Citizens for Responsible Education Reform

Comments regarding specific content in editorials on this page should be directed to the author of the piece. E-mail addresses are provided at the end of each editorial.

What works is sometimes obvious. To implement "what works" is a harder problem, although I think it is doable school by school, district by district. Here's how the problems should be approached, in my mind -- Seven biggies and a bonus thought, too!

1. What works? Skilled teachers, versus products of the average education school: To implement this, you need to establish generous certification programs, parent involvement in hiring and firing, High standards of student performance, high levels of physical security in the workplace, decent teacher pay, autonomy for teachers in the classroom, and minimum bureaucratic supervision in school systems. Implement these simple aspects in your school system and you will miraculously have a lot of excellent teachers teaching.

2. What works? Longer class sessions, versus 35-45 minute sessions: To increase class length you need to change school policy to schedule 90 minute to 2 hour sessions -- K-12, this applies equally, with different benefits. The transit time, settle down time, and the time to thoroughly learn and discuss concepts, both as a lass and individually, is critical to the learning process and the teaching process. The total amount of time watsed in a seven period day for transit, (5-10 minutes time six changes) plus settle down time in each class (5-15 minutes per seven classes) eats up an incredible amount of potential learning and teaching time.

3. What works? Security in school, versus guns and weapons in school: This seems simple, but in fact is a chronic compaint across the country, in both urban and rural schools. To implement this, you simply set standards of behavior, enforce standards, have a alternative place for those who aren't abiding by the rules, and involve parents early on in discipline issues. Consider the approach Rudolph Guiliani took in NYC in picking up vagrants, loiterers, and open drunkenness as a preventative to later burgluries, assaults, and more serious crime -- apply this approach to school violence and unruliness.

4. What works? An attitude that all can learn, and elimination of an attitude that only the talented can learn: The American attitude towards most learning is ability-oriented; the Japanese and less-so the European attitude is that some students must work harder to get to the same place, but simply must apply more effort. This attitude hurts our gifted and talented, who are seen to need no extra help (re: the amount of money spent on special ed towers over that spent on TAG programs). This attitude hurts those who need to work harder by letting them off -- basically communicating to the student that it's OK, they weren't really able anyway, so why try -- or perhap instead of math, science and reading, you can try track, basketball or football and be an equally successful young person. Likewise, this attitude on the part of learning is directly opposite the evidence that most Americans consider a national value -- that everyone can succeed -- if they try...or like NIKE says, "Just do it" or "I Can". Additionally, this success over obstacles, via hard work and practice, is the true source of self esteem in school age students and adults. Currently, these concepts are alien to most Ed School curriculums.

5. What works? Common language in the classroom, versus many languages: To pursue this as a goal for successful public education, you need to implement English as the core language of instruction in public schools -- beginning in Kindergarten. You need to provide before and after school ESL courses to assist students and their parents in coming up to speed, or vouchers for this if needed. If the energy we spent on special ed was only partially diverted into serious part-time and after-school instruction in English for non-native speaking children and their parents, we would be well on our way to excellence in education.

6. What works? Teaching and capturing/creating the teachable moment and reducing the percentage of non-instructional time in school: Time spent in the school building, during core school instructional hours in increasingly used up by non-core educational activities. These include time spent settling down a class and getting them out to the next class (this is compounded when class times are shorter, because the settle down times are the same), time spent in disciplinary activities, time spent in social, school administration and/or self esteem building activities (this includes Drug Resistance Education, play and snack times in the early grades, time spent in fund raising activities for the school or the classroom, and time spent preparing for and taking standardized tests for the state or national statistics). If you go one step furter and examine the value added of some of the instructional activities, more opportunities for improvement can be found. The important thing here is to simply understand what goes on in the average student's day in school. I would venture to say that upwards of 30% of the time (not counting lunch) is counter-educational in the sense of achieving what we have chartered public schools to achieve academically.

7. What works? Parent involvement. To gain parent involvement, teachers simply need the ability to contact parents, and vice versa. It is not a matter of parent nights, although they are a good idea. It is not a matter of newsletters home, although that is a good idea too. It is a matter of evey teacher having a phone in his or her classroom, of having a list for every one of his or her students with parent's work phones, home phones, beeper number, and email address, and of him or her providing to every parent the same information on himself or herself. I have yet to see this kind of information sharing be initiated by a teacher or asked of parents by the school. Apparently, the way the rest of the business world does business is also an alien concept to the public education establishment.

