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
Sept. 30 issue — 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.
Keliher is the author of “Guerrilla Warfare for Teachers: A Survival Guide.”
© 2002 Newsweek, Inc.