Over break, I’ve had the chance to read and enjoy Linda
Darling-Hammond’s The Flat World and Education: How America’s Commitment to
Equity Will Determine Our Future (2010). It has served as an
excellent reminder of what we know about schools, what we are doing well, and
what we could probably still do better. As we continue our focus this
year on educational research and how we can use it to improve our classrooms
and our school, I would like to devote this month’s newsletter to some of those
big and small picture findings that Darling-Hammond offers. While the
book is fairly detailed, I will limit my focus to key findings in the areas of
schools, teachers, and practices.
When it
comes to schools in the U.S., Darling-Hammond pulls out some of the well-worn
scores from international testing, which show how our schools are falling
behind in comparison to other countries. Interestingly enough, she spends
quite a bit of time discussing the variables that should be considered in
looking at these comparisons, but on the whole she discusses the rather grave
concern that our schools are falling further and further behind. And she
reduces this problem down to a matter of educational equity in our
country. She points out that the
distance between the “haves” and “have-nots” in the U.S. is far greater than
every other country within our
category. Her argument is that until we
fix this problem of unequal educational opportunity in this country, things
will not change. She mentions that part of the problem stems from the
formula for educational funding, which is largely based on property taxes. This creates a cycle where the rich get
educationally richer and the poor get educationally poorer. As an interesting side note, she spends a
considerable amount of effort discussing school size and its impact on student
culture. She points to research that
shows how generally speaking smaller schools are better than larger
schools. At the high school level, she
says that 1,200 students is probably the largest that a truly effective school
should go. And schools with higher
populations of needy students should be smaller, going as low as 300-500
students. The more schools can
personalize their environments, the more successful they become. She even
discusses the powerful impact that an “advisory” system can have for students,
especially when those are structured to pair students and teachers across
multiple years.
Beyond
schools, Darling-Hammond also spends a good deal of time discussing teachers.
She indicates that probably the single most powerful in-school factor of
a student’s success is the quality of the teacher in the room. She
emphasizes the failure of alternative licensure programs that typically put
unprepared teachers with high needs students.
And because of the way funding flows in our school systems, these
teachers usually end up in concentrated numbers, which has a school-wide
effect. Her comparisons to teachers and training in other countries is
especially interesting. In countries
like Singapore, teachers are paid and honored on the same level as engineers
and professionals. They also must get
accepted into teaching programs that require standardized tests. They are
closely mentored throughout their early years with release time from teaching
to meet with and watch veteran teachers. In fact, all teachers are given
substantially more release time to maintain professional learning communities
and to watch other teachers, both within the district and beyond the district.
She states that teachers in the U.S. spend much more time teaching than
in other countries. The average U.S.
teacher has about 1,100 hours of student contact time per year, where more
successful programs average about 800 hours of student contact time per year.
Darling-Hammond points out that teachers in other countries are given much more
time to meet with colleagues, visit other schools, and get professional
training.
In terms of
our practices, Darling-Hammond suggests that much of our curriculum in the U.S.
is still based on the factory model of learning. She suggests that to
prepare our students for the demands of today’s world, things will have to
change. She shows how lesser abled
schools prescribe top down curriculums that strip teachers of the ability to
personalize and adapt lessons to the needs of students. Practices that
focus on establishing control and obedience over critical thinking and
real-life problem solving are largely ineffective and typically lead to more
disciplinary problems and higher rates of absenteeism and drop-outs. Classrooms where students are actively
engaged in small group discussions and problem solving, where they participate
in inquiry based and problem- based approaches have the opposite effect.
Additionally, students in these successful programs spend more time
critiquing and analyzing their own work and their own processes than students
in other schools.
On the
whole, the book confirms a lot of steps that we have taken here at AVHS.
For some of us, the book is a reminder about how our school and
classrooms should look. While the text seems overwhelming at times, I do
walk away from it thinking that the solutions to our problem with educational
equity are not unsolvable. Being ever mindful of both our practices and
choices as teachers and as a community is a step in the right direction.
Full newsletter here.
