Charter Schools—Not Another ‘Fairy Godmother’ Fad (part 2)

Most Americans can understand why there is more technology in the classroom today than when they were in school, or why history or science textbooks are updated from when they read them. However, most Americans probably don’t understand why education today seems so trendy.

Americans of my generation grew up watching Dead Poets Society or reading the Harry Potter novels where we got the same ideas about education that our parents got from theirs—-that schools are sanctuaries of knowledge and fortresses for individual learning and growth. This is the old, classical notion of a liberal arts education. Though this idea of education has not been a reality for some time, I think that the notion of a universal, stable, and personal education looms large in our imagination.

I think this is one reason why when people who are not educators want to talk to me about what I did at my latest professional conference (beyond what I ate for lunch in downtown Louisville, etc.), they’re a little taken back when I say, “We discussed getting rid of class goals and replacing them with learning outcomes for students instead,” or, “the presenter argued that writing assignments should incorporate forms of service learning.”

While their unfamiliarity with foggy educational schemes of thought can quite naturally baffle people, I think more people are stunned to see education in such a constant state of vogue and flux: all they ever say—-if they say anything—-is something along the lines of “well school sure sounds different” or “when I went to school…” That so many people—-whether they are 30 or 60—-have such a reaction leads me to think the idea they had of education was less mutable than the reality I describe.

Public education, however, has become a very capricious field since the 1980s. For example, when I prepared my first syllabus, I was told to write out the course goals and objectives that I was going to cover in class. What a goal was in those days, was what I wanted my students to be able to do once they had completed my class, and so using the template I was given, I would write out something such as this in such a simple statement format: “recognize 20 common errors,” etc.

This seemed simple enough, if not a tad perfunctory.

Then suddenly we started hearing about how ‘learning outcomes’ were all the rage now, and that we were to incorporate them into our course syllabuses—-never mind all that stuff about ‘goals’ now. (No one thought of explaining what was so wrong with goals that they had to be replaced…it was all a ‘what everyone is doing now’ sort of thing.) To write a learning outcome, we had to spell out what our students were going to learn or be able to do after being taught in our class. I remember telling the educational specialist, who was being paid to do this workshop at my school, that “We’ve written that down already.” But we were told to take 10 minutes and turn one of our goals into an outcome.

Since we were forced to cancel a full day of teaching to do this, I thought the specialist was asking us to do something difficult…otherwise, why would the school pay her to come here? It took me about 9 of those minutes to realize that what she wanted me to do was ridiculous, easy, and useless. I simply rewrote my goal of “recognize 20 common errors” to “Students will be able to recognize 20 types of errors that are common in most writing.”

Did we really need to pay this woman or cancel a day of class…for this?

Furthermore, since students rarely look at a syllabus (or its goals or outcomes) except during the first week or (if I'm angry) when I make them take it out, the whole situation here was not about the pedagogy inside the classroom, but was preoccupied with the liability outside of it. But most of all, please notice that the only difference between a goal and a learning outcome is that the latter is an independent clause that begins with ‘students’ as its sentence subject. The goals were more like imperatives that used simple phrasing. In other words, the only difference between a goal and an outcome is the style, not its content.

Why on Earth do teachers all over the United States waste their time doing things that won’t make any difference in student achievement?

The answer is this: our public education institutions are addicted to fads. The people who control public education (administrators, university theorists, touring speakers and specialists, etc.) will never admit that they have run out of ideas or that the current system cannot be reformed: to do this, they would have to surrender both power and prestige. Therefore, they attach themselves to the latest gimmicks being presented at professional conferences or printed in whatever educational publication they happen to superficially peruse.

Therefore, teachers are bombarded with different schemes, and theoretical phrases such as ‘Maslow’s hierarchy of needs’ and ‘Bloom’s taxonomy’ are dropped at meetings as God-terms for months at a time, and then abandoned with more practical concepts such as ‘service learning’ and ‘media center,’ etc. All of this is done with such a rapacity that it all becomes muddled into ‘white noise’ for teachers who sit through hours of this baffled and numbed.

And of course, the students who we were supposed to prioritize get lost in all of this fad frenzy—they become an ancillary concern beside the ongoing power struggle between tired and fed-up teachers and administrators who are perpetually acting out a new and improved dramatic version of “The Emperor’s New Clothes.”

Instead of another fad, we must understand charter schools as part of a long awaited and much needed philosophical shift in American education. This new philosophy has 4 main characteristics, all of which I will discuss in more detail in a later blog post: (1) decentralization, (2) teacher-student centered, (3) full-circle accountability, and (4) a foundation of student/parent involvement.

Where charter schools fit into all of this is that while charters are not a ‘cure all,’ they help us to begin creating a new system of education that this country needs. I want to see a new movement arise in America and I think that charters, vouchers for private schools and home schooling, and more school choice will all be part of this.

The United States must have a new education movement because the old system, after 40 years of trying at the federal and state levels, seems non-reformable. If the old guard has their way, they will continue to tell us ‘all is well’ while they go on with forcing teachers to chase fads.

In the meantime, students will continue to graduate from some of our high schools reading and writing on a 5th grade level. They will continue to lack some of the basic skills they need such as critical thinking and reasoning, which they need to be good citizens and good voters. (On that note, they will also need some knowledge of history and government.)

And of course, they will continue to be weak in the areas of math, science, or computer technology—this means that they will be unable to compete in the high-tech job market that is now evolving.