New Page 1

Nothing new under the Sun

My Turn: Forget the Fads—The Old Way Works Best

What will fix public education? A teacher, a chalkboard and a roomful of willing students

By Evan Keliher
NEWSWEEK

9/30/2002 — I’ve never claimed to have psychic powers, but I did predict that the $500 million that philanthropist Walter Annenberg poured into various school systems around the country, beginning in 1993, would fail to make any difference in the quality of public education. Regrettably, I was right.

BY APRIL 1998, it was clear that the much-ballyhooed effort had collapsed on itself. A Los Angeles Times editorial said, “All hopes have diminished. The promised improvements have not been realized.” The program had become so bogged down by politics and bureaucracy that it had failed to create any significant change.

How did I know this would be the result of Annenberg’s well-intentioned efforts? Easy. There has never been an innovation or reform that has helped children learn any better, faster or easier than they did prior to the 20th century. I believe a case could be made that real learning was better served then than now.

Let me quote Theodore Sizer, the former dean of the Harvard Graduate School of Education and the director of the Annenberg Institute for School Reform, which received some of the grant money. A few years ago a reporter asked him if he could name a single reform in the last 15 years that had been successful. Sizer replied, “I don’t think there is one.”

I taught in the Detroit public-school system for 30 years. While I was there, I participated in team-teaching, supervised peer-tutoring programs and tussled with block scheduling plans. None of it ever made a discernible difference in my students’ performance. The biggest failure of all was the decentralization scheme introduced by a new superintendent in the early 1970s. His idea was to break our school system into eight smaller districts—each with its own board of education—so that parents would get more involved and educators would be more responsive to our students’ needs. Though both of those things happened, by the time I retired in 1986 the number of students who graduated each year still hadn’t risen to more than half the class. Two thirds of those who did graduate failed the exit exam and received a lesser diploma. We had changed everything but the level of student performance.

What baffles me is not that educators implement new policies intended to help kids perform better, it’s that they don’t learn from others’ mistakes. A few years ago I read about administrators at a middle school in San Diego, where I now live, who wanted a fresh teaching plan for their new charter school and chose the team-teaching model. Meanwhile, a few miles away, another middle school was in the process of abandoning that same model because it hadn’t had any effect on students’ grades.

The plain truth is we need to return to the method that’s most effective: a teacher in front of a chalkboard and a roomful of willing students. The old way is the best way. We have it from no less a figure than Euclid himself. When Ptolemy I, the king of Egypt, said he wanted to learn geometry, Euclid explained that he would have to study long hours and memorize the contents of a fat math book. The pharaoh complained that that would be unseemly and demanded a shortcut. Euclid replied, “There is no royal road to geometry.”

There wasn’t a shortcut to the learning process then and there still isn’t. Reform movements like new math and whole language have left millions of damaged kids in their wake. We’ve wasted billions of taxpayer dollars and forced our teachers to spend countless hours in workshops learning to implement the latest fads. Every minute teachers have spent on misguided educational strategies (like building kids’ self-esteem by acting as “facilitators” who oversee group projects) is time they could have been teaching academics.

The only way to truly foster confidence in our students is to give them real skills—in reading, writing and arithmetic—that they can be proud of. One model that incorporates this idea is direct instruction, a program that promotes rigorous, highly scripted interaction between teacher and students.

The physicist Stephen Hawking says we can be sure time travel is impossible because we never see any visitors from the future. We can apply that same logic to the subject of school reforms: we know they have not succeeded because we haven’t seen positive results. But knowing that isn’t enough. We should stop using students as lab rats and return to a more traditional method of teaching. If it was good enough for Euclid, it is good enough for us.