What I Learned At School This Year

Good column from George Wood in the Forum for Education and Democracy

His list of what he'd learned from the Forum's report, Democracy at Risk, is most interesting:

What I learned from looking at these far-from-perfect numbers is that the nations that do well on these comparisons do things I wish we did, including:

• Funding their schools equitably, often nationally, and refusing to allow the disparities we see in this nation;
• Taking care of their children by providing national health care, early childhood education, safe neighborhoods, and quality housing;
• Supporting a professional teaching corps by providing financial support to become a teacher, ensuring mentoring programs, and investing in ongoing professional development;
• Making sure there is a supply of well-prepared and well-supported teachers for every child and every school;
• Relying upon performance assessments, and assessments of learning at the school and classroom level, to gauge how schools are doing;
• Using assessments that engage students in higher order thinking processes to solve real-world problems; and
• Refusing to use standardized assessments for high-stakes decisions.

Every time I mention this list to policy-makers they seem astounded. What I have learned this year is that we have a mythological notion of what is going on in schools around the world. We believe something like this: In other nations kids go to school all the time, study primarily math, take tests almost daily, and are subjected to a great deal of drill and memorization work. In fact, nothing could be further from the case and to pursue a policy agenda based on this mythology will deeply damage our schools.

And, as he says in closing:
What we need is a system of national policy supports for schools that insures every child, regardless of condition, has equal access to a good school, with good teachers, where what they learn is judged by what they can do on complex tasks.