Five myths

As part of the Washington Post’s “Five Myths” series, Paul Farhi today offers us “Five Myths about America’s Schools.” It’s not likely to change much in the American discussion about school improvement, but I’d guess that about ninety-five percent of all teachers, kindergarten through university, would agree with his assessment.

Among the myths: 1) Our schools are failing; 2) Unions defend bad teachers; 3) Billionaires know best; 4) Charter schools are the answer; and 5) More effective teachers are the answer.

My take on all this is that, contrary to everyone’s good intentions, there are few if any solutions to our education problems outside of the schools themselves. Certain kinds of assessment, in mathematics for example, are both valid and reliable and can tell us a lot about student performance, though not always so much about teacher performance. In my field, though, writing instruction, despite decades of trying, there simply isn’t any valid, externally verifiable way to assess student writing and improvement. This makes people outside of the profession crazy, but it’s something that we writing teachers tend to accept as a given. The same is true in most disciplines.

Think, for example, of the arts. Critics and the public might largely agree that a certain film is excellent and another is terrible: Say, Citizen Kane and Conan the Barbarian. Still, not everyone will agree. Mexican writer and critic Jorge Luis Borges thought Citizen Kane sucked, and so did I. Others thought Conan was a pop-culture classic. I didn’t, but there you go.

For all the films that fall somewhere in the middle, it becomes virtually impossible to make a purely objective assessment. Does good acting trump a mediocre plot, or do great special effects make an otherwise mundane plot in some way measurably better? Is My Dog Skip a better film because it features a Jack Russell Terrier than if it featured a cocker spaniel? (Of course it is.)

Likewise, it gets much harder when we try to assess competence in the roughly eighty percent of students who fall somewhere in the middle. Does a particular student write noticeably better at the end of a ten-week class than at the beginning? As an instructor, I believe I can assess that, but another instructor might read samples of that student’s writing and reach a completely different conclusion.

Is a particular excellent student more excellent after my able instruction? Is a terrible writer a little less terrible? Yes, but don't ask me to prove it.

Good writing instruction results from a vast network of intangible features of a particular school’s culture, including a good president or principal, a good department chair, a balance of shared expectations among the faculty and a lot of room for originality, a mix of students who are motivated and at least moderately competent to learn (which can vary greatly even from one class to the next), and the luck of the draw in the abilities of individual department members. There are many other factors, not the least of which are a student’s home environment and upbringing.

My answer then, which will never be accepted by politicians or the general public, is to give us some money and get out of the way. Teachers have been teaching with mixed results but generally reasonable success since at least Socrates, without benefit of standardized testing, merit pay, or charter schools.

And remember that Jesus was a great teacher, but he didn’t publish.

Departments tend to seek excellence, even if from the outside they look largely dysfunctional (my former department being perhaps the best example of this since the invention of the pencil). Bad teachers tend to get pushed into other jobs more suited to their abilities, such as parking enforcement. Good teachers tend to get a few pats on the back from both colleagues and students, which is mostly what motivates us to continue teaching and even improve if we can.

We're not perfect, but neither are truck drivers.

So my suggestion for genuine school improvement is benign neglect: Trust us; we know what we’re doing. Show a little respect. Quit blaming us for all the social problems you can’t solve.

You can read the Farhi five myths by copying and pasting this link into your browser. I could easily add five more, but this is a good start.

http://www.washingtonpost.com/opinions/five-myths-about-americas-schools/2011/05/09/AFunW27G_story.html