The pendulum is swinging again. Five years ago, a number of education reports revealed disturbing facts about our schools. Many students were graduating from high school without taking solid courses in English, math and science. Often they were automatically promoted to the next grade whether or not they had mastered the previous year's work. And in some cases, teachers were hired even though they didn't know the basics or what they were supposed to teach.
A wave of state regulations followed these disclosures. Tougher courses were mandated and standards for promotion and graduation were raised, and most entering teachers had to pass some sort of test before being hired.
While it's still too early to measure the results of these reforms, there's general agreement that, while many of these regulations may be necessary, real school improvement will come not from bureaucratic edicts from above, but by encouraging innovation and risk-taking down below.
Therefore, one of the major movements in education now is toward breaking up bureaucracy - to let each school manage itself and, if a school is too big, break it up so there are two, three or four schools in one building.
The assumption behind this approach is that bureaucracies are not very imaginative and that different students and teachers can more effectively reach their goals in a variety of ways and not just through the one process approved by the central authority. Giving independence to schools will allow them to customize approaches and get away from mass-processed and standardized education. As a result, there will be greater diversity and, ultimately, improvement.
But are these assumptions warranted? Does the fact that we have 15,500 independent school districts really in greater diversity and substantial customizing of education in each district? Of course there are state and district differences, but the similarities are so great that a Martian visiting schools across the country would very likely conclude that the U.S. had one centrally-run, national school system rather than 15,500 independent ones.
School based management won't bring us more diversity unless those in charge at the school level develop a different vision of how children learn, why many do not, the role of the teachers, the kinds of materials - other than textbooks - that can stimulate learning and assessment techniques which, unlike the current standardized tests, will encourage the learning of thinking, writing, persuasion, expression and imagination.
Teachers and administrators in each school need to see possible alternatives to what everyone is now doing. There are a number of ways to do this. One is to take a look at a few schools that are really different. Another is to study current literature on organizational changes in business to see what can be learned. And there are some excellent books on teaching and learning that will stimulate thinking about new approaches. In coming months, I'll comment on a number of them, but I'll start with Eleanor Duckworth's "The Having of Wonderful Ideas" and Other Essays on Teaching and Learning (Teachers College Press, Columbia University).
Almost everything written about education assumes that students passively absorb what's thrown at them and that all we need are better lessons, better teachers, better texts. So far, these approaches have bought little improvement. Duckworth looks at the problem from the point of view of the learner.
The book is rich and complex. Like a good play or poem, it defies summary and is best experienced directly. In it, readers will find discussions of the kind of learning that takes place when one is encouraged to pursue one's own "wonderful ideas" as opposed to being told what's right and wrong by someone else and when one takes the time needed to develop broad foundations in a subject instead of being pressured to cover a curriculum quickly.
Duckworth is at her best when she describes situations in which teachers are given learning tasks in which they are simultaneously learning about a subject and observing how they learn as students. In an essay on "The Virtues of Not Knowing," she explores how we can get beyond valuing merely getting the right answer to another set of virtues essential to learning - caution, courage, confidence, risk-taking and "sitting alone, noticing something new, wondering about it, framing a question for oneself to answer, and sensing some contradiction in one's own ideas - in other words, all of those virtues that are involved when no one else is present to stimulate thoughts or act as prompter.
" ... It is , moreover, quite impossible," she says, "to help children develop these virtues. Providing occasions such as those described here, accepting surprise, puzzlement, excitement, patience, caution, honest attempts, and wrong outcomes as legitimate and important elements of learning, easily leads to their further development. And helping children to come honestly to terms with their own ideas is not difficult to do ....
"The only difficulty is that teachers are rarely encouraged to do that - largely because standardized tests play such a powerful role in determining what teachers pay attention to. Standardized tests can never, even at their best, tell us anything other than whether a given fact, notion, or ability is ready within a child's repertoire. As a result, teachers are encouraged to go for right answers, as soon and as often as possible, and whatever happens along the way is treated as incidental.
"It would make a significant difference to the cause of intelligent thought in general, and to the number of right answers that are ultimately known, if teachers were encouraged to focus on the virtues involved in not knowing, so that those virtues would get as much attention in classrooms from day to day as the virtues of knowing the right answer."
The effort to transform our schools needs vision and imagination. Eleanor Duckworth' s book is a good place to start.