Change in public education is always fettered by two opposing forces — one from outside the system that worries that kids are not learning the stuff we all learned as kids, and a second from inside the system that grasps the general outline of the change proposed, but not the details.
From outside the K-12 system, changes in public education look risky to the point of being irresponsible.
“You can’t be experimenting with kids,” a noted physics professor once exclaimed to me at a provincial curriculum meeting.
I responded that it was some notable physics professors, Albert Einstein and Enrico Fermi among them, who said they did not know what the exact outcome of the first nuclear explosion at White Sands, N.M., would be.
“Maybe not much,” said Fermi. “Maybe a chain reaction which could consume the universe,” said Einstein.
But they pressed the button anyway.
Change or progress in any field does not arrive unaccompanied by some risk and controversy.
From inside any system, it is in the fuller and more patient understanding of the details of what the proposed change is really all about that the true value and potential for progress is found.
Educators are notorious for hopping onto bandwagons without considering that progress does not involve entirely giving up what worked in the past. Back in the 1980s, the “whole language” approach to teaching reading became the latest thing in K-3 classrooms.
Whole language described a literacy philosophy that emphasizes that children should focus on meaning and strategy instruction.
It was widely criticized by those within the profession who espoused a phonic-based approach and from outside the profession by those who wanted public education, despite challenges from a rapidly changing world, to get “back to the basics.”
The battle lines were drawn, and it was not until relatively recently that sanity prevailed and “balanced literacy,” an integrative approach, has found its way into classrooms.
In the late 1980s, the Sullivan Commission was the most eagerly debated issue in B.C. education. Some of the basic ideas from the report have found their way, 23 years later, into B.C.’s new Education Plan.
At the time, however, then-education minister Tony Brummet’s “Mandate for the School System” led to a detailed program called “Year 2000,” which described what and how students would learn at each stage of their education for the 21st century.
Development of the Year 2000 program was both exhilarating and anxious for everybody. The common curriculum and primary schools without age-based grades were new ideas, and some parents and educators were delighted with the chance for kids to experience new courses and curriculum. Others were alarmed at what seemed like radical change.
The Year 2000 program, despite high-profile attempts at implementation, went nowhere. Some of the Year 2000 proposals were already annoying observers, not to mention the far right. There were, even according to then NDP premier Mike Harcourt, huge complaints about the new “anecdotal” report cards that didn’t quantify students’ progress.
And now it’s math’s turn.
For reasons yet to be fully examined, Canadian Grade 10 students slipped below the top 10 on an international test.
The Globe and Mail quickly and erroneously reported that “an increasing percentage of Canadian students are failing the math test in nearly all provinces.”
There were immediate suggestions, ignoring any other factors, that jurisdictions that teach math in a more “traditional” way had more success than those such as Ontario and other provinces that use “discovery learning,” a method that allows for open-ended student investigations and problem-solving.
No discussion about whether a rush to embrace what is useful in discovery learning or, for that matter, whole-language or B.C. Education Plan ideas, should not and do not require abandoning everything that works now.
Unlike other practitioners in other professions — medicine, law, engineering — public educators are subject to constant public and political uncertainty about what is happening or changing in classrooms.
Subsequently, thoughtful and incremental progress in classroom practice is hindered by the absence of an independent research body, not subject to the politics of the day, that can test, refine and prepare educators for new approaches to teaching and learning before they become the “next big thing.”
Geoff Johnson is a retired superintendent of schools.
