What Would It Take to Turn Back the Wave of Behaviorism in American Education?
Public education policy these days is trapped in behaviorist thinking about rewards and punishments. We have zero-tolerance charter schools that award demerits to children for failing to exhibit good posture, track the speaker, and even wear the socks that are part of the school uniform. We close or privatize schools for failing quickly to raise overall test scores, and we downgrade teachers in their formal evaluations for failing to raise their students’ test scores fast enough. Now the U.S. Department of Education says states must rate colleges of education by tracking whether their graduates, once they get hired as teachers, can produce students whose test scores rise quickly.
David Kirp, a professor of public policy at the University of California at Berkeley and a fellow at the Learning Policy Institute, thinks our education policy’s reliance on behaviorist psychology is technocratic nonsense. His article in Sunday’s NY Times explains why.
Kirp describes three research studies about interventions by teachers “to combat students’ negative feelings. I’m dumb, some believe; I don’t belong here; the school views me only as a member of an unintelligent group.”
In one study, “sixth-grade students… (were) taught, in eight lessons that intelligence is malleable, not fixed, and that the brain is a muscle that grows stronger with effort.” This kind of teaching “aims to change students’ mind-sets by showing them that their intelligence can grow through deliberate work.”
In a second study, when teachers wrote comments on the school work of African American male adolescents, no matter the other critiques on the students’ papers, the teacher explained: “she had high expectations and believed that, if the student worked hard, he could meet her exacting standards.”
In the third study, “sixth graders wrote about values that were meaningful to them, like What Would It Take to Turn Back the Wave of Behaviorism in American Education? | janresseger:
