Hypothesis: That the education process on which teachers and students rely in our classrooms meets the needs of neither students nor their teachers.
In a blogpost of December 30th of 2024, Diane Ravitch reposted an article from the blog[i] of Joyce Vance, a veteran US Attorney for the Northern District of Alabama, in which she wrote about what she believes to be the root cause of Donald Trump’s appeal to American voters. That root cause, she says, is “low-information voters who are hoodwinked by his lies and believe he will fight for them. Ha. Not funny.”
This could not be truer and begs the question: “what can we do to better inform our citizens, so they are not so easily swayed by charlatans of any kind?”
It is my assertion that despite the extraordinary and heroic efforts of teachers, the percentage of high school students that are graduating having earned C’s, D’s, and F’s, is untenable and has been so for decades. The question we must ask is:
Are we sending all students out into the world to accept the responsibilities of citizenship in possession of a portfolio of knowledge and skills sufficient to make thoughtful choices with respect to the cogent issues of their time? If not, what are we prepared to do about it?
Given the highly focused attack on community public schools and their teachers, it is understandable that professional educators have felt a need to defend themselves and their body of work. Such a response is unnecessary, however, and leads critics to judge them as culpable.
What I implore educators to consider is that standardized exams and their results do not measure the academic achievement of our children or the performance of their teachers, rather it measures the efficacy of the education process with and within which our teachers and students are expected to do their essential work.
The primary purpose of testing is typically diagnostic, whether discussing the student or the process. What the results tell us is that what we ask of teachers meets the needs of neither students nor their teachers. In present times, however unjustly, critics utilize results to pass judgment on the wrong issue and the consequence is the pervasive discontent on the part of customers/constituents of public education.
Irrespective of venue, product, or service if a process continues to produce unacceptable outcomes no matter how qualified our people may be, or how hard they work it is the process that we must examine and reengineer to produce the outcomes both educators and their communities seek. Unacceptable outcomes demand action.
Test scores do reveal something we all need to know. These results offer a litany of evidence that the way we structure, organize, task, staff, resource, and manage the performance of the education process, enables neither teachers nor their students to produce the outcomes we seek. The question is not whether students should be able to demonstrate proficiency on core subject matter, rather it is why do they not? And what must change?
What I ask the leaders and advocates of community public education to do is accept the fact that the outcomes of the past half century or more have produced widespread dissatisfaction of a society that depends on the capability of its citizenry. It is this dissatisfaction that drives “school choice” and that threatens the future of community public schools.
This frightening prospect will not and cannot change until the education leaders and teachers choose to change.
I stand before you with a proposed solution. I invite all educators to examine two other posts on this blog that will reveal the source of the idea for my education model (1/23/2024) and how it differs from the existing education process (11/15/2023). You will find them on the list on the right side of the page.
The most frequent comment I get from teachers who take a glance at my model is that:
“. . . this won’t work in my classroom. I barely have time to do what my students need of me today, how is it possible to do everything my students need of me?
My response is:
“Exactly!”
[i] “Civil Discourse with Joyce Vance.”