I can’t agree more with Ms. Ravitch. However, in addition to doing everything possible to help those who are damaged by poverty, we must also design a system and philosophy of education that doesn’t push out those who are slow and that doesn’t hold back those moving faster.
There are three fundamental problems with education. The system does not acknowledge nor does it accept the facts that:
1. Kids learn in different ways. Make learning real rather than artificial memorization for a test.
2. Kids demonstrate learning in different ways. This makes the single standardized test moot. Assessment is only as good as the information gathered and its application to the education of the student.
3. Kids blossom at different times. This is the most important issue and the most difficult to deal with as the “dominoes” will fall all over the place. Even Albert Einstein blossomed “slower” in the eyes of the school. So his mother took him out, bought him a violin, bogarded him into a university and the rest is history.
We have falsely coined two phrases.
1. Slow learner 2. Underachiever.
Those who learn slow are not dumb. Many may very well be smarter than the book learned geniuses who do well in the test.
“Underachievers” are based on the belief that all kids must be at the same place at the same time, at the same age in the same grade, on the same page of the same book, learning the same, reading the same, writing the same with the same questions and the same damn answers.
The expectation is that all kids are the Stepford Kids. All kids are not educationally pure but that does mean they are not smart. Kids blossom at different times and in different ways. We never know how genius will unfold.
The concern of many is that, with the changes listed, the last will become first as there are so many kids pushed into the street that will now thrive in a system that is real. The purpose of school will no longer be to maintain the subclass. However, those who TRULY believe in our children will understand immediately that the country will be much better off.