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THEODORA KALIKOW: Sticking with same wrong answers won’t solve education problems

 
Happy New Year! Here’s a parable about the state of education today.

I’m in the supermarket to do shopping for holiday baking, including several items that I normally don’t buy.

The biggest puzzle: Where is the Bisquick? I am at one end of Aisle 3 with the baking supplies. Here’s the brownie mix, the cake mix, the cupcake mix, even the ployes mix, but no Bisquick. I look again. I am so careful. I read every darned package. Nothing. Grrr. I go away and get other things, but finally I come back to the same place on Aisle 3 and search carefully and get the same result. Nothing.

In desperation, I ask the manager, “Where is the Bisquick?” He says, “Aisle 3.” I say, “No way, I looked there.” He says, “Follow me,” so I do. I’m humoring him. I am being polite. I know this is going to end badly. I know they don’t have it.

We go to the other end of Aisle 3, and there it is. After many expletives, most of them deleted, I remember my manners and thank him.

What does my little story tell us? First of all, I had a lousy search strategy. I thought I knew what I was doing, and I didn’t. Second, how easy it is even for a relatively smart person to get trapped into a fruitless set of behaviors because of unexamined expectations and assumptions.

Why did I assume that the Bisquick was with the cake mixes and not with the pancake and waffle mixes somewhere else? Because I didn’t even know there was a separate category for pancake and waffle mixes. So I set up an expectation, then forgot I had it and repeated the same useless behavior because I couldn’t imagine anything else.

Now for the connection to education. A few weeks ago, it was national news: in the results of the 2009 Program for International Student Assessment (PISA), the United States came out barely average in the achievements of 15-year-olds in reading, below average in mathematics, and just about average in science. Also, the test results of U.S. children have not measurably improved since 2000, when this international testing program began.

Lots of hand-wringing. Lots of blame. After all, we’ve had 10 years of No Child Left Behind. Kids have been tested relentlessly in reading and math. In some places, merit pay for teachers is based on annual improvement in students’ test scores. Many states have set up charter schools. Many rich and powerful foundations have been involved in funding these programs. Schools and teachers have had to dismantle large chunks of the curriculum to deal with the required testing in reading and math. And yet, the needle has not moved. What happened?

There are many possible answers. Here are some familiar ones. We need to test even more. We need even more charter schools. We need even better teachers. We need to run school even more like a business. We haven’t been tough enough yet. We need to get rid of the unions. We need fewer administrators. The schools need to be smaller, or larger. We need even more incentives for improvement from the federal government.

These are the same old wrong answers we have been stuck with for over a decade. I think we’re at the wrong end of Aisle 3 stubbornly applying our bad search strategies and mistaken assumptions and we are never going to find the Bisquick.

Recently, I heard a talk by Diane Ravitch, well-known education writer, who has championed the strategies of testing and charter school choice. A leader in the development of No Child Left Behind, and a former U.S. assistant secretary of Education, she has done something rare in public or scholarly life — she has changed her mind. After examining the evidence, she has concluded that No Child Left Behind was flawed. Too much testing is harmful. Charter schools as currently conceived are bad for public schooling. And more.

In my next column, I will report some of Ravitch’s conclusions from her new book, “The Death and Life of the Great American School System: How Testing and Choice are Undermining Education.”

This is a good time for us in Maine to know what she says. A new state administration seems to be hot to run after national education trends, even mistaken ones. Sometimes there is virtue in being late. Maybe we don’t have to end up at the wrong end of Aisle 3.



Theodora J. Kalikow is president of the University of Maine at Farmington. She can be reached at kalikow@maine.edu.

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