An archaic education system
ONE OF MY favorite quotes from Judith Berger's 1976 novel "Ordinary People" comes from a piece of advice that offbeat psychiatrist T.C. Berger gives his overanxious, emotionally damaged teen patient Conrad Jarrett. Although Conrad's slow recovery from recent traumas is hindering his ability to focus on his schoolwork, he is reluctant to drop some of his courses and risk getting further behind. "Behind what?" Dr. Berger asks him. "The Great Schedule in the Sky? The Golden Gradebook? What?"
I couldn't help but think of Conrad's plight as I read the recent Boston Globe article detailing the results of a new Boston school system report, which found that nearly half of Boston students fail to graduate from the city's high schools within four years. Certainly it is troubling that only 27 percent of students who hadn't graduated after having spent four years in high school went on to do so, as the report also noted. But I can't help but wonder if a system in which the quantity of the education is fixed and the quality of the education is variable is partly responsible for the inordinately high dropout rate of 9.1 percent that Boston schools reported in 2005-2006.
Grouping students by age is part of the problem. The anachronistic structure of our public schools is education's most well-known "dirty little secret." A vacation of nearly three months in the summer is a vestige of our long-gone agrarian past when the kids were needed at home to help prepare for the coming harvest. We now know that during this long, continuous break from their studies, students lose progress they made the previous spring.
The archaic system of starting school at the crack of dawn, seating students in strict rows, marking off arbitrary blocks of time with bells, and exposing kids to strict, teacher-centered instruction (also known as "chalk and talk") was designed to prepare kids for manufacturing work in factory settings. Schools functioned as sorters of children: Think of the traditional bell curve used for grading - failures are literally built into the system. Meanwhile, teachers were encouraged to "teach to the middle," ensuring that the most skilled students were bored and unchallenged and the students with the fewest skills remained hopelessly behind.
The archaic practice of grouping children by age stigmatizes those who need more time to become proficient in one or more of their skills. In fact, the fear of this stigma led to one of the greatest disasters in modern education: social promotion. Throughout the late-1980s and '90s, educators were reluctant to hold students back a grade, afraid of the damage that might be done to the child's self-esteem. Ultimately, however, those children who were promoted before they were ready were done a grave disservice: What happened to their self-esteem when they found themselves in high school but without the knowledge or skills to succeed?
Today, a high school diploma means little more than a student has managed to make it through 12 years of 180 school days.
Schools that embrace a standards-based approach start by identifying the results they want to see and planning backward. What should a high school graduate know and be able to do? What skills and knowledge are essential for a graduate of our school system to have? What should an 11th-grader know and be able to do? A fifth-grader? What should a student know and be able to do after kindergarten?
A standards-based system of instruction, assessment, and reporting acknowledges that children grow and develop at different rates. Some advanced students will be able to master their course standards early: We should encourage them to move through the system more quickly, allowing them to graduate when they are ready. The students identified by the new Boston school system report as needing longer to graduate include those with learning disabilities, emotional disabilities, and limited English proficiency. Of course these kids need more time to master their skills!
Age should play little or no part in the decision to promote a student. Ultimately, when schools identify the skill sets and knowledge a student needs to move to the next level, they will also improve their ability to offer remediation to students who are not there yet: Because the standards determine progress, teachers and schools using standards-based grading will be able to target exactly what needy students are lacking, rather than the shotgun approach favored today. This is the 21st century: laser-sharp precision is needed.
David Smokler teaches English at Needham High School and wrote "Making Learning Come Alive: Interactive Experiences for the Secondary Classroom."
