I claim no credit for the title, which comes from this Education Week piece by Ronald Wolk, who was a co-founder of The Chronicle of Higher Education and founder of Education Week, and is chairman of Editorial Projects in Education, which puts out both Education Week and Teacher Magazine. The piece appeared online yesterday, and will be in print tomorrow. And it is as cogent as anything I have read on the problems with how we make education policy in this country. You will have to register to read the article, and as a non-subscriber will only be able to read for free two articles a week, but this is worth one of the two of your allotment. Consider:

After nearly 25 years of intensive effort, we have failed to fix our ailing public schools and stem the “rising tide of mediocrity” chronicled in 1983 in A Nation at Risk. This is mainly because the report misdiagnosed the problem, and because the major assumptions on which current education policy-and most reform efforts-have been based are either wrong or unrealistic.

Wolk considers the people running public eduation and leading the “reform” movement “knowledgeable, dedicated, and experienced” but argues that they

are so committed to a strategy of standards-based accountability that different ideas are marginalized or stifled completely.

One could write a book about each of the five major assumptions on which education policy rests, but in this limited space, a few brief paragraphs will have to suffice.

Let’s list the five key assumptions upon which he says education policy is based. I will list in bold italics the assumptions as he pens them, and for each offer the final statement he offers on each in a brief blockquote.

Assumption One: The best way to improve student performance and close achievement gaps is to establish rigorous content standards and a core curriculum for all schools-preferably on a national basis.

The issue is not whether standards are necessary. Schools without standards are unacceptable. Society should indeed hold high expectations for all students, but those expectations should reflect the values of the family and society-doing one’s best, obeying the rules, and mutual respect-and not simply the archaic academic demands of college-admissions offices. We should be preparing young people for life, not just for college.

Standards don’t prepare students for anything; they are a framework of expectations and educational objectives. Without the organization and processes to achieve them, they are worthless. States have devoted nearly 20 years to formulating standards to be accomplished by a conventional school model that is incapable of meeting them. We will make real progress only when we realize that our problem in education is not one of performance but one of design.

Assumption Two: Standardized-test scores are an accurate measure of student learning and should be used to determine promotion and graduation.

Except in school, people are judged by their work and their behavior. Few of the business and political leaders who advocate widespread use of standardized testing have taken a standardized test since leaving college. It is probably a safe bet that the majority of them, even after 16 years of formal education, could not pass the tests they require students to pass.

“But I took those courses years ago,” they say. “I can’t remember all that stuff.” Exactly.

A common justification for standardized testing is that it’s the best proxy for student achievement we have until something better comes along. The performance-based assessment used in many charter schools (and now statewide in Rhode Island and New Hampshire) is better.

Assumption Three: We need to put highly qualified teachers in every classroom to assure educational excellence.

If we want effective teaching, we should change the ways schools are organized and operated, and shift the teacher’s primary role from an academic instructor to an adviser, someone who helps students manage their own education.

Assumption Four: The United States should require all students to take algebra in the 8th grade and higher-order math in high school in order to increase the number of scientists and engineers in this country and thus make us more competitive in the global economy.

If the nation wants more scientists and engineers, then educators need to find ways to awaken and nourish a passion for those subjects well before high school, and then offer students every opportunity to pursue their interest as far as they wish.

Assumption Five: The student-dropout rate can be reduced by ending social promotion, funding dropout-prevention programs, and raising the mandatory attendance age.

The key to graduating is learning; the key to learning is motivation. There are innovative public schools that graduate most of their students because they personalize education, encourage students to pursue their interests and build on that enthusiasm, and offer multiple opportunities to learn instead of a one-size-fits-all education.

Wolk concludes as follows:

It is neither wise nor necessary to bet the future on a single reform strategy, especially when hundreds, perhaps thousands, of schools are demonstrating every day that there are other and more successful ways to help children learn and succeed.

But we can pursue two strategies only if we act to assure that the dominant strategy does not smother the fledgling movement in its crib.

I do not agree with all he presents in this piece. For example, in my opinion and in the opinion of far too many on the ground in Chicago, he gives Arne Duncan far too much credit for Renaissance 2010, the program Duncan used to reshape public schooling in the Windy City. The track record of that approach is not as sanguine as many would have us believe, and here I would note that Education Week has not given as many column inches to critics of that approach as I would have like to have seen.

I am also a bit critical in his framing that while he rightly talks about engendering enthusiasm for math in science by appropriate approaches in the lower grades (about which more anon) he ignores the damage that can be done to students and to our nation if we place too much focus on those subjects at the expense of other domains, including literature and the arts, historical and cultural knowledge, and preparation to be a citizen. We run a serious danger with our current obsession with math and science of producing a generation of technocrats without the ability to reflect morally, and we cheat many children of a chance to discover their true passions in fields that may not return the direct economic benefits we presume to see in science, math and technology, but without which our lives and our nation would be immeasurably less rich.

Still, despite those criticisms, this article provides the person reading it with insights that those of us who have been attempting to make a difference in education all know. There is no one path. Our overemphasis on standardized testing is limiting and destructive and really does not inform either us or those tested completely. There are other ways of assessing. Invoking interest in the early grades can be key to developing the kind of student passions we need. And we misunderstand and misapply the idea of standards.

Let me repeat one line I find key: We should be preparing young people for life, not just for college. Not only not just for college, also not just for employment in fields as we currently imagine them. Unless we inspire students to be willing to explore beyond the boxes we can currently imagine, we will stultify the creative impulse that has been at the heart of America’s genius, in science and industry to be sure, but also in the arts and politics. It is that creative impulse, too easily stultified by the kinds of approaches that have driven our educational policy in the past quarter century (since A Nation At Risk in 1983, although similar thrusts can be seen back over the past half century), that have enriched America not only financially but also in our willingness to take on societal inequities as we saw in the New Deal and the Great Society. As one born in 1946 who lived through the latter, it was the willingness of people to imagine a world different than the one which was given to them that challenged America to be different: think of the young people whose commitment fueled the Civil Rights movement as just one example of this.

Read the entire piece by Wolk. Let it provoke your own thoughts. Go beyond what he says – he would never claim to have all wisdom on the subject.

And remember these two points. First, Wolk says of the business leaders who seem so insistent on our current approach to standards and testing It is probably a safe bet that the majority of them, even after 16 years of formal education, could not pass the tests they require students to pass. My adolescent students are well aware of that, and our testing regimen makes them cynical. Do we really want to be inculcating cynicism as part of our educational process? Second, If we want effective teaching, we should change the ways schools are organized and operated, and shift the teacher’s primary role from an academic instructor to an adviser, someone who helps students manage their own education. Ultimately one key part of the job of teacher is to empower those who pass through our care to learn how to learn on their own. That is far more important than any single fact or formula we manage to have them absorb. Yes, we need to teach them the different ways through which we currently organize knowledge, but should also recognize that they may come up with better ways to do so, for themselves and for society as a whole, but only if we are willing to let them take risks, to try new things and new ways of perceiving.

I read Wolk’s piece late last night. I pondered it for a while. When I arose this morning, I decided there was nothing more important that I could do for public education today than to make the piece more widely known.

Well, almost nothing more important. The most important thing I can do is what I do every school day – head off to my classroom determined to empower all of the students who come through my care.

What will you do?

Peace.