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Saving public education

On Tuesday, Feb. 14, 2006, NPR Morning Edition education correspondent Claudio Sanchez tried to tie together two distinct threads:

• the first thread, the Commission on the Future of Higher Education's attempt to force standardized testing on colleges,
• and the second thread, a Pew Charitable Trust survey that more than 50 percent of college graduates can't calculate tips or understand newspaper stories and editorials.

Standardized testing is already used in K thru 12 education, and tip calculations are taught in sixth and eighth grades, according to New York standards. Newspaper story understanding is taught at intermediate levels and news editorial understanding by high school graduation. Since K-12 standardized testing failed to guarantee those standards, why is the commission proposing a failed strategy?

This is just another salvo in the ongoing battle between the Hatfields and McCoys. Do you want politicans' fingers on the pulse of learning or credentialed educators taking their own pulse? Neither one! It's like Shakespeare's Romeo and Juliet:

Where be these enemies? -- Capulet, -- Montague,
See what a scourge is laid upon your hate.

• When students are passed who haven't mastered the work while other teachers and principals turn a blind eye.
• When administrators believe that kids with no food, no father, and no faith can't learn to think critically.
• When that they are credentialed seems more important to educationists than success educating. [You want heat? Suggest to a credentialed teacher that there might be a more successful way to do something.]
• When to politicians, any measureable number, however unrelated to success, is an opportunity to advance.
• When to boards and administrators, busy managing buildings and mandates, success is managing expectations, dampening initiative and imposing order.
• When the Hatfields and McCoys tolerate the ordinary.

• A librarian said that over 30 years, to her recollection, every single kid, but one, who signed up for a library card in elementary school, graduated.
• Or, in Frankford Elementary School in Delaware, 95% of the girls and 100% of the boys passed the state reading exam because teachers accepted no excuses. Students who stumbled got help until they passed.

Break the cycle by horse-laughing at the bumbling Hatfields and McCoys, and, instead...

• Form a stakeholders group at each school -- two each of parents, teachers, administrators, students, and community leaders -- with no power except conversation. Success will happen.
• Insist teachers feed back to previous year teachers what skills their students had not mastered before advancing.
• Mentor teachers who aren't excellent.
• Reward teachers for each at-risk student they save.
• Bring the community into the schools to see that in-school suspension kids aren't warehoused, but get mentored.
• Help every 7 thru 12th grader find something -- anything -- that will give them a sense of belonging while in school.
• Loosen up the bureaucratic lockdown, foster responsibility, open communication and initiative.

Success happens one student at a time and not through insulated educationists or standardized tests. Excellent teachers -- and we have many -- will relish the help.

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