Do We Need to Be More Conservative in Our Teaching?

I'm always on the look-out for ideas about how we can improve teaching (rather than test scores).  A new idea has popped up for me about incorporating more conservative techniques in teaching, sparked by an intriguing new book by David M. Ricci, a professor of politics and American studies at the Hebrew University of Jerusalem.  However, before this becomes a political debate, let me say I'm not talking about incorporating more conservative beliefs in teaching; I'm talking about including more of the conservative reliance on selling ideas through great stories.

Ricci's book is entitled Why Conservatives Tell Stories and Liberals Don't:  Rhetoric, Faith, and Vision on the American Right.  This book answers the puzzle posed by New York Times colonist and author of The World is Flat, Thomas Friedman, who stated just before the recent elections "The thing that baffles me about Mr. Obama is how a politician who speaks so well, and is trying to do so many worthy things, can't come up with a clear, simple, repeatable narrative to explain his politics."  It also explains why conservative leaders whom those with left-wing leanings find to be, at best, simple, and at worse, let's call it "intellectually challenged," keep winning elections.  These Conservatives may not have the Ivy League degree or the facts and figures at their fingertips.  But they tell a great tale about America's glorious possibilities, and sometimes those stories triumph--even if they turn out to be fantasies, or even worse, lies.

Ricci argues that it is in the very nature of liberalism to eschew storytelling over data.   He traces the liberal movement from the Enlightenment, and shows how they have consistently relied on science, theories, and facts to convince the population to abandon long-held policies or behaviors.  Conservatives, on the other hand, promote traditional values, conveyed through uplifting stories about such qualities as courage, decency, authenticity, and the democratic virtues of freedom and justice.  So you have President Obama trying to teach people about his national health care legislation, which was more than 2,300 pages long, while Sarah Palin talks about her mama grizzlies and tea parties.  And we all saw which approach tended to be most convincing to voters in the 2010 elections.

But leaving politics aside--I think this is a valuable insight for us to consider in education.  How many of us are liberal thinkers, and so think the most important thing is to teach our students the facts and figures of what ever subject we are teaching?  If we are, how powerful would it be NOT to abandon facts, but to combine it with the more conservative bent towards storytelling?  Because when I think back to the best teachers I've ever had, they weren't the ones who necessarily fed me the most theories and data.  The best ones, for me at least, were those who brought the subject alive through their passion for and, yes, stories about their subject matter.

Of course, it may seem that storytelling lends itself more to some disciplines than others.  Literature, of course, is all about stories, and history can easily be taught (although, unfortunately, too often is not) as a series of narratives about historical dates, facts, and figures--tales of the who and why that enliven the when and what.  But how about math?  For many of us, that is one of the most fixed, inflexible, and uninteresting (and, unfortunately, for some incomprehensible) subjects.  However, you only need to meet a master math teacher like my friend, Maria Droujkova of Natural Math, to learn otherwise.   No matter what topic she is teaching, Maria is always conveying a story of math as a fun, creative, flexible, beautiful, and personal medium through which each student can express him- or herself and make life better.  Maria changes people's stories about math, and that can make all the difference in their ability to learn math.

Or how about science?  There has been an intense discussion lately on the Natural Math e-loop on how science differs from math in regards to storytelling (which, unfortunately, has gone over my head, or at least over my ability to devote the time and attention to comprehend all the posts and links that have been exchanged by people with much more specialized knowledge in those fields).  But I still believe that there is a place for storytelling in science and that science, too, in the end tells different stories about the world.  If you have read Thomas Kuhn's classic work, The Structure of Scientific Revolutions, major shifts in the fundamental theories in science, like moving from the Ptolemy to the Copernican astronomy or from mechanical to quantum physics, also change our story of who we are and how our worlds operate.

Once again, I haven't actually read the book, so I'm not sure that I completely buy Ricci's argument.  But I think he raises a fascinating point to consider, and shines a light on something that may be a bit of a blind spot for some of us.

Should We Get Rid of Middle Schools?

Forget about just getting rid of F's--should be be getting rid of middle schools altogether?  Researcher Peter  Meyer of the Thomas B. Fordham Institute certainly seems to think we should, at least according to his article in Education Next entitled "The Middle School Mess."  Meyer cites studies that show that students who attend K-8 grade schools, rather than stand-alone schools teaching 6th-8th grades, demonstrate fewer behavior problems, maintain higher rates of on-time high school graduation, and earn higher grades and higher standardized test scores.

So what's the problem with middle school?  Meyer argues that the typical middle school does not put a high priority on academic achievement, and so does not demand sufficiently rigorous learning demands on the students in these grades.

According to Meyer, middle schools are a relatively recent invention.  For most of the 20th century, 7th and 8th graders attended "Junior Highs" that were supposed to prepare them for high schools.  But in the 1960's and 1970's, such institutions were attacked to putting too much pressure on the students, while not recognizing the developmental needs of early adolescents.  The fear was that starting the academic preparation for college in junior high was forcing 12 and 13 year olds to focus solely on the core classes--math, reading and writing, and science.  However, the educational theorists of the time protested that early adolescence should be a time for discovering and pursuing passions like art and music, journalism and drama, scouting and other outdoor experiences, and (in those time) topics like home and industrial education.  Early adolescents, they felt, were dealing with a lot of physical, emotional, and hormonal changes, and needed time to explore not only these interests and potential study and/or career paths, but also to figure out who they were becoming and how they related to their family, peers, and world.  Thus, middle schools were founded as a transitional time for 6th, 7th, and 8th graders to get used to the high school system of different classes with different teachers and other such attributes and to acquire subject-matter content and skills necessary to be successful in high school without overloading them with work so that they could try on different activities and ways of being as they matured into true adolescents.

