A few years ago, I had the pleasure of being a member of the Carnegie Forum's Task Force on Teaching as a Profession, which developed A Nation Prepared: Teachers for the 21st Century. There were many tough issues the Task Force wrestled with, but none was more difficult than the question of what impact raising standards for teachers would have on minorities. All of us were committed to a rigorous system of national board certification for teachers. But would that result -- as it often has in other professions -- in screening minorities out?
As we deliberated on our report, Dr. Shirley Malcom, a Task Force member who is head of the Office of Opportunities in Science at the American Association for the Advancement of Science and a black, clarified the issue for us. She said that the effect of raising standards would depend on what kind of gardeners we were. There are some who have beautiful gardens by weeding, by removing all the plants that don't seem right or that they don't want and tending those that remain. But others have beautiful gardens through cultivation, by paying attention to plants that don't look so beautiful now and recognizing and developing their potential. The impact of higher standards on minority teachers, Malcom said, depends on whether we're going to develop the profession largely by weeding or by cultivating. We chose cultivating.
I've often thought of Shirley Malcom' s gardening analogy and its applications. During the Depression of the 1930s and the period when baby boomers entered the work force, there were plenty of people lined up applying for jobs. Employers needed only to post the qualifications they were looking for and weed out those who didn't exactly meet their standards. But it's different today. "Help Wanted" signs are up all across the country. There may not be anyone lined up who meets the posted qualifications. What do many businesses do? They cultivate. They hire the best available and help to train and develop them, often with creative methods. They sometimes even discover important and unexpected skills and talents in these employees that they weren't originally looking for and that they can use.
Isn't it time our schools learned a similar lesson? Our current school model is the same as the one we had 50 and 100 years ago. We didn't need many high school or college graduates in those days, and there were plenty lined up. The schools were structured in a lockstep fashion, and anyone who didn't fit that lockstep was weeded out: those who could not sit still and keep quiet for five or six hours a day, those who could not learn very well by listening to teachers lecture, those who took a little longer to figure out the answer and those who were not as good as others at manipulating words and numbers. The fact that these youngsters might be good at other things important for their future lives, for our society and the economy, didn't count. The possibility that many of the youngsters who did not appear to be academically able could be if different learning opportunities were presented to them or their strengths were used to overcome their weaknesses wasn't even acknowledged.
The system worked "well." It selected the few who fit into the lockstep and had what it took to go on to more schooling. And it weeded out the rest, who went on to lower tracks in school, watered-down versions of the lockstep, or who dropped out into a job. There were no headlines or editorials when only 25% of students graduated high school in 1940. (Was the word "dropout" even in use then?) The system was producing enough talent to meet the demands of the time.
But we now have a different world and a different ideal. We need and want everybody to have a solid high school education and large numbers to have much more. Instead, we have a much higher percentage of kids graduating high school than ever before - in part because we lowered standards to keep them there and because they don't have jobs to drop into - and huge numbers of them don't have much skill to show for it. And while we also have a large percentage of high school kids who go on to college, according to the National Assessment of Educational Progress only about 5-10% of them will really be able to perform real college-level work. What's wrong?
The weeding system of schooling doesn't fit our changed world and ideals. We are now shocked that our schools don't work for the many, but the fact is that they were designed to select the few. Yet instead of rethinking or at least questioning the appropriateness of this system, we blame the teachers or the texts or TV -- or the students -- for our plight.
We talk as if we are periodically reforming the school system, but we actually only change our standards from high to low and back again. By now we should realize that having the same high standards for everyone usually doesn't work because not everyone can master the same things in the same way in the same period of time. Lowering standards to keep the slowest on board doesn't work either because everybody suffers. Those at the bottom don't acquire more than the basics and end up with worthless credentials, while those who once did well reduce their efforts because they know that they can get away with it. And so we again raise standards, and the pendulum swings again ... and again.
We need to develop a new system of schooling, a system based on cultivating rather than weeding. We need to recognize that most students don't learn well in the system we designed long ago and still maintain, and that neither we nor they can afford such massive failure. We need to understand that children learn in different ways and at different rates, that they have and our society needs diverse talents that our schools ignore and that many who do not appear able to be academically or vocationally successful could be if we offered them more than only one or two ways of learning. We need to design a system that builds on students' strengths and successes and uses these to overcome their weaknesses. We do not need to periodically lower our standards, but instead broaden our ideas and practices about different routes to high standards.
Our weeding system of schooling is choking the development of our youth and of our nation. Isn't it time to design a system of cultivation?