Let's see what's not working in American schools, and bring it here

You gotta love the National Socialist Post. I find it's always good when I need to get my rage on (if you haven't noticed, that's always). It's particularly interesting when the headlines don't even match the article.

Take this piece of inspired journalism: "The problem with 'edu-babble.'" As both a teacher and a former editor, I have a deep loathing for educational jargon (or jargon of any sort)*, so I was thrilled to find an article in That Fascist Rag that I might actually agree with.

Imagine, then, my disappointment when there was no mention of edu-babble in the article at all. The article is a fluff piece about a book by a teacher in Manitoba (who is also a right-wing politician and an evangelical Christian) basically advocating the sorts of policies that have trashed the American education system. (While not all evangelical Christians are right-wing blowhards, Mr. Zwaagstra's religious beliefs are relevant to the discussion, given the disastrous influence of fundamentalists on American educational policy.)

It seems that when we look upon the myriad failures of the public education system, there are really three groups that can be blamed:
1. The unions
2. The women
3. The teachers' colleges

In fairness to Wallace and Zwaagstra, they primarily blame #3 and leave blaming the first two to the commenters. In fairness to the teaching profession, however, none of these parties actually sets curriculum, or even develops edu-babble.

It wasn't that the young student-teacher felt he knew better than his University of Manitoba faculty of education professors, or that the overconfidence of youth had taken hold. It was more of a feeling that the in vogue, so-called "progressive" ideologies and unwavering but nebulous theories about how best to teach our kids simply wouldn't prove practical when staring at a class full of uninterested teenagers.

No shit, really?

I have been thinking about this since my own OISE days. I liked OISE; it was the pedagogical equivalent of a summer popcorn movie. I was completely unprepared for stepping into a classroom.

How could OISE have trained me better? I'm pretty sure that they couldn't have. Teacher education always left a little something to be desired. Back in the old days, they used to pull any old high school graduate with zero experience off the streets to teach in schools. I used to know a teacher who attended the Toronto Normal School right out of high school. One of my more honest OISE instructors remarked that you can't really teach someone how to teach; ultimately, we all get thrown into the classroom in a whirlwind of confusion and turmoil. The problem wasn't woolly-headed liberal thinking**, it was that the only way to learn how to teach children is to be in a classroom, teaching children. I had a month of in-class placements, and that taught me more than the eight other months of instructional theory.

(In my specific case, they could have done better by not grouping all of the tech subjects together, instead focusing on developing subject-specific assignments and assessments, with a realistic understanding of available facilities. More time in placements wouldn't have hurt either. But this is tweaking, not overhauling.)

The book touches on a number of controversial practices that have made headlines recently, including no-fail and no-test policies, the spread of "edu-babble" in curricula and a diminishing of teachers' authority in the classroom.

Okay, I lied. There's a nod to edu-babble. By the way, I disagree with the no-fail policy in elementary school, but you can absolutely fail students in high school. I have failed several students.† As for the no-test policy, I have not heard of such a thing. If anything, there is an increasing emphasis on testing and teaching to the test. In Ontario, the opaque and politically-appointed Education Quality and Accountability Office (EQAO), with a $15 million annual budget, tests Grade 3 and 6 students on reading, writing and mathematics testing, Grade 9 students on maths, and Grade 10s on "literacy." Students do not attain a high school diploma unless they achieve above 75% on the test.

It seems, in fact, that many of the "basic, common sense" approaches advocated by Mr. Zwaagstra are in fact in place in Ontario schools. It may not come as much of a surprise that they don't actually work. I agree that today's children are less literate and know less about the world around them than previous generations. One of the big reasons for that, of course, is that English teachers are forced to spend less time teaching them to read and write, and analyze, and think critically, and more time teaching them techniques to pass the standardized literacy tests.

"There are some extremely long curriculum guides and you'd think, 'Boy, there's a lot of stuff in here kids are supposed to know.' Then you read them and you can't find any examples where students are told to read certain books or certain authors," says Mr. Zwaagstra [...]

Translation: Do my work for me.

I kind of love my curriculum. It's incredibly vague and clearly not written by someone with knowledge of any communications technology field. That's fine, because I know my subject well, and I know that it's nearly impossible to write a textbook for a field that changes so rapidly. So perhaps this makes me a terrible "progressive" teacher, but I spend a lot of my time reading up on new material and finding new resources so that my courses are current, relevant, and engaging.

It's the same with any subject. Some of the English teachers in my school, bored with a reading list that hasn't changed in 50 years, started using Cory Doctorow's Little Brother in their class. I am pretty sure, if the curriculum prescribed certain books or certain authors, Doctorow (and the only other recent addition to the English reading list I can think of offhand, Khaled Hosseini) would not be on it. Nor would any of the assigned authors I enjoyed reading in high school. Instead, students would continue to be writing godawful book reports on Lord of the Flies.††

He says the quality of textbooks has followed suit, with recent publications being noticeably "dumbed down" when compared to those written two or three decades ago.

zingerella can probably comment more intelligently on this than I can, but I blame Texas, Alberta, and the Catholic school boards. The only way to turn a profit on textbooks is to produce them for the broadest possible market. If part of that market does not want certain facts taught, those facts will be eliminated from the textbook. Hence, watering-down.

The "powerless teacher" is a symptom of a greater problem, he says: a consolidation of power within the adminstrative [sic] branches of education systems. "You get all this micromanagement from the top, and teachers are told what to do and are monitored to ensure they're doing it, but we're not measuring the final product — student performance. It's completely backwards."

Funnily enough, the politicians who eroded the power of the classroom teacher are the same ones who brought in standardized testing. Again, the result was abysmal failure.

"Teachers have a pretty good idea what they're doing and the reforms that work are actually very simple," he says. "Make choice more prevalent in the system. That way, parents can choose the school their kid goes to. Measure where kids are at so that way we can see if the learning is happening. Make sure principals have the ability to actually change what's going on in the school.

This is a dogwhistle for charter schools. This guy would love to see "choice" for the rich and a lottery for the poor. When right-wingers talk about reforming public education, they actually mean to destroy it.

As bad as the article is, however, it's nothing like the comments. From "Diogenes1":

The Schools of Education have been completely taken over by the Left (Feminists, Multiculturalists, etc) who are using their classes to indoctrinate their students who teach good lefty versions of history and society. There are very few male teachers because they are not welcome in the Feminist classrooms of our Teachers Colleges.

And from "Tossed Salad":

Get rid of the over abundance of female teachers and their enablers who in reality are seething and oozing with misandry. My son is in all boys school and has gone from fifties in applied with supposed ADD to the seventies in academic with no such attention disorder nonsense and not a female educator is sight. I am fortunate or should I say my son is fortunate that I can afford the price tag most cannot.

Hmmm. It seems like educational standards were somewhat lacking in the good ol' days as well, given the overall lack of coherency, logic, or grammar present in these comments.



* Let's purge the following terms from our education system: "moving forward," "SMART goal," "PLC," "ALP," "TPA," "nugget," "create change," "equity through excellence," "pillars," "piece" when randomly inserted into sentences for absolutely no reason, and "EQAO."

** That leads to getting eaten.

† I jest. They failed themselves.

†† They still do in most classes not taught by "progressives."