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. . . .”
This could not be truer and begs the question, “what can we do to ensure our citizens are better informed and not so easily swayed by charlatans of any kind?
The answer, of course, is that we must provide a higher quality education to ensure our children enter adulthood with the prerequisite knowledge and skills they will need to understand the world and its people, provide for themselves and their families, abide by the rule of law, add value to society, understand the U.S. Constitution and the role of government and, finally, to participate in their own governance by making informed choices about the cogent issues of their day.
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.
Ironically, the standardized test scores about which public school educators and advocates complain, verify what I believe should be obvious. If a student is unable to demonstrate proficiency on chapter tests given immediately after a lesson, why should we be surprised those same students are unable to demonstrate proficiency on state exams, given in the spring, or NAEP Assessments, whenever administered.
The lesson to be garnered from these data is that standardized tests measure the efficacy of the education process in which teachers are expected to teach and students are expected to learn. The assessments do not measure the performance of teachers nor the ability of students to learn. Teachers can only teach the way they are allowed to teach and students can only learn what we give them an opportunity to learn.
Rather than defend themselves from the disappointing outcomes of their students on standardized tests, educators—particularly public-school educators and their advocates—should use this long record of disappointing outcomes as compelling evidence of a need for transformational change in the way we “structure, organize, task, staff, and resource our classrooms and how we evaluate student achievement and teacher performance.”
Whenever I am successful in convincing teachers to examine the education model I have designed to reinvent the education process, their response is instructive.
“. . . this won’t work in my classroom,” they say. “I barely have time to do what my students need of me today, how can I possibly do everything your model expects of me?”
My response is:
“Exactly! That is the correct question.”
Teachers cannot do everything their students need of them unless they are working with and within a model and process that supports responding to the disparate needs of a diverse population of students, in an environment in which learning is the only thing that counts and is counted. Once a student has figured out how to use in life what they have learned in school, how long it took them is inconsequential.
[i] “Civil Discourse with Joyce Vance.”