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August 6, 2001. Standing here at the National Press
Club, addressing a group of top educators and journalists from
all over the country, receiving an award from the Newspaper
Association of America Foundation, I find that I’m somewhat
embarrassed to admit that when I was a student, I rarely read
the newspaper. As a kid, my only regular exposure to news came
from the radio as I grudgingly endured a few minutes of it,
every hour on the hour, during Kasey Kasim’s American Top 40.
The only news program I can remember
now was delivered by a strange guy with a strange voice and an
even stranger delivery who would introduce a humdrum human
interest story and continue, rather haltingly, for a minute or
two, until coming to a conventional close. Finally, to my
delight, Kasey Kasim would return with the kind of news I was
really interested in: the fate of the latest Helen Reddy hit
or the little known story of the high school talent show
origins of enduring megastars like England Dan and John Ford
Coley.
At some point later on, that strange
guy would come back again: “And now… the rest of… the story.”
It was Paul Harvey, of course, and as
soon as I figured out his format, I couldn’t wait for his
spot. The story may have been dull as dishwater, but the rest
of the story, that was something else entirely — surprising,
often quirky, always compelling. It didn’t take long before I
was hooked.
Now, I’m a news junkie. In a single
day, I can easily listen to a couple hours of NPR, skim both
of Seattle’s daily papers, surf the Net for background, tackle
a Time Magazine, and possibly catch a little of Inside
Politics, Crossfire, or Moneyline with Lou Dobbs — even
O’Reilly occasionally factors into my day. If that isn’t
enough, I often end up falling asleep to Ted Koppel, Bill
Maher, or Charlie Rose.
What interests me most these days is
all the news about education. I can’t tell you how pleased I
am with the amount of coverage, and how exciting it is for me
to be listening in on what is surely our country’s first
national dialog about school. But as I follow the reports
about testing, standards, vouchers, charters, and all the
other fashionable aspects of education reform, I feel like I’m
missing the rest of the story.
In my work as an education consultant,
I have the fortunate opportunity to spend a lot of time
teaching in classrooms all across the country. Though I don’t
have students of my own, I get to deliver hundreds of lessons
each year to kids of all kinds, at all grade levels, in all
subject areas, and in all types of schools. That means I get
to see things: the real things that really go on in real
schools struggling with the realities of real reform.
When I turn on the TV or open up The
Seattle Times for which I now write, I hear mostly about
testing. I hear our President saying things like “How do you
know how you’re doing if you don’t test?” It all sounds quite
logical, and it’s a good story. But it’s not the rest of the
story.
It turns out that more testing doesn’t
necessarily mean more learning. The history of educational
testing in our country is well documented. I learned about it
recently in a book called “Standardized Minds: The High Price
of America’s Testing Culture and What We Can Do to Change It”
by Peter Sacks.
Reading this book confirmed for me what
I had been noticing in the schools I visit: that even though
scores are going up, as they tend to do at the beginning of a
new testing cycle, the increases are primarily artifacts of
test preparation and test familiarity, and not necessarily
evidence of authentic learning.
The tests are based, of course, on
standards. And it seems like every state has them now.
Standards are a hot story, too. But the rest of the story,
from my vantage point at least, is that we may be
standardizing the wrong thing.
Instead of standardizing the quality of
learning — a dubious and dangerous endeavor, it seems to me,
for any free society that wants to stay that way — we should
be working to standardize the quality of teaching, and seeking
to ensure equality of access to that teaching. It simply isn't
fair for some kids to get great teachers while others do not.
And no type of testing or set of curricular standards can ever
address this fundamental inequity.
I learned about the rest of this story
a few years ago when I came across a book called “Best
Practice: New Standards For Teaching and Learning in America's
Schools.” This wonderful resource is a concise and precise
distillation of good teaching and how to make it happen in any
school anywhere under just about any circumstances.
This book makes clear something I have
long felt but could not express: that the reason some teachers
are dramatically more effective than others is simply because
they use more effective methods. What’s more, there's little
disagreement among well-researched and well-practiced
professionals as to what these methods are. To me, this means
that if we took some of our testing money and turned it into
training money, our children and our country might be better
served.
Finally, we have voucher programs and
charter schools. The story here seems to be that if one group
of folks can’t educate our children then a different group
will surely do a better job regardless of who they are, what
they do, or what kind of experience they have. While I myself
have an intense interest in educational alternatives, I have
no enthusiasm for unproven ones, especially those born out of
frustration and based, as I have often discovered, on little
more than well-intentioned guesswork. At this crucial juncture
in the history of our nation’s education system, I see little
value in perpetrating upon our children new and risky
experiments, especially when the research of the last 30 years
is so clear about what can and should be done.
Fortunately, the rest of this story,
like the other two, also has a happy ending. There already
exist many proven models of successful schooling like Nancie
Atwell’s Center For Teaching and Learning in Edgecomb, ME. Or,
if you’d like to see an inner city school with the same kind
of cutting edge practice and stunning results, visit the
Center for Inquiry run by Jerome Harste in Indianapolis, IN,
or drop in for a day at Shelley Harwayne's P.S. 290 in New
York City. The most important thing that these and many other
fine educators have shown is that every can child can learn,
that educational achievement correlates more with good
teaching than it does with where you live, how much money you
make, and the color of your skin.
As someone who has spent serious time
in thousands of our country’s classrooms, I can say with
confidence, that despite popular rhetoric, there is no crisis
in American education today. This is not to say there aren’t
problems, merely that most of them have already been solved
somewhere, by someone, in some way. I see these solutions
dotted all around the country and I hope that some day soon
our politicians, pundits, and members of the press will be
able to connect the dots and see the picture as plainly as I
do.
Most people simply don’t know about
these amazing schools, these great books, and these terrific
teachers because we haven’t yet gotten around to telling the
rest of the story. Right now, education is a political
football and nobody wants to punt. It’s all about Hail Mary
passes and quarterback sneaks instead of just pounding away
with a solid ground game. If we are “a nation at risk,” as the
famous congressional report once declared, it is only because
we are more familiar with the current crop of politically
expedient, red-herring remedies than we are with the real
solutions discovered and perfected by our country's best
teachers and researchers.
When I started writing two years ago,
three articles a week for The Seattle Times, I realize now
that I became part of the media, too. This year I begin again.
And so the responsibility for telling the rest of the story
falls now upon me as much as it does upon anyone else. In my
first year, I didn’t live up to that responsibility as well as
I know now that I could have. It was my first time writing for
a major newspaper. I was nervous. I wanted it to be good, but
I also wanted everyone to like me. So when my editors
suggested that some of what I wanted to say was not exactly
what they wanted me to say, I gave in. Rather than fighting
for what I regarded as the truth, I chose instead tamer topics
and a safer style.
I don’t want to do that this time
around. While I still feel nervous, I’m no less committed
because of it. And thanks to the support and inspiration I’ve
received this week from the wonderful people I’ve met here
through the Newspaper Association of America, I think I now
have both the clarity and the courage I need to begin telling
the rest of the story.
Good bye.
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