MODERN TIMES
Art Hobson
ahobson@uark.edu
NWA Times 2009
Narrowing the
achievement gap at FHS
Congratulations
to Fayetteville schools for opening a welcome dialog on whether, and how,
Fayetteville High School needs to change its teaching methods. They sparked it by distributing
2,000 copies of Tony Wagner's book "The Global Achievement Gap" to
interested citizens, sponsoring three community discussions of the book, and
bringing Wagner here this Monday at 6:30 pm in the Fayetteville Town Center. I'll be out of town, but I hope you'll
be there.
Wagner's
book has been criticized and praised in these pages. One reviewer noted that the book lacks research-based
evidence for its claims, but I found Wagner's many interviews to be reasonable
evidence for most of his conclusions.
Furthermore, there's little doubt about the book's overarching theme,
namely that teachers must "actively engage" students much more fully
by requiring them to think, discuss, write, invent, reason, imagine, speak, and
problem-solve. They must be
involved in their own learning rather than passively listening to lectures and
memorizing facts. By now there are
tons of careful research supporting this conclusion. Fayetteville schools should pay attention to this. Teachers whose students aren't thinking
for themselves are missing the point.
Wagner
starts with some unsettling facts:
America's 70 percent high school graduation rate is well behind most
industrialized countries. Only a
third of our high school graduates are ready for college, and most college
professors report that high schools do not prepare students for college. Students will need at least some
postsecondary education to earn a decent wage. America ranks tenth in its college completion rate. Most
young people are politically apathetic and don't vote (although 2008 might have
changed that). Students are
graduating from high school and college unprepared for the world of work.
Wagner
offers several somewhat radical suggestions, all leaning toward active
engagement. He agrees with Thomas
Friedman's "The World is Flat" that young Americans are in
competition with developing countries for middle-class jobs and he's concerned
that Americans are not acquiring the skills needed in this new world of
work. He's also concerned that,
despite the mounting sense of dread provoked by the daily news, classrooms
mostly ignore issues such as the Iraq war and global warming. Teachers he interviewed were unable to
address such issues because they felt obligated to spend all their class time
covering detailed content requirements and preparing students for standardized
tests. He's skeptical that
content-oriented, test-oriented education is preparing either competitive
workers or thoughtful citizens.
Specifically,
students need to learn several key "survival skills": critical thinking based on evidence and
reason, problem solving ability, how to collaborate with others, how to adapt
to new circumstances, individual initiative, effective written and oral
communication, assessment of information, and imaginative vision. Note that these are not traditional
subject-matter fields, but rather skills that must be developed through
practice. Wagner doesn't reject
traditional education in academic subjects, but he regards it as secondary to
developing real-world survival skills.
Wagner
is leery of No Child Left Behind and state standards, with their implied
emphasis on testing. He opposes
not so much the tests themselves as the great gobs of time spent preparing for
them, claiming that "there is only one curriculum in American public
schools today:
test-prep." He states
that NCLB's main impact is its contribution to the gap--the achievement gap--between
what's being taught and what needs to be learned.
He
criticizes state academic content standards as too extensive, too detailed, too
content-oriented, and insufficiently concerned with competencies for work,
citizenship, and life-long learning.
"In today's world," he claims, "it's no longer how much
you know that matters; it's what you can do with what you know."
He's
leery too of AP courses, claiming that they are a mile wide and an inch deep
and cannot prepare students for true college-level work. He claims that, rather than teaching
students to think through the subject matter, these courses "teach
to" the AP tests and encourage rote memorization.
In
light of all this criticism, what's to be done? One suggestion is that teachers and supervisors should
observe, record on videotape, and discuss each other's teaching and supervision. He regards this as the single most
effective strategy for improving instruction. Yet it's almost never done.
He
emphasizes active engagement, a method that harks back to Socrates, who taught
by asking questions. The idea is
that students working alone or in groups should think through questions for
themselves, with guidance from instructors.
Wagner
closes his book with three exemplary coalitions of schools that work. All individual schools are small (400
to 800 students total in grades 9-12) but self-contained. Two of the three are charter
schools. Students are not tracked
by ability, so there are no "college-bound" or
"non-college-bound" students or courses. There are no AP courses. Teachers do not teach to state tests (although students take
some such tests, and generally do well).
Much academic content is taught through interdisciplinary projects, and
students pass to the next grade on the basis of these projects. Students spend considerable time in
work or community project internships.
Sports are absent or de-emphasized. Teachers are judged by the quality of their students'
work. Each coalition has a set of
learning goals that are similar to Wagner's survival skills. Teachers are intensely engaged with
students and know each student well.
There's a lot of group communication. School campuses or buildings receive little emphasis, and
some are quite modest. One campus
that might be relevant to Fayetteville's notion of dividing a single campus
into smaller learning centers is High Tech High, where the main campus
comprises a village of six small (about 400 students) schools situated on the
grounds of a former naval training facility in San Diego.
Fayetteville
High School should encourage active engagement. Wagner's many other ideas might or might not be adopted
here, but his book stirs the pot in a useful way.