Today for the most part I am going to get out of the way and leave room in your minds for Marc Waxman’s powerful blog post about ceasing to believe in the nation’s dominant school reform narrative. It’s meaty stuff and should give pause to those of us who promote all or part of that narrative.
I know Marc agonized over the post. He outlined it for me over coffee several weeks ago, submitted a draft, pulled it apart and reworked it. I posted it late Tuesday afternoon, and by 10 p.m. it had been viewed by over 500 people. That’s a lot of evening action for a niche blog like ours.
One reason the post garnered so much attention so fast was that Elizabeth Green, proprietress of the excellent, Manhattan-based Gotham Schools website linked to it Monday evening. Within a couple of hours, the comments came flying in. Diane Ravitch even asked Elizabeth for Marc’s e-mail address.
One observation about the reactions to Marc’s post. He concluded his post with the following:
“My question for today is not what reforms we should or should not believe. It is simply this – what’s your vision of a good education? It’s time to have this conversation, however messy it may be.”
Instead of attempting to answer that difficult question commenters chose to go after their favorite targets – corporate takeover of schools, testing, yada, yada, yada. This prompted Marc to e-mail me:
“Interesting that pretty much no one answered the question – “what is your vision of a good education.” I was thinking about replying to each one of them really pushing that question. We can continue to point fingers, etc., but we really need to talk about what’s important to us and why….”
OK, I’ll bite. A good education ensures that children possess the skills they need to become reflective, critical thinkers who question assumptions and refuse to accept easy answers. Well-educated children can demonstrate that they have acquired the basic skills that are a necessary precondition for higher-order thinking.
By the way, in case you hadn’t noticed, Marc’s post is part of a steady evolution in the EdNews blog. In its early days three years ago, the blog was a snarkier affair. The writers used pseudonyms and many, though not all, wrote from a similar perspective.
I’ve worked at recruiting a crew of bloggers with more varied views on education issues. Today, you’ll find writers ranging from Ben DeGrow of the Independence Institute to Kevin Welner, a University of Colorado professor who, to put it mildly, sees the world differently from Ben. Some of you will try, but you’ll be hard pressed to pigeonhole this blog accurately.
As I’ve written recently, feelings are running high these days on many issues, education among them. Some people can’t help but descend into ad hominem attacks.
A brief example: I was called an unethical pissant on Mike Klonsky’s blog last week, because I had the temerity in this space to voice support for value-added modeling while acknowledging its imperfections. I’m sure the upcoming seminar, MEDIA BIAS: How Corporate Media Shapes the School Reform Debate (and what Progressives can do about it will take the EdNews name in vain as well. How did a “boutique Hyde Park liberal” from Obama’s (and Bill Ayers’) neighborhood get into a pissanting match with progressives? What has the world come to? What have I?
But I digress. My wish for this blog is that it remains a safe harbor for vigorous debate and disagreement without ever descending into invective.
Popularity: 2% [?]
Umm…some folks have started to answer that question…(Some comments *do* contain thoughts relevant to the original question.)
Also, a lot of people in the education world have built schools and written books about what a great education looks like. Deborah Meier is a prolific author in that regard. I also look to Starting from Scratch by Stephen Levy, the Watershed project in Radnor, PA (the creator, Mark Springer, has written about it) and Lave & Wenger’s Situated Learning when I start envisioning what I think education should look like. There are lots more, but I’ll stop there for now.
Yes, including you, Sabrina. I wrote that before some of the newer comments came in.
Alan, the media bias forum will address the way the mainstream media gives all charter schools and “reform” efforts a pass without digging more critically into what works and what doesn’t. Education, like pension financing, tends to be such an “inside baseball” topic, and few education (or finance) reporters really understand the intricacies.
You and the other writers here are to be commended for wanting to look deeper. As I’ve said to you before, I am glad you are adding a wider spectrum of contributors.
If we’re to fix education, we need to put all facts on the table and be honest about what works. Right now, we know precious little, and this mostly due to the fact that kids are not widgets. We have to keep talking and keep exchanging ideas if we’re to get anywhere.
It is, however, very difficult to separate the snark of the opinion side from the reporting on the news side. I appreciate your efforts to do so, however.
Good points all …
I am struck by the few who recognize the ecological nature of learning, leading, and change. It must be based on research-validated principles from mutliple disciplines, a task to which I have dedicated my life’s work as have many of my closest colleagues around the world and here in the US.
I think we have a lot of answers but we must deal with the chaos, complexity, and unpredictable nature of our work in education. Friends like Meg Wheatley and colleagues such as Andy Hargreaves, Peter Senge and Otto Scharmer have found common principles and truths that can help us all. I have summarized these in my last two Corwin Press books published in 2007 and 2008. They have received little press but I don’t worry — for me it about being and doing the work and not just talking about it …
My two cents for now! Best, Barbara
Education should not only teach people how to think (for themselves) but should also instill in them a real love and enthusiasm for the process of learning, which is what is so exciting about getting educated, You discover the power connected with actually USING that thinking equipment we are born with. The operative question is “how”?
I was disturbed by a piece in The NY Times that said that “kindergarten is the new first grade.” What a depressing observation!
I find it interesting that a theme running through most of the answers to Marc’s question, critical thinking, also points us to the answer to another question often asked, why don’t these reforms work better.
Despite the hand wringing of hiring managers and the pronouncements of CEOs, our “free market” economy does not, in fact, want a population that thinks critically, questions assumptions or refuses to accept easy answers. It wants a population that will mindlessly consume whatever appears on the market, and quickly so inventories can be kept as low as possible. And when the captains of major sectors of the economy enrich themselves to the point things start to collapse, well, we’d better not think or question or anything else, it’s time to step up and save them (by mortgaging one or two generations of future tax payers) . Where would we be if we’d actually taught kids to think critically for the past 20 years?
I used to joke about this all the time until, in the hours after the 9/11 attacks at the World Trade Center, then President George W. Bush told the American public it was their patriotic duty to go shopping. The reasoning went something like this – terrorists want us to be afraid and to stay home. If we do that, our economy will crash and they will win. So get out there and buy something. And I’m not being sarcastic here – it was all just about as crass as that but it was presented in all seriousness.
Kids get the disparity between what we say we want for them and what they will actually have the opportunity to apply. Responding to a student’s question a couple of years ago, I explained that lateral thinking and problem solving were important to develop so he would have the skills to get work he found meaningful and with colleagues he could solve important problems with new ideas. To this he replied, “what, like you?!”
Some people do actually get to exercise their brains professionally (I suspect that group is over represented in the readership of this blog) and some, like me, will exercise their brains whether allowed to or not (especially when not). Most people will have to resolve the tension between the psychological need for creative interdependence and consumer capitalism’s demand for surrender to the wisdom of the market. Since education has been subsumed into the economy as a component system, I’ll bet on the needs of the containing system winning out in the end. I’ll take that bet just about every time.