E.D. Hirsch, Jr. previewed his response to Sol Stern’s “School Choice Isn’t Enough” piece here earlier this week. City Journal is savvy enough to keep the chattering classes chirping, asking Dr. Hirsch, Diane Ravitch, Jay P. Greene, Andrew J. Coulson, Robert Enlow, Neal McCluskey, Thomas W. Carroll, and Matthew Ladner to respond to the piece. Coulson’s response provides a laugh out loud moment:
“Everyone knows the story. It’s Act 5, Scene 3. Romeo returns to Verona to find Juliet’s apparently lifeless body. In despair, he kills himself. Then Juliet wakes up . . . oops.
“I recalled the play’s tragic finale as I read Sol Stern’s City Journal essay. He’s leaning over what he believes is the corpse of market education. . . . He’s taking out his vial of poison. . . . “Sol, don’t do it!” I yell helplessly at the screen. “Market education isn’t dead!” And then it’s over.”
Stern has another go at his critics afterward. Good reads all around so take a look. Make sure the printer has lots of paper.
I have avoided wandering into the crossfire about New York City’s plan to study the effectiveness of individual teachers based on test scores. Since I taught in a struggling South Bronx elementary school, I’m afraid that my reaction would be driven by my personal experience to an unhelpful degree. I prefer to bring light not heat to a discussion when possible.
But in reading the coverage and the ensuing debate, I’m left hoping there will be as much focus on effective curriculum and pedagogy in New York City as individual teachers. If the product is flawed, it’s hard to see why attention would focus exclusively on the person delivering it. The waiter is rarely blamed for the undercooked meal; the car salesman for the lemon. Before you say those are not comparable analogies to teaching, consider: As a teacher, I was required to use Everyday Math and the Teachers College Writer’s Workshop pedagogy (it’s not a curriculum) in my classroom. I found neither to be particularly effective for various reasons. Left to my own devices, I’m sure I could have devised more effective ways to help my students grow as writers and as mathematicians. In my mind, my students test results had at least as much to do with what they were being taught as how I was doing as a teacher. I certainly felt my effectiveness constrained by choices I could neither make nor influence.
If it were in my power, I would gladly make the following bargain: tell me what to teach, but let me decide how to teach it. If I don’t deliver the expected results, fire me. But if you insist on telling me what to teach and how to teach it, then the results are beyond my control.
Core Knowledge board member Diane Ravitch recently wondered how American education fell under the control of “Know Nothings from the world of business, law, and politics.” Here’s what I wonder: why they didn’t bring with them one of the business world’s most effective and powerful management practices: hire good people, give them the goal and get out of the way.
There were only two times in my 25-year professional life when I was explicitly told both what to do and how to do it. The first was when I was a 16-year old Taco Bell employee. The second was when I became a New York City school teacher.
How does this sound? “A systemic high-quality education, including the most remote and impoverished communities of this vast country, so that all….can acquire the means to become creative and critical thinkers, capable of developing their own opinions and becoming true contributors to solve the challenges involved in constructing a fair and democratic society.” More? A Federal Institutes for Education, Science and Technology, “which will result in the establishment of a network of 354 institutes dedicated to teaching science and technology to high schoolers and training thousands of new teachers in the public education system.”
What country is Scientific American talking about? Click here.
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