So should we get rid of middle schools?  I guess it depends on how much you buy into our current system of evaluating educational progress primarily, if not purely, by test scores and other quantifiable data.  If one's priority is simply higher test scores, then our 1970's-style, more humanistically-designed middle schools are probably out of place.  Meyer states that the recent trend is towards eliminating middle schools in favor of more K-8 institutions.   However, I can see other curricular, economic, and practical rationales behind such schools, so I don't know without more research that a backlash against the middle school concept is fueling that trend.

My personal bias is that schools should be about developing happy, productive, well-rounded, and effective citizens, and I don't think that is measured by standardized tests.  In fact, the current preoccupation with testing is one of the reason we have chosen to homeschool.  And I would like to think that somewhere along the now 17+ years of institutionalized education that we now expect our children to attend there would be some kind of focus on developing aspects beyond being a highly-performing testing machine.

But, then, I know I'm an oddball.  So what's your opinion?  Do we need to get rid of middle schools, or at least get them on a more academically-focused track?

Can a Stanford Educator Explain the Wake County School Board?

I ran into a book today that gave me a whole new theory in terms of explaining the recent tumult in the Wake County School Board.  As inhabitants of the Raleigh, NC-area Wake County know, last year four new school board members were voted in and claimed they had a mandate to dismantle the old system, in which students were bussed throughout the country to provide economic diversity among all the schools rather than creating a system of poor schools and rich schools, in favor of a neighborhood-based system.  They aligned with one previous school board member with similar inclinations, and gained a 5/4 majority on votes relating to this issue.  That previous board member was chosen to chair the board, and the majority was seen as "steamrolling" their position in vote after vote, despite the concerns being raised by the community.  Board meetings were turning into circuses, with protesters, petition, police, and prison incarceration becoming common occurences.

Then, last week, suddenly things shifted.  The board member from Cary (where I live), claiming that she was being shut out of the decision making and was increasingly uncomfortable about the direction the new school assignment plan being designed by a closed board committee was going, swung her vote to the minority and shut down work on the current board plan.  So now the whole thing has to go back to the drawing board, as they say.

It has been a nasty time, with ugly comments and insulting insinuations being flung by both sides.  And now nobody knows what is going to happen (although those aligned with the formerly-minority side are happy with that right now).

But the book I encountered today put it all into a new perspective for me.  David F. Larabee, a Professor of Education at Stanford University and long-time observer and writer on educational policy, has just released his latest book entitled Someone Has to Fail:  The Zero-Sum Game of Public Schooling.  Once again, I haven't actually read the book, other than sections through Google Preview and from reviews and comments from the author, etc.   So I really can't speak to the entire contents of the book.  However, one concept I picked up from what I have read has helped me reframe this entire conflict.

Larabee argues that there are two major forces that drive changes in public school:  the Reformers, those who want to use the public schools for all sort of beneficial public purposes ("melting pot" integration of aliens, increasing opportunities for the poor, producing a more competitive economic workforce, and so on), and the Consumers, those who are sending their children to school for a better life (in Larabee's opinion, it seems, often by providing them a competitive edge over other children).  Sometimes the interests of Consumers and Reformers overlap, as when education provides poor children with a mean to escape the poverty of their parents.  Sometimes Consumers can co-exist with Reformers; they don't necessarily actively support the reform movement, but it doesn't cause them any issues so they are fine with it.  But Larabee seems to indicate that if there is a run-in between the Reformers and the Consumers, the Consumers win every time.

I think that is exactly what we are seeing here in Wake County.  For the past ten years, despite the issues and problems, I don't think most parents (the Consumers) were opposed to the Reformers plan for economic diversity.  Unfortunately, the school system blew the implementation of that system through its inadequate planning.   The school system was reassigning students on a continuing basis, so that students were going to three different elementary schools from K-5, families had siblings on completely different schedules (traditional, year round, different tracks, etc.), and neighbors were attending completely different schools.  In short, the costs of the Reformers' plans were becoming too high for the Consumers.  And so, they rebelled....and voted in a new slate of school board members.

But here is the crux of the latest problem....

The people on the school board who were designing the new system, although voted in by Consumers to solve their Consumer problems, were, in fact, Reformers.  They were opposed to the existing Reformers, so perhaps they should be called the Anti-Reformers, but they were still Reformers.  One, in particular, is not even married and doesn't have any children.  This is not to say that they don't care deeply and aren't trying to do the right thing and have no right to have input to the school system--after all, since I homeschool, I'm not a consumer either--but it is to say that they aren't coming from it from a Consumer point of view.

So thing fell apart, I think, when word started getting out that this new set of Reformers/Anti-Reformers were considering creating regional zones and not assigning students to a base school.  Now, who knows what they were doing, since it was closed even to other board members, and maybe it made sense in their new Reformer scheme.  But that was anathema to all the Consumers who were tired of all the confusion after years of redistricting for economic diversity and who were just trying to vote in a system where they would know where their children would go to school for the foreseeable future.

So it came down to the new Cary board member, who was voted in on the new Reformers platform but who was, in reality, a Consumer (she has two children in the public schools, I believe).  And beyond being a Consumer herself, she represents the community with the most vocal and active Consumer population, just given Cary's relatively high income, educational achievement of parents, and number of one-income families where spouses have the time and expertise to advocating for their children in the school system.  She---and by extention, the Consumers--wasn't being listened to, and she pulled the plug.

And that, according to Laramee, is the fate of any Reformers scheme when it runs head-to-head with Consumer opposition.

Or, at least, that's what I think Laramee says.  Regardless, it makes a lot of sense to me to explain the recent events from that framework.

What do you think?