Environmental Education in the Classroom

Last Tuesday it was unanimously decided upon that all school districts in Maryland need to begin including courses on environmental education. This will only affect high schools around the state and will likely take the form of environmental education being injected into biology courses. While this is a step in the right direction I ultimately believe more needs to be done. Growing up in Florida, throughout my entire K-12 education I received some form of environmental education. If Maryland really wants to make a difference they need to adopt this model of making it more than just a small piece of some high school biology class, but a fully integrated part of the curriculum. There is no reason that environmental education can’t work its way into reading, math, or civics courses, and ultimately Maryland school districts need to start offering schools with fully integrated programs to their students. If districts don’t begin to create these kinds of schools then we are potentially not nourishing the interests and goals of the next Jacque Cousteau or Ansel Adams. Students need to be learning about their effect on the environment and how it shaped by the public and private sectors in all classes. While teaching conservation and protecting wildlife may be seen as promoting a specific agenda, I ultimately think that since both of these ideas are promoted by the EPA there is nothing wrong with bringing them into schools. This new law was a healthy start but Maryland needs to stop patting themselves on the back and start doing more.

Merit Pay for teachers

Since this week we are discussing Merit Pay for teachers, this seemed like an interesting topic to blog on. There was a recent Washington Post Article (http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/content/article/2010/09/21/AR2010092103413_pf.html (from tuesday) that comments on a new study about merit pay and student achievement. This study found no significant gain in student achievement. It was a study done over three years in Nashville and compared two groups of teachers, 1 was eligible for a bonuses based on test scores while the other was not. The study found no significant difference in test scores except in the 6th grade. However, critics of the study argue that it misses two of the major purposes of merit pay which are teacher retention and getting a wider range of applicants to teaching jobs. They argue that merit pay would get more of the brightest into teaching because they could be earning comparable pay to their counterparts in other professions.

Obama has significantly increased support for merit pay but without any significant evidence to show its effectiveness. I think the critics of the study make valid arguments for why the study is not comprehensive but the study does seem to suggest that changes such as merit pay are not going to be stand alone answers to the problems of education. It is going to have to be a bundle of changes that are made together to significantly change the state of our education system.

Where is Superman?

"Either the kids are getting stupider every year, or there is something wrong with the education system." Quoted in the trailer for "Waiting for Superman", Geoffrey Canada relates what we know as a society all too well: our country's school system is failing many of our childrens' present and future. The fundamental discussion, of course, is not the "what", because this is evident in drop-out and HS graduation rates, standardized testing scores, and countless anecdotal accounts from teachers in countless regions across America.

I would like to argue that the current question isn't even the "how"; we are exploring countless options, from charter schools to lottery systems, from national standards to teacher programs such as Teach for America and Baltimore City Teaching Residency. The current question is the "what trajectory are we currently on?" We can't examine how to best go about solving this multi-faceted, mind-boggling epidemic when we are still trying a plethora of options, few of which are unequivocally 'successful'. In this way, we haven't gotten to the point yet where we as educators, policy makers, and stakeholders (that's everyone) can say that we have a plan but just not the resources or the manpower.

No, what I think we need to do now is examine what kind of path this current "experimental" stage of reform is taking us on--we are really still in its infant state. What is the current state of school reform with respect to charter schools? Are charter schools that are essentially independent from the public school system the most effective? Will national standards help ease the stress from state or local school districts and allow resources to flow better elsewhere? What can attempting to seed clones of Harlem Children's Zone in other cities do there?

There are many questions, and of course I don't have many (or most) of the answers. These answers are also on the huge scale, when we have so much more to worry about on the micro (school/district/classroom) level. I am excited to see Waiting for Superman to see if it asks some of these questions in a way that makes it unavoidable for us as a country not to discuss them. We know the flame is lit and the discussion has started. I hope we are asking the right questions and not trying to accomplish everything as individuals, on small scales, in ways that are difficult to replicate or analyze. Mostly I hope that we can be glad that so many people care but realize that intentions don't get a student to achieve what they really need.