EDUCATING FOR GREATNESS, NOT GRADES

From a group of educators

In 1983 a National Commission on Excellence in Education issued a "Nation At Risk Report" and set in motion a series of government-imposed reforms, all based on a false goal, student achievement in curriculum. The latest of these reforms, "No Child Left Behind," put extra pressure on teachers to ignore the diverse needs of students and to standardize their education through scripted reading, writing, and math. This top-down pressure is evidence that public school teaching is not regarded as a profession in our society.

Over many years our culture has become so obsessed with curriculum we have lost sight of our purpose – curriculum for what? Student achievement in curriculum has become a false goal, an end in and of itself. Grade-point-averages have become the main indicators of achievement in education. We have a cultural cramp – a mass mind-set that spawns counterfeit reform movements.

For genuine reform of public education we must start with a clear purpose. We suggest Education for Human Greatness.

In 1973, ten years before "Nation at Risk," the teachers at Hill Field Elementary School in Clearfield, Utah decided to ask parents about their priorities for the education of their children. In interviews with thousands of parents, over several years, teachers were surprised to learn of three needs that parents felt were more important to them than the need to have a child achieve in reading, writing and arithmetic.

First, parents wanted teachers to respect children as individuals, to pay attention to each child's special needs, and to help youngsters develop their unique talents and abilities.

Second, they wanted children to increase in curiosity and passion for knowledge – they wanted children to "fall in love with learning."

And third, parents wanted teachers to help children learn how to express themselves, communicate and get along. The priorities were so consistent with nearly every parent, the teachers surmised that these may be the core needs of people in every culture – the need to know who we are and what we can become (identity), the need for knowledge (inquiry), and the need for respect and love (interaction).

This finding led to a new concept – curriculum should not be viewed as a goal, but as a tool to help students grow in identity, inquiry and interaction. Even though the concept was temporarily smothered by the standardization movement, it remained alive all these years and has now evolved to become a framework for authentic changes of public, private and other forms of education with four priorities added as shown below:

1. Identity – Help students learn who they are – as individuals with unlimited potential, develop their unique talents and gifts to realize self-worth and develop a strong desire to be contributors to family, school and community.

2. Inquiry – Stimulate curiosity; awaken a sense of wonder and appreciation for nature and humankind. Help students develop the power to ask important questions.

3. Interaction – Promote courtesy, caring, communication and cooperation.

4. Initiative – Foster self-directed learning, will power and self-evaluation.

5. Imagination – Nurture creativity in all of its many forms.

6. Intuition – Help students learn how to feel and recognize truth with their hearts as well as with their minds – develop spirituality and humility.

7. Integrity – Develop honesty, character, morality and responsibility for self.

Surprise: When reading, writing, math and other disciplines are taught as tools rather than goals, students learning produces more depth and breadth, they retain more of what they learn and are able to apply it to solve other problems. This "higher vision" allows teachers to perform as professionals who involve parents and inspire students to accomplish amazing things.

OBAMA'S EDUCATION CHOICE

Greg Palast - Trial balloons lofted in the Washington Post suggest President-elect Obama is about to select Joel Klein as Secretary of Education. If not Klein, then draft-choice number two is Arne Duncan, Obama's backyard basketball buddy in Chicago. . .

Klein, who lacks even six minutes experience in the field, was handed management of New York's schools by that political Jack-in-the-Box, Mayor Michael Bloomberg. The billionaire mayor is one of those businessmen-turned-politicians who think lawyers and speculators can make school districts operate like businesses. Klein has indeed run city schools like a business - if the business is General Motors. Klein has flopped. Half the city's kids don't graduate.

Klein is out of control. Not knowing a damn thing about education, rather than rely on those who actually work in the field (only two of his two dozen deputies have degrees in education), Klein pays high-priced consultants to tell him what to do. He's blown a third of a billion dollars on consultant "accountability" projects plus $80 million for an IBM computer data storage system that doesn't work.

What the heck was the $80 million junk computer software for? Testing. Klein is test crazy. He has swallowed hook, line and sinker George Bush's idea that testing students can replace teaching them. The madly expensive testing program and consultant-fee spree are paid for by yanking teachers from the classroom.

Ironically, though not surprisingly, test scores under Klein have flat-lined. Scores would have fallen lower, notes author Jane Hirschmann, but Klein "moved the cut line," that is, lowered the level required to pass. In other words, Klein cheats on the tests.

Nevertheless, media poobahs have fallen in love with Klein, especially Republican pundits. The New York Times' David Brooks is championing Klein, hoping that media hype for Klein will push Obama to keep Bush schools policies in place, trumping the electorate's choice for change. . .

The anti-union establishment has a second stringer on the bench waiting in case Klein is nixed: Arne Duncan. Duncan, another lawyer playing at education, was appointed by Chicago's Boss Daley to head that city's train-wreck of a school system. Think of Duncan as "Klein Lite."

Duncan was once captain of Harvard's basketball team and still plays backyard round-ball with his Hyde Park neighbor Obama. But Michelle has put a limit on their friendship: Obama was one of the only state senators from Chicago to refuse to send his children into Duncan's public schools. My information is that the Obamas sent their daughters to the elite Laboratory School where Klein-Duncan teach-to-the-test pedagogy is dismissed as damaging and nutty.

Lawyer Duncan is proud to have raised test scores by firing every teacher in low-scoring schools. Which schools? There's Collins High in the Lawndale ghetto with children from homeless shelters and drug-poisoned 'hoods. They don't do well on tests. So Chicago fired all the teachers. They brought in new ones - then fired all of them too: the teachers' reward for volunteering to work in a poor neighborhood.

It's no coincidence that the nation's worst school systems are run by non-experts like Klein and Duncan. . .

It's not just Klein's and Duncan's empty credentials which scare me: it's the ill philosophy behind the Bush-brand education theories they promote. "Teach-to-the-test" (which goes under such pre-packaged teaching brands as "Success for All") forces teachers to limit classroom time to pounding in rote low-end skills, easily measured on standardized tests. The transparent purpose is to create the future class of worker-drones. Add in some computer training and - voila - millions trained on the cheap to function, not think. Analytical thinking skills, creative skills, questioning skills will be left to the privileged at the Laboratory School and Phillips Andover Academy.

We hope for better from the daddy of Sasha and Malia.