Schools, Circus, and Nuts!

Millions of kids walk away from school long before they're scheduled to graduate. Millions more stay but disengage. Half of those entering the teaching profession soon abandon it. Administrators play musical chairs. Barbed wire surrounds many schools, and police patrol hallways.” A few lines from What's Worth Learning?" Information Age Publishing, Charlotte, North Carolina, 2011 piqued my interest. Is it any wonder our why kids aren’t doing well in school.  The amazing thing is, to find the problems with students in schools, the only solution has been to test the crap out of them. It should come as no surprise that the scores are in fact crappy. Where is the fun in schools what happened to the excitement of discovery? Well, its gone because there is no test for that. But, not surprisingly, there is an app for that. This obsession with test scores has come at a hefty price. (Literally have you ever looked into how much it costs to administer these tests?)

Consider the current decline in math scores. let’s take a look at the systems current logic: Students do poor on tests. Then we  give more tests to find out why. Tests show students don’t like taking tests, or the tests don’t really show what the students know, so the students lose interest. The educational leaders realize “hey we can’t get the students to like tests……., but we can make it so what’s being taught is more “ALIGNED” to the tests.  Maybe if they have had more exposure to it they will do well… Maybe we should test for that”. Reality: Students still dislike testing and have found ways of expressing that dislike; classes have reverted to lower level rote memorization; and opportunities for and enrichment or experienced based learning have been replaced with repetitive practices and what essentially amounts to teaching to the test.

In the article “Test Problems: Seven Reasons Why Standardized Tests Are Not Working” by By David Miller there are reports of people bucking against the continued proliferation of standardized testing. In Scarsdale, New York, an upscale, college-oriented community, parents organized a boycott of the eighth-grade standardized tests. Of 290 eighth-graders, only 95 showed up for the exam. In Miami protests erupted when over 12,000 Florida seniors were denied their high school diploma, and in Massachusetts, local school boards defied the state and issued their own diplomas to students they believed were being unfairly denied their high school graduation because of the state-mandated test. Teachers in California and Chicago refused to give tests and faced disciplinary action. 

It seems we have all been made part of a flea circus. For the unfamiliar let me explain. Fleas have the ability to jump great heights proportional to their body size, in the wild. However, place those wild fleas in a small jar and close the lid for approximately 20 minutes. You will see something quite odd. When you remove the lid, you will find the fleas no longer believe they have the ability to jump out of the jar. They have gotten so tired of banging their heads against the lid that they just stop jumping as high. These fleas that are now trained to reach below their potential stay that way until death. I should not have to explain the parallel, but I will just in case. If you teach to a low level, the students will only learn at a low level. Furthermore, if they are trying to do better and are continually getting hit across the head with standardized tests eventually they will stop trying.

While we are on the subject of taking lessons from nature, the educational pundits could learn a thing or two from George Washington Carver. He correctly theorized that the repetitive planting and replanting of cotton was depleting the nutrients from the soil. He suggested, to save the land from spoiling farmers to rotate crops that complemented one another. The peanut being one that was quite notable as a complement to cotton. Why is that important? Well it's actually quite simple. We are stripping the soil in the minds of our students! Why is everyone so surprised? After all our sewing we are not reaping much of an intellectual harvest! Quite simply, we are failing to rotate the crops. The practices high repetition with little application or exploration are depleting the students of resources like an out of control weed. It should be expected that the students are bored and uninterested. If we really want our students to become invested again, we all have to reinvest in experiential learning, extracurriculars, and electives. In any rate we have got to find some way to rotate, fertilize and cultivate our crops before we lose our nuts.