The Errant Unity in the Proclamations of Bob Walser and Ted Kolderie

So pervasive are the putatively progressive precepts of education professors that those making proclamations on K-12 education may not always know the degree to which there is an errant unity in the words that they are uttering.

 

Minneapolis Public Schools Board of Education District #4 member Bob Walser has on many occasions  expressed views consonant with the dictums of  education professors.  He has on occasion linked his views to John Dewey, so Walser must have some awareness that his utterances are traceable to the early 20^th century.

 

By the 1920s, teachers colleges located on university campuses (most lamentably Teachers College of Columbia University) were superseding the normal schools that had been established to train teachers in the late 19^th century.  Insecure in their position among so many field specialists (e. g., mathematics, biology, history, English literature, psychology), education professors developed an anti-knowledge viewpoint that asserted the importance of pedagogy over subject area knowledge. 

 

In 1918, William Heard Kilpatrick authored an article, “The Project Method,” and soon followed with a book of the same name.  In 1926, Harold Rugg coauthored a book, The Child-Centered School.  These works of Kilpatrick and Rugg became the foundation for an approach to education in which the classroom presence is not a teacher but rather a “guide” or “facilitator” for student exploration of personal driving interests in cooperative projects with their fellows.  The teacher as a transmitter of knowledge is jettisoned in the visions of this purportedly “progressive” approach.

 

Many field-trained teachers and parents in the locally centralized school districts of the United States  resisted these notions from education professors, wanting a substantive education for their students and offspring.  But teachers were increasingly trained upon such precepts and by the 1960s and 1970s these “progressive” notions jibed with other ideas of personal expression in the zeitgeist, so that from that time forward to this very year of 2018 these are the ideas about education and pedagogy that teachers carry with them into the classroom.

 

Much classroom time is wasted in projects that are inefficient in terms of knowledge conveyed.  Very little background knowledge is imparted by teachers, so that whether the student is working in a group or has been given a topic for which information is to be looked up, she or he typically is hazy in the extreme as to the informational context for the assignment.

 

There is a preference for education professors and their acolytes for another misnomer, “authentic assessment,” through which students demonstrate what they have learned through demonstrations or in portfolio collections of salient written or artistic productions, rather than through objective testing.  The education professor mantra rises in opposition to standardized testing and asserts the benefits of student-driven projects based on personal interests rather than set curriculum.

 

MPS District Member Walser would do away with standardized tests, move entirely to classrooms wherein projects and portfolios are the indicators of student information acquisition, and toward schools led by teachers and students.

 

Public policy analyst Ted Kolderie would create more schools in the charter mold, wherein students and teachers drive curriculum, projects supersede  teacher lectures and whole-class discussions, learning is personalized, students work at their own pace, and much learning occurs online.

 

These are the very notions that are practiced in the classrooms of the Minneapolis Public Schools and most other K-12 institutions, superintendended as these classrooms and institutions are by teachers and administrators who are suffused with the notions of education professors.  Just as was the case for the pre-1960s decades succeeding the Kilpatrick and Rugg works, a substantial public contingent has presented a counterforce making the case for curriculum, at least for mathematics and reading, and for objective testing for determination of what students actually know.

 

But curriculum is weak, particularly in biology, chemistry, physics, history, government, economics, and high-quality literature.  Reading suffers for lack of student development of vocabulary across the subject area domains.  Instruction in mathematics is highly misguided, disregarding mastery of fundamentals for early use of calculators and in the absence of disciplined acquisition of skills necessary for success in a field for which sequenced acquisition of knowledge and skill sets is critical.

 

Thus we have the results that we see on the Minnesota Comprehensive Assessments, the National Assessment of Student Progress, the Program of International Student Progress, and the SAT and ACT measures of college readiness.

 

Education professors are objectionable generally and mathematics education professors are objectionable particularly.

 

Bob Walser and Ted Kolderie serve as mouthpieces for the failed notions of education professors with whom they are in errant unity.

 

I deliver the corrective in my book, Understanding the Minneapolis Public Schools:  Current Condition, Future Prospect.

 

And I will call Walser and Kolderie out for their errant parroting of education professor-speak whenever they emit such verbiage.