In response to an email that I sent to her,
Michelle Rhee (the founder and chief executive officer of the education reform
organization, StudentsFirst) defined an “excellent education” as follows:
An excellent
education equips a person with the skills and inspiration necessary to follow
their passions, achieve their dreams and become a productive member of society.
First and foremost,
this requires a firm command of the foundational skills upon which our society
and economy are built: reading, writing, mathematics, science and problem
solving. Our schools must be rigorous—through testing and other means—in
demanding that every child is proficient in these core subjects.
An excellent
education, however, must move beyond the basics. Just as a command of the fundamentals
of basketball—shooting, dribbling, passing—are necessary to become an effective
player, an excellent player
also has the ability to work well with others, analyze and strategize, and
think quickly and creatively.
Our schools must
foster creativity and exploration, and allow children to develop social and
analytic skills. Every student should have the opportunity to learn a second
language and participate in arts, music, sports and after-school programs.
Finally, in addition
to arming kids with a broad and robust array of skills, an excellent education
motivates kids—no matter their socioeconomic background—to use those skills to
reach for the stars. This is why an excellent education cannot exist without
excellent teachers, who have the special ability to identify and cultivate the
potential within every child. Recruiting, rewarding and retaining great
teachers must be the centerpiece of any education reform agenda.
An investment in our schools is an investment in our nation’s future; we cannot stop fighting until every student receives the excellent education they deserve.
The response from Ms. Rhee is wholly in accord
with the main themes that she elucidated in her book, Radical: Fighting to Put
Students First (New York:
HarperCollins, 2013). One of the
things that struck me in reading that book, though, was the absence of the kind
of explicit definition that she offered in her emailed response to me.
I find this to be the case time after
time. Steve Perry, for example, never gets around to defining an excellent
education in his own book, Push Has Come
to Shove: Getting our Kids the Education
They Deserve--- Even If It Means Picking
a Fight (New York: Broadway
Paperbacks (Crown/ Random House, 2011)
Michelle Rhee is a passionate advocate for a
quality of change in K-12 education that puts the interests of students ahead
of adults in education-related jobs.
With grit, courage, and the backing of an equally steel-spined mayor
(Adam Fenty, who lost an election and his job as a reward for his own efforts
in behalf of students), Michelle Rhee took on the education establishment as
chancellor of schools in Washington, D. C., during 2007-2010. As an advocate for policies and the quality
of teachers capable of improving student achievement in some of the theretofore
worst schools in the United States, one can extrapolate from Rhee’s book (and the documentary, “Waiting for
Superman”) principles that consider math and reading skills essential to an
excellent education, which also includes a strong liberal arts curriculum. But a focused and specific definition is
lacking in her book and speeches.
Focus, for that matter, is lacking in the
definition offered by Ms. Rhee in her emailed response. A definition as lengthy as the one she
offered fails to provide a central focus around which other, desired components
may be ordered. Her definition fails to
provide any conclusive comment on the relative importance of subject area
knowledge versus the processes by which one acquires knowledge, a matter of
great debate and dissension among those who concern themselves with change in
K-12 education.
At a “Soup with the Supe” event in February
2013, Minneapolis Public Schools Superintendent Bernadeia Johnson responded to
a question from me on this matter of the definition of an excellent education
with the laundry list approach taken by Rhee.
In the course of a 30-second ramble, the superintendent ticked off a
definition that included the importance of educational technology, engaged
students, lively teaching, critical thinking, and an amorphous reference to
general knowledge and skills. As with
the Rhee definition, there is nothing in Johnson’s definition that comes as a
surprise, and little to which one might object--- but also not much around which to build an
approach to educational excellence for a K-12 public schools system.
……………………………………………………….
Thus far, I have tendered the same question as
to the definition of an excellent education to many people working for
educational change in Minnesota. Three
of these are at the head of their respective organizations. Two have yet to convey to me a cogent
response. The other replied as follows:
“Ah, that is such a profound question.” She then verbally raced forward with comments
that she apparently thought to be of greater importance, especially the
negotiations that at the time were ensuing between officials of the Minneapolis
Federation of Teachers and the Minneapolis Public Schools.
Whatever the level of profundity of the
question posed, we need to give a clearer and more concise definition of an
excellent education before we race madly to achieve it. And the definition is not at all a matter of
consensus among thoughtful observers and commentators.
………………………………………………………..
Omission of a working definition for an
excellent education may also be noted in the work of prominent authors,
commentators, and founders of large organizations articulating ideas for change
in K-12 education. Although I find their
omissions part of the noted and regretted phenomenon, one can extrapolate from
the publications of some of the best-known commentators working definitions
that these notables would recognize as synchronous with their key emphases.
Three educators who would be properly placed
in the “progressive” camp of articulators of K-12 change are Alfie Kohn, Howard
Gardner, and the late Maria Montessori.
Definitions culled from their works would viably gain expression as
follows:
An excellent education is a matter of students
and teachers collaboratively investigating topics of intense mutual interest
through engaging cooperative projects, demonstrating their knowledge in
portfolios, presentations, and demonstrations. [Alfie
Kohn]
An excellent education is a matter of students
disciplining their minds in pursuit of deep understanding of the true, the
beautiful, and the good while utilizing linguistic, musical, mathematic,
spatial, kinesthetic, and personal intelligence as appropriate. [Howard Gardner]
An excellent education is a matter of
preparing a learning environment wherein children will acquire common skill and
knowledge sets at their own pace, according to the means most appropriate at
each developmental stage. [Maria Montessori]
What unites these progressive commentators is
an emphasis on process. For progressive
educators, the process by which one acquires subject area knowledge supersedes what
is learned. Most extreme in this regard
is Alfie Kohn. His vision of “the
education our children deserve” embraces the “learning how to learn,” “lifelong
learning,” and “constructivist” approaches that overwhelmingly dominate
professorial pronouncements in our schools, colleges, and departments of
education. This approach devalues
knowledge for definite, sequenced acquisition and promotes the notion that
facts can always be looked up when one needs them. What is important to progressive educators is
a classroom driven by the particular and passionate interests of students and a
teacher who acts more as facilitator than disseminator of factual knowledge.
At the other end of the spectrum, one finds
the politically conservative William Bennett and the politically liberal E. D.
Hirsch. The latter deserