From time to time, I like to call people’s attentions to provocative ideas that lie outside the mainstream of conventional thought, especially if I believe there is at least a grain of truth in what is being said. Today that person is Marion Brady, veteran teacher and curriculum designer, who wrote an open letter to teachers recently that was published in the Washington Post’s education blog “The Answer Sheet”:
The single worst shoot-yourself-in-the-foot act that contributed to our loss of control of education reform happened about 20 years ago. That’s when leaders of business and industry, convinced that educators either didn’t know enough or didn’t care enough about educating the young to be trusted, hijacked our profession. And we let them.
Mr. Brady suggests that we have entrusted our educational system to people who are not professionals. They think they know how to run a school because they know how to run a business and they attended school as student.
If you’re looking for a surgeon to remove a cancerous growth, a plumber to fix a leaky pipe, an artist to paint a portrait, a caterer to produce a wedding dinner, you don’t dictate which scalpels the surgeon picks up, which wrenches the plumber brings into the house, which brushes the painter will use, or select the caterer’s kitchen utensils.
Mr. Brady suggests that it’s fine for these non-professionals to engage in problem identification, but they should leave solution-identification and implementation to professional educators.
The new leaders were certain they knew what was wrong with America’s schools, and what had to be done to set them right: What was needed were “standards.” Clear, no-nonsense standards. Tough, demanding standards.
Mr. Brady thinks everyone is wasting a lot of time developing curriculum standards. First, they are unnecessarily narrowing what students need to know. Second, they are encouraging memorization over the development of “an organized, self-reinforcing, dynamic body of knowledge.” Third, they are stifling the development of new ideas by providing an official list of worthy ideas.
Two recent posts here - The Race to the Bottom and The Race to the Top? – summarize research and analysis that support Mr. Brady’s contentions.
Once again, I have to agree.
Whenever I come across something in the media about what needs to be changed in our education system, or whenever I hear someone evangelizing about how to “fix” our schools, the person doing the talking is almost always a professional lobbyist who hasn’t stepped inside a classroom in ages, if at all.
I’ve worked as a substitute teacher on about 10 separate occasions, and while it wasn’t pleasant, it was one of the most eye-opening experiences of my adult life. These non-professional types (actually, I would call them non-education professionals) who claim to have all the answers truly have no idea what the actual job of teaching entails, or the challenges that real teachers actually face in the classroom.