We threw the baby out with the bath water! Education "reform" gone awry!

When it comes to education, we somehow threw out the baby with the bath water when: 

1. Our schools were transformed from "places of learning" to "test prep and testing centers", and
2. Pedagogy, learning theory and child development were left behind in our rush to integrate technologies into schools.

 
I.  Test Prep  & Standardized Tests Replace Learning

This transformation was not initiated by educators, it was not approved by educators and it has been strongly resisted by many educators.  However, between the forces of the federal government and the corporations who stood to make massive profits, education lost.  Educators lost.  

Worst of all - children lost.  Many of our finest teachers left the profession.  They knew that what this was doing to children was wrong, and they had no intention of participating in this process.

When NCLB was enacted in 2002 I actually thought that it was so insane that it would certainly not survive.  Well, I was dead wrong.  It's been nearly 15 years of continual dismantling of teaching and learning.  We can now look back over the years and see the road strewn with the wreckage.

There would be no point to this post if it weren't for the fact that the inertia of standardized testing mania is continuing to cause harm.  Six months ago the NCLB was finally thrown out.  In it's place is the ESSA - Every Student Succeeds Act.  Will it be an improvement?  While it does give more control back to the states, I doubt it will improve education.  In the meantime, there are those at the federal level who are now attempting to insert into the ESSA the same punitive measures and threats that were in the NCLB.
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Like vegetables pickling in a jar, it's almost as though education has been marinating in this fallacious paradigm for so long that we've lost sight of what education is all about.  
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Education - schooling - does not exist for the purpose of raising test scores, and certainly not for tests that measure nothing but how many facts students can memorize (temporarily).  The tests are measuring something that is no longer relevant.

As recently as five or ten years ago, most students did not have all the facts at their fingertips and in their pockets.  And, until very recently, students were not allowed to bring devices to school that connected with the Internet;  many educators considered that students were cheating if they looked up information online. They did not realize at the time that if curriculum and assessment are designed properly it is literally impossible for students to cheat.  However, most students now have access to all this knowledge 24 hours a day.  They do not need to memorize it.  And, rather than banning these tools, many schools are now implementing BYOD programs - "bring your own device" to school.

What students do need is to learn how to use the knowledge, and that is what assessment should be about.  We need to let students have the freedom and the time to be creative, and then we must allow them to demonstrate what they can do with the knowledge which they have constructed through inquiry, experience, trial and error.

In an inane effort to raise test scores, we simply ran off and left behind everything we knew about pedagogy, learning theory and child development.  These are among the "babies" that got thrown out with the bath water.  

I'm not sure what the "bath water" was.  Apparently it was the supposed bad schools, bad teachers and the resulting low standardized test scores. Therefore, it made sense to someone to try to increase standardized test scores by creating, then enforcing, tougher laws - aimed at educators.  These included sanctions, or threats, of possibilities ranging from cuts in pay to loss of jobs, loss of funding and even closing schools or turning them over to the government to run.
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Actually, this mania began long before NCLB.  Standardized testing mania had been going on in Texas since the early 1980's.  

If it wasn't obvious at the time that high stakes standardized testing was a bad idea, surely it should be apparent by now.
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The new ESSA is still focusing on issues such as accountability, which is tied to standardized tests scores.  

What we are doing today may have been deemed appropriate for the Industrial Revolution.  But, we are far beyond those days, and that structure, the factory model, is now totally obsolete.  We are also past the Knowledge Era, and we are well into the Innovation Age.  We cannot prepare our students for success in the Innovation Age if we are still trying to force fit them back into the Industrial Age, or factory model, of education.  We are trying to make the factory model of education prepare students for successful lives in the 21st century.

That's a bit like trying to spin straw into gold, and we have no Rumpelstiltskin!  It is time for real change - right now.  

​II. App Fever

There are many highly dedicated educators who are working very hard to make things better.  They are doing so from within an impossible combination of circumstances.  But little tweaks here and there, and throwing technology at the problem - without pedagogy, learning theory, acknowledgement of child development and a strong curriculum that is relevant, rigorous and real world - will not solve the problem.

Part of this is the current frenzy for anything and everything digital.  I call it "App Fever" because it reminds me of "gold fever", not the television show, but the hysteria of the gold rush to California (1848 to 1855).  When gold was discovered at Sutter's Mill in 1848 over 300,000 prospectors from all over the world descended upon the area hoping to strike it rich.  See specific examples of the App Fever phenomenon here.

In a way, this App Fever is a "gold rush" - for all the companies marketing hundreds of thousands of apps as well as many other programs and devices, many of which are not high quality.  These companies hawk their products to educators who are flocking by the tens of thousands to conferences that are really not much more than markets where they avail themselves to the hundreds or thousands of sales reps.  
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Many of these technologies are amazing, and I agree that we should certainly integrate them into education - but, wisely.  These technologies are fantastic, powerful tools, opening doors to learning experiences never before possible. And, they are available to students in their lives outside school - from the suburbs to the inner cities in the USA, and in developing countries, from the remote jungles of Thailand to densely populated areas such as the Old Quarter of Hanoi.  

In the United States access to these technologies among children aged zero to one increased by 75% between 2011 and 2013 according to a report from Common Sense Media.[1]  Therefore, these technologies should absolutely be part of their schooling, whether it be public schools, home schooling or other alternative schools.  

More schools are going "paperless", providing all materials and activities digitally.  That seems to me to be a case of throwing out the baby, "books in print", with the bath water.  The point here is to identify the purpose of using only digital tools as opposed to other tools;  why are schools fascinated with going completely digital?  The fallacy is that this is the equivalent of becoming "21st century schools".  

We need to ask the question, "Which tools are best for each student, and what will best support the learning goals?"  

The babies that got thrown out with the bath water were all non-digital materials, tools, activities and experiences.  Again, pedagogy, learning theory and child development were abandoned.  

My recommendation is that we diversify, utilizing many approaches to learning, including digital!  We need to create and provide a well-balanced, holistic, child-centered learning experience.  Let's NOT throw out the baby with the bath water!

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1] Rumplestiltskin, by the Brothers Grimm.  Watch Rumplestiltskin here, featuring Ned Beatty, Shelley Duvall and  Hervé Villechaize

[2] Zero to Eight:  Children's Media Use in American 2013, https://www.commonsensemedia.org/research/zero-to-eight-childrens-media-use-in-america-2013

[3]  A side note here while I am addressing the benefits of these digital tools and access to the Internet:
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Sugata Mitra has demonstrated that simply by providing access to the Internet - with no teacher -  he proved that children can learn as much or more on their own, and with no teacher,than children in private schools!  His Hole in the Wall project opened the door to learners any time and anywhere in the world.  Many public mainstream schools are integrating his SOLE (Self Organized Learning Environment) project into their curriculum.