Tuesday, October 27, 2009
Words from two wise men
Two luminaries of education passed away last week...
Theodore Sizer, who was 77, was involved in education from the ivory tower of Harvard to founding a coalition of small schools that inc
In expressing how it was possible to adopt the assumption that all students can succeed against a fatalistic acceptance at the outset of the school year that a certain percentage will fail, he recalled to USA Today in 1996 about the time that he was called upon as a 21-year-old second lieutenant in the Army to train new soldiers how to fire weapons.
“Nobody said, ‘Well, some of them don’t test well,’ ’’ Sizer said. “There wasn’t an assumption that some can’t learn. It was: ‘Lieutenant, I give you an order.’ I watched semiliterate dropouts whose home language wasn’t English take off like rockets and become superb people.’’
....Gerald Bracey, who was 69, probably would have complemented Sizer’s passion for classroom intimacy with a call to stop teaching to the test. The longtime policy critic and former analyst for the National Education Association said of President Bush’s No Child Left Behind, “If 2000 was the year that testing went crazy, 2001 was the year it went stark raving mad . . . What say we take a moment to consider a few of the personal qualities that standardized tests d
Bracey was also well known in education circles for bipartisan skewering of politicians, including President Obama, and media coverage for painting public schools as so bad that no one wants to actually help them. In one of his last contributions in September to the education policy magazine Phi Delta Kappan, Bracey said, “Americans never hear anything positive about the nation’s schools and haven’t since the years before Sputnik in 1957.’’
In 1996, Sizer told The Boston Globe that it should be no surprise that students drop out of “big, standardized, mechanized’’ schools. The surprise will be when we stop delivering such schools to the students.
I have a son and a daughter. My daughter went to a small high school where everybody knew each other's business. She flourished under the ability to shine and excel in a smaller fish tank. My son went to one of the larger public high schools in the state. He enjoyed the relative anonymity and the opportunity that provided for concentrating on what interested him. Both were good students who got into good colleges: She went to a smallish college in the mountains and he is currently at a big city university.
What the two of them taught me is that one size does not fit all. In a majoritarian republic, we sometimes forget that.
Labels: Gerald Bracey, high school dropouts, higher education, teaching to the test, Theodore Sizer
Thursday, July 10, 2008
Apparently the piece of paper does not make you smarter.
Edward Bernard Glick's column in The American Thinker, titled something like "How our Marxist faculties got that way" included the following remark, in quotation marks and attributed to the head of the psychology department at Duke: "No. We don’t hire Republicans because they are stupid and we are not. Why should we knowingly hire stupid professors?" Although the remark turned out to be apocryphal at best, it captures the way we all suspect that many educated people, especially toilers in the higher education trenches, think. The assumption is that (1) conservative Republicans are stupid, and (2) people with Ph.D.s are more intelligent and open minded than the population as a whole.
These statements only hold up to the most biased and cursory scrutiny. Many people with graduate degrees are highly intelligent, thoughtful people. Another group of them (smaller than the first, I hope) is composed of those who had the time, money and endurance to become extremely well-informed in one narrow area of expertise, or who were able to jump through the requisite set of higher education hoops, but whose natural inclination or habits of thought have become narrow as well. This second group tends to be over-impressed with their own accomplishments and thoroughly convinced that it makes them better than people with less formal education.
As for the assumption about conservative Republicans, it may seem hard to refute. Suffice it to say that George W. Bush, James Dobson and Lou Dobbs do not constitute the entire universe of Republican and conservative thought. Just as an example, most of us do not think that the problem with Richard Cheney or Karl Rove is their lack of cleverness, intelligence or cunning. I could digress further here on the absolute necessity for all social, economic and educational levels to employ their own critical thinking to truisms from both left and right, but you must catch my drift.
By the way, the real quote that Glick heard third or fourth-hand from a report on National Public Radio (a treasure trove of "progressive" attitudes) was this, from former chair of the Duke philosophy department Robert Brandon: “I don’t know the political affiliation of all of my colleagues in philosophy, nor do I care,” Brandon had told the [Duke] student paper. “Our last hire was in the history of modern philosophy. We hired an expert in Kant and Newton. Politics never came up in the interview.” Brandon had gone on to say “We try to hire the best, smartest people available. If, as John Stuart Mill said, stupid people are generally conservative, then there are lots of conservatives we will never hire. Mill’s analysis may go some way towards explaining the power of the Republican party in our society and the relative scarcity of Republicans in academia. Players in the NBA tend to be taller than average. There is a good reason for this. Members of academia tend to be a bit smarter than average. There is a good reason for this too.”
Judge for yourself whether that means what Glick's misquote implied.
Labels: conservative, higher education, liberal, PhD, progressive
