A
Warning from the Trenches
This morning I ran across a remarkable essay. I had heard
it mentioned briefly in the Chronicle Review but had not seen the actual essay at
AAUP site until today. Written by Ken Bernstein, a former high school teacher from
Maryland who retired much earlier than he had planned, his “Warning
from the Trenches” seeks to alert those of us in higher education to a
pattern that many of us have long suspected - that the students coming to us from the high
stakes test driven pedagogy of No Child Left
Behind are largely unprepared for higher education.
I was not only moved by the passion Bernstein clearly
holds for education, a passion I also share in the trenches of factories producing
degrees that have in Florida replaced higher education, I was struck by his
ability to zero in on the metaproblem of NCLB – a reductionism and minimalism
that reduces the educational process to little more than a mechanical
memorization of unnuanced data in pursuit of success in a standardized test
game.
A
Critique Right on Target
Bernstein’s essay moved me to write this response left on
the AAUP site. I reproduce it here:
I am the fifth generation of educators in my family and I
have taught at every level of education from elementary school to doctoral
candidates. Over the past 31 years, I've taught many undergraduates in
community colleges, private universities and state universities. I left a
lucrative practice in law to return to the classroom knowing I would never be
paid what my hard work was worth but believing the sacrifice was worth the
opportunity to serve the state that had permitted me to become an educated human
being.
Sadly, not only is Mr. Bernstein on target here but the
evidence of the accuracy of his observations has already arrived at our
colleges and universities. Over the past 30 years, I observe that my entering
students have become more and more limited in their capabilities, both in
writing but more importantly in thinking. NCLB has produced students who can
perform admirably within the limited parameters of the test game for which
they've been trained. But they are not only largely incapable of translating those
limited skills to anything outside the testing context ("Will this be on
the test?"), they are inveterately resistant to doing so. NCLB has taught
them many things. Perhaps the most damaging has been a lack of curiosity and an
impoverishing reductionism in their approach to becoming educated human beings.
Avoiding
the Easy Out of Scapegoating
I do not blame Mr. Bernstein or any of his colleagues in
public education today for this situation. This is the result of public policy
which has produced a whole generation left behind. No doubt the sense of dismay
Mr. Bernstein so obviously experiences here is compounded by the sense of
frustration that the inability to impact or even critically assess the very pedagogical
procedures one is required to administer as a condition of employment must be
terribly painful.
N.B.
Bernstein’s article referenced another essay, “Teachers
Should Be Seen and Not Heard,” by Anthony Mullen, the National Teacher of the
Year in 2009 who relates his experience of attending a national conference on
education and standing “like a fly on the wall” at a reception while policy makers
engaged in mutually affirming truisms about education, all the while ignoring the
only teacher in the room. Finally asked his opinion, he relates his response in
this essay, a portion of which is instructive here:
Where
do I begin? I spent the last thirty minutes listening to a group of arrogant
and condescending noneducators disrespect my colleagues and profession. I
listened to a group of disingenuous people whose own self-interests guide their
policies rather than the interests of children. I listened to a cabal of people
who sit on national education committees that will have a profound impact on
classroom teaching practices. And I heard nothing of value. “I’m thinking about
the current health-care debate,” I said. “And I am wondering if I will be asked
to sit on a national committee charged with the task of creating a core
curriculum of medical procedures to be used in hospital emergency rooms.”
The
strange little man cocks his head and, suddenly, the fly on the wall has
everyone’s attention.
“I
realize that most people would think I am unqualified to sit on such a
committee because I am not a doctor, I have never worked in an emergency room,
and I have never treated a single patient. So what? Today I have listened to
people who are not teachers, have never worked in a classroom, and have never
taught a single student tell me how to teach.”
I have also observed the wisdom of the National Teacher
of the Year quoted above who echoed the observation of my own teacher father
years ago: "The problem with education is that everyone thinks they're an
expert." As I often tell my own students, I did not let my clients tell me
how to make objections or closing arguments at trial when I practiced law and I
do not let my students tell me how to create and execute my pedagogy as a
college instructor. Even as I readily
listen to their suggestions regarding both content as well as process, for the
most part students too readily confuse what they actually want to do - which is
increasingly less and less - with what an actual learning process actually
requires.
We
No Longer Have the Luxury of Naiveté
However, there is a day of reckoning for all of the
parties identified here. Like the alcoholic who wakes up the next morning for
the first time and does not remember what happened the night before (including
how they got home), there is no longer a luxury of naiveté. There is a problem
that may be denied but it will never simply go away.
For the policy
makers, it's precisely articles like this which illustrate problems already
statistically documented by publications such as Academically
Adrift which suggest their policies are at best a mixed success if
not an abject failure in many aspects. For the
general public which elects those policy makers, it's confronting the
reality that quick fixes such as NCLB do not produce the instant gratification
they have been trained to value as consumers. For public school educators, it is the recognition that silent
acquiescence to what could readily be seen as educational malpractice through
dutiful tailoring of pedagogy to NCLB minimalism demands an outcry, perhaps
even a revolt. For the products of NCLB, the students who come to the universities seeking the easy path to a
profitable career but rarely to become the educated human beings our society
will require, the luxury of naivete ends when they are confronted with not only
their ignorance about the world but their sense of entitlement to minimal
effort and maximal grades. And for those of us in the academy, it comes when our own silent retreat into the trenches
of research to avoid the devolving reality we encounter in our classrooms becomes a form of denial and enabling a
destructive paradigm to continue unchallenged.
The bishop of Verona in William Shakespeare's Romeo and Juliet pronounces judgment on
an entire community at the end of that tragedy: "All are punish-ed."
The problems that Mr. Bernstein has so eloquently elaborated here are not the
problems of any segment of our culture, it is an indictment of an entire
society which has sought the easy way out of a problem that simply requires
much more engagement, investment and delayed gratification in observing and
assessing results. The question that we must now address is what, if anything,
will we do about it. In answering that question, we would do well to bear in
mind Albert Einstein's warning that the definition of insanity is continue to
do the same things (operating out of the same presumptions) and expecting a
different result.
++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++
The
Rev. Harry Scott Coverston, J.D., Ph.D.
Member, Florida Bar (inactive status)
Priest, Episcopal Church (Dio. of El Camino Real, CA)
Instructor: Humanities, Religion, Philosophy of Law
University of Central Florida, Orlando
If the unexamined life is not worth living,
surely an unexamined belief system, be it religious or political, is not worth
holding.
Most
things of value do not lend themselves to production in sound bytes.
++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++
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