/fail, self-esteem riddled schooling that accompanied it, were blasted in “A Nation at Risk,” prompted brief, occasional “back to basics” efforts over the ensuing decades, and finally bore corrupted fruit in No Child Left Behind and its exhaustive testing regime.
Today, assessment fans and Common Core boosters prattle on about their data, while more and more of the time I used to have to teach my students is lost to tests that tell us either nothing or something we already knew. Meanwhile, reformers like New York City’s school chancellor continue to deride facts as something students learn merely “to take tests.” According to this false choice philosophy, students need “thinking,” not facts, “to get on in life.” According to centuries of liberal arts and sciences education, they need both.
As long as excessive, pointless assessment continues to displace and subvert actual teaching, critics will complain about “drill and kill.” As long as those critics, however, insist on disdaining and scorning facts as unnecessary burdens on thinking and obstacles to educational “joy,” as long as those advocates mock and reprimand teachers who impart knowledge to their students as “sages on a stage,” assessment zealots on the other side will be right to complain that American students don’t know much.
As long as schools are ruled by two fanatical, bankrupt extremes, no matter what the issue and no matter which side’s experts are advancing at the moment, students, teachers, and learning will be suffering in the middle.