Two Myths Are Part of Shaky Foundation of School “Reform”
Here are two of the myths that underpin the school “reform” movement. First, there’s the myth that the real problem with American schools is that teachers hold low expectations. You’ll remember that the No Child Left Behind Act was supposed to address “the soft bigotry of low expectations.” And the second myth: schools and especially high schools fail because they are modeled after factories. For seven years, U.S. Secretary of Education Arne Duncan has insisted that public schools are trapped in the dated industrial model and stuck in the 20th, not the 21st century. These ideas are rarely questioned. What do they mean? Here are recent articles that examine some of their implications.
Myth 1: Children are falling behind because their teachers hold low expectations.
Gary Rubinstein is a math teacher at New York City’s Stuyvesant High School, and a former teacher with Teach for America (TFA), the two-year alternative teacher preparation and recruitment program. Rubinstein publishes a thoughtful blog that critiques TFA and more generally the school “reform” movement. In a recent post about TFA, Rubinstein digresses into a fascinating reflection on teaching itself and the role of teachers’ expectations: “How I wish that low expectations were the main difficulty in education. It would be so easy to improve. Teachers would just raise their expectations: Teach a little faster, assign a little more homework, make the tests a little longer, a little more difficult—more ‘rigorous’ if you will. While I’m certainly not an advocate for low expectations, I think it is definitely naive, and even a bit dangerous, to too blindly believe that the act of just having high expectations will cause students to learn more.”
Rubinstein describes the teacher’s job from the point of view of the practitioner. And he Two Myths Are Part of Shaky Foundation of School “Reform” | janresseger: