Say the thing that people immediately disagree with.
As a former professor I get a lot of hate for not being all in on public school and teachers in general. Why would I who has been an educator not be all in for teachers? There are a few reasons. One is because I have twin sons and two because at heart I am a scientist and so is my wife. Here are some not scientific but good enough for opinions reasons for me.
- My twin sons were enrolled in a top school in Indiana. At that time, they were doing software development, doing computerized tutorials, and, in general, pretty introspective kids. They took a standardized test to measure reading at the end of the school year (1st grade). Over the summer, as we usually do, they did workbooks and software courses and played a lot. They took the same test again at the beginning of the next school year (2nd grade) and did even better. On track. As I would like to say, it is good to go. New teacher, new school year, and at the end of the school year they take the test again. And they do significantly worse than at the beginning of the year. Empirically, we might say they got dumber. We might even say we had corroboration with TWO doing the same activities.
- Thinking about the structure and function of the school might have been the problem. That and the fact schools are little cesspools of petty bickering between teachers and administrators, teachers and parents, and having none of that for my kids. We bid and got my sons into a local charter school based around experiential learning. Test scores went through the roof and their behaviors were much better. This left me wondering is it the industrial structure of traditional schools, is it teachers, or some systemic issue within public education.
- When we moved from one state to another the new school administrators treated our twins like they were malignancies. So, we homeschooled our boys. They rocketed ahead and did amazing on the standardized tests. We’ll call that anecdote about homeschooling instead of a takedown on public schools.
- Time and time again, we watched the success of our twins with the same and different teachers. (Your kids may vary.) The more industrial the education, the more likely they were to fail. The more remedial, luddite, and tech reductionist, the more likely they were to fail. Simply put, poor teaching results were directly attributable to autocracy and the hierarchical relationships of industrial processes.
Sure, your kids may be different and I’ve two other kids I could use as an example. My wife and I are not the “hands off, the school is daycare parents.” We sit down everybody around the dinner table and have focused discussion around topics. We talk about their homework, and though they have to do it themselves we are empathetic to their needs. To be honest they didn’t ever ask a lot of questions.
Now, they’ve both graduated from university, have their divemaster certificates and captain’s licenses, started their own software company, and are traveling the world quite a bit. What is success and what is the future? I’m not sure but having watched teachers and schools apply the autocratic we know what’s good for you and seen the evidence that isn’t true. Not even a little bit of a fan of industrialized public education and not a fan of most teachers who think it’s a good idea.
And, when you get mad, understand that I was a student subject to socio-economic tracking when I transferred from an urban school to a suburban school. That is a series of stories you don’t want to hear today.