The Politics of School Reform

Governor Terry Branstad and his Education director, Jason Glass, deserve credit for initiating a statewide discussion about education.  Although they illustrated there are no quick fixes for Iowa’s schools, some good will come of these sessions.  Most every idea discussed carries a heavy price tag at a time when the state has precious few dollars to spare.

Iowa is better off than many states, but it continues to walk a thin line.  Many Iowa students are achieving, but far too many are not.  Gathering people around the table to discuss our problems is a good start.  Solving them will require an overhaul of public education the likes of which Iowa has never before contemplated.

The Branstad proposals released in October mainly focus on student testing, teaching quality and things like the length of the school day.  The answer does not lie in more testing or simply adding class time.  We have to rethink how and what is taught.  And, dare I say it; we need to give educators a larger role in determining policy.

The Testing Myth
It is important to test students, but the questionable Bush Leave no Child Behind policies, the Obama Race to the Top competition, or Branstad’s recent proposals all offer testing as some mysterious panacea for American schools.  Testing doesn’t improve learning, just as monitoring your blood pressure won’t improve your health.

A high blood pressure reading helps pinpoint a problem.  Improving your health will take effort and that starts by changing diet and increasing exercise.  Testing in the classroom is the same.  Testing provides an indicator of how students are performing.  Improving learning starts by changing how and what subjects are taught, and increasing rigor in the classroom.  Your blood pressure won’t go down faster if you monitor it more often, and kids won’t learn better if we test them more.

In 2011, testing has become so important in the classroom it overshadows the most important aspect of learning.  Teaching students to think and apply subject matter often takes a backseat to helping students successfully parrot information by filling in bubbles on a standardized test.

The School Calendar is a Small Part of the Problem
Just as Iowans can count on a congressional election every couple of years and one for president and governor every four, they can count on at least one candidate talking about our antiquated school calendar during every campaign.  Every election cycle we hear about how the school year is based on an outmoded agrarian calendar.  We are reminded kids are not needed in farm fields anymore and how we lag behind other countries in the amount of time students spend in the classroom.  But, the passion for doing anything about this dwindles as the election fades in the rearview mirror.

Oddly, the amount of instructional time has decreased recently.  If one adds up the minutes lost to school days shortened to balance tight budgets, being released early every Wednesday so teachers can plan, the switch to block scheduling in high school (block schedules gives more minutes per period, but fewer total minutes per subject) and the amount of additional time designated for taking standardized tests; my kids have lost weeks of instructional time compared to their counterparts a few years ago.

It is one thing to talk about keeping school open longer during an information session with constituents, doing something about it takes political capital few elected officials have and tax resources few are willing to commit.

Thomas
The sad truth is adding time in the classroom and developing the perfect evaluation tools would have minimal impact.  What and how we are teaching needs to change even more than time spent doing so and how students’ knowledge is tested.

Visit my daughter’s middle school and you will understand the depth of the problem.  Wander the halls long enough and you will encounter one child who embodies the issue.  I’ll call him Thomas.  He is a hulking man-child large enough to play linebacker for the Bears.  He is generally kind, always talkative and a handful for any teacher tasked with trying to reach a class full of adolescent hormone-pumping near-teens.  Thomas has difficulty sitting still, will never go to college and is unlikely to develop the tools he needs to make it through the most basic classes required to graduate from high school.  Most class periods, Thomas’ teachers give in to his restlessness and allow him to “go to the bathroom.”  Thomas routinely roams the halls unquestioned for countless minutes every day.  While he is out there, his teachers have the ability to better focus on teaching the rest of his class.

Thomas is sacrificed, so others can learn.

Middle school is the dirty underbelly of our school systems.  Even though the problem began long before many students reached the middle years, it is there students like Thomas begin to be squeezed from the system.  In a perfect world, there would be a learning environment better suited for students like Thomas.  While it is an oversimplification to say we operate a one-size-fits-all public school system, even the greatest defender of our current schools will admit we do not have the alternatives required to help every child reach his potential.

Political Will
As does Governor Branstad, the Des Moines Register deserves some credit for adding to the conversation by publishing an ongoing series about education reform.  It is important for students, parents, teachers, political leaders, business people and the public to have honest discussions about fixing our schools.  Far too many children are failing to learn in Iowa schools and we need to put our heads together to find the solutions and, most important, build consensus for funding a fundamental change in public education.  The payback will be worth it, but the cost to do this correctly will be immense.

Until we commit dollars and political capital in equal measures to creating alternative learning environments aimed at reaching students at every part of the learning spectrum; we will continue to see schools fall short of what we expect from them.  If the school calendar is considered antiquated, the curriculum model we continue to follow for our schools must be called ancient.

Students like Thomas, students headed to college and students destined to become skilled laborers require different things from school.  It won’t matter how many minutes or days are added to the school calendar, or how many tests we administer; as long as we allow students like Thomas to fall through the cracks and do not provide teachers the resources they need to reach every student, we will never have a school system capable of performing as it should.

###

Graham Gillette can be reached at grahamgillette@gmail.com

This entry was first published as a Des Moines Register blog entry.