There are other things, but if a school decided to simply modify its approaches based on these seven simple improvements, results would be seen quickly, and teachers unions would not resist -- because every one of these things make teachers happier, as well as students and parents. The skilled teacher aspect might be problematic, but in reality, most of the teachers are doing OK, and will do better given the opportunity that structural changes and attitude changes described above will provide. If a school (principals and lead teachers, and parents) planned over the summer for how it would implement security, quality of teachers, reduction of non-academic time wasters, longer class sessions, English language instruction, parent involvement and increased teacher autonomy in classrooms, it could implement in the fall, and likely not face serious resistance from either the teachers, parents, or the county or state school bureaucracy. The key to all of this is leadership at the principal level. And that is number 8 -- hire great leaders as principals.

E-mail comments on this editorial to Karen Kwiatkowski.

Everyone is debating what works and what doesn't. That debate has been, and will continue to be endlessly unproductive, as well as destructive. The catch phrase "preparing our students for productive careers"; is a code phrase to disguise the fact that education has shifted so far from its original intent as to be almost unrecognizable. We are kept off-balance trying to figure out where we are; the educators have long forgotten where we were; and children are casualties of BOTH sides of education issues.

Adults connected in any way with education are concentrating on their own "productive careers," rather than on the now lengthy procession of badly-educated students sacrificed to educators' expanding job creation, consultants' job creation, program sales creation, and creation of commissions to "prove" that more changes are needed. Crafting reform is "all in a day's work" (often lucrative busy-work!) to them. Tomorrow is another day and another round of busy-work stars to paste in their career ladder portfolios. Their productive careers are protected by stifling or eliminating good, efficient and caring educators from the process, lest the comparisons of results emerge into public view.

The education industry-and that is definitely what it is! -- has become like the proverbial House That Jack Built. In this case "Jack" is both the architect and the slang term for the billions of dollars made available to agenda-driven managers and innovators who are THEMSELVES products of the first wave of "reformers." Convoluted zig-zags of soon-discarded innovations remain as monuments to the self-annointed experts. The House is an eyesore, marketed via "needs work; but is a real treasure, don't let it be torn down."

When something is as badly flawed as the current education industry, what is needed is not more innovation, but unraveling back to the point where IT WORKED! Everything that worked before was thrown out in the frenzy to justify the layers of jobs created by opportunists more intent on reaching the top of their profession than on ensuring young people a well-rounded education.

You have to look at WHAT WORKED before you can fix what didn't! What worked was starting in kindergarten with a good beginning foundation for education, in an atmosphere where children were safe, where adequate books and supplies were available, and where children were not herded into a fast-paced, high-pitched frenzy of stimulation that stressed them instead of letting them get their feet on the path to the future, at a pace they could handle.

"Developmentally Appropriate" is a code phrase to cover the junking of what actually WAS appropriate for children at the first stage of their education development. "Developmentally appropriate" is the code phrase that also fooled parents into believing that sex ed was only "health" and that experts would only teach students what they needed to know. Look what the experts have zig-zagged onto the House with that trend!

The educator industry was clever. It used the IDEA of giving children a good foundation, but twisted it to mean that kindergarten is none too early to start "career training." (The careers are for the layers of bureaucracy and the partners they enlist, not for the kindergartners.)

Earlier generations were ALWAYS "prepared, beginning in kindergarten." "Skills needed in future employment" didn't require massive pilot programs, lengthy planning sessions by paid consultants facilitating in-service programs, or by processions of "exposures to careers" by adults taking time off from their own jobs! Skills were absorbed in the course of routine kindergarten activities.

"Employment skills" were always taught in school-but with much less fanfare, and far less expense! Getting to school on time is the same as "showing up on time for work." "Socializing skills for work" is the same as learning to behave civilly in classrooms and hallways. "Doing research and preparing reports" is the same as studying and completing homework assignments based on studies. "Character education" is the same as the old "don't destroy other children's work, don't cheat, don't insult, don't hit," now updated by added layers of consultants, troupes of entertainers and piles of literature, videos, billboards culminating in evening performances by students "demonstrating their skills."

The most laughable "employment skill" contrived by reformers selling the need to upgrade students' employability, is "Ability to read, write and communicate."

Wasn't this what schools did before word-guessing, inventive spelling and abolition of grammar became the watchwords of the crowd that insists "critical thinking and problem solving" can be done without instilling any intellectual and literary skills first??

What WORKED, was teaching basics FIRST-not listening to teams of competing educators twisting the idea into the claim that only radicals want to handicap children by LIMITING their education to "basics." If you don't know basics, you won't know if you have a mile marker or a millstone. If you learn "creativity" before you learn how to harness and direct it, or "invention" before you understand what makes a process work, you end up with exactly what we are seeing now: human error in programming or construction; faulty components; inability to live up to advertised claims; and unworkable policies and projects at all levels of society.

We had "diversity" when we learned about other cultures as they developed in history, and how EACH erred or succeeded along the way. We will have chaos if we persist in listening to experts who have been teaching American children that their culture is both non-essential and abusive. We will have chaos if we persist in listening to experts who urge that students be taught that culture is superior by virtue of being non-majority.

We will have chaos if we persist in listening to experts who teach students that they have the right to develop their own rules, while at the same time holding parents responsible for their children's actions.

We had an education that, by and large, was excellent. It was run by people at the local level, staffed by teachers and administrators whose "career" was educating children, not moving rapidly from place to place before knowing the locale and its students. The profession was based on performance, not on insider-tracks laid out by fellow "experts" sharing the same agendas. Schools and parents worked together as equals, not as dictators viewing parents and taxpayers as inept irritants. Schools didn't usurp large blocks of parents' time and lost time by coercive involvement in schools, and then justify co-opting parents' wishes by pointing out how little time they spend raising their children.

It worked when students graduated from school with skills that have been for centuries legitimate "training" for higher education or for starting at the bottom rung of any career, not just a school-directed "career strand." It worked when business and industry concentrated first on providing steady employment for the adult workforce, and next on providing whatever specialty indoctrination a new employee might need. They didn't expect students to walk in, ready to take over for any seasoned employee the first day on the job. They didn't use regular employees to go into schools and tell students how exciting work could be. School was school and work was work; it wasn't playing at work or working at play.

It worked when businesses didn't hire graduates who couldn't read and write for jobs that required literacy. They didn't do the educators' jobs for them by acting as "alternative schools."

When earlier generations of fifth-grade students were well able to read and write, and earlier high school students could do what is now almost post-graduate college level work, it's time to go back and see what WORKED. We need to stop funneling money AND students into the hands of experts whose track records prove only that they made tracks through the school systems and monkeys out of parents and taxpayers. Otherwise we well deserve what we're getting now and what will destroy the future of the country as well as that of the students.

E-mail comments on this editorial to Joan Battey.

As parents, we often rail against teaching methods that deny our children the education we believe they deserve, but who is really responsible for the activities and ideologies that permeate the classrooms? We often vent our frustrations at our child's teacher, but in fact we should direct our attention and energies to the teachers of teachers, because it is they who brainwash our teachers and set a chain reaction in motion. It is they who are sending America's children into the sewers of ignorance.

John Dewey once described folks like us as "that indefinite amorphous thing called the consuming public." His premise that we are consumers is correct, but surely amorphous better describes the theories, practices, and jargon found in the ivory towers of education colleges. Why?

Because it is from here that predominantly liberal, may I even suggest Socialist, agendas are implemented. It is from here that pop-psychology fads, such as the theory of multiple intelligences, and developmentally-appropriate practices, are proselytized, opening the door to subjective grading methods, or sometimes no grades at all. It is from here that obtuse terminology emanates to hide its real intent and methodology from the ignorant masses.

Teachers of teachers have created an education system that is, by design, idealistically liberal in philosophy, empty in content, subjective in practice, and unmeasurable by objective standards. It is, therefore, amorphous--without clearly drawn limits, and defying objective classification or analysis. It is designed to make teachers unaccountable to consumers.

Education professors are babbeling away in their visionary towers, not listening to the cry of voices below. It is now time we made the ground rumble under their feet!

E-mail comments on this editorial to Jeanne Donovan.

Send comments and mail to CRER

Return Home

This page hosted by Get your own Free Home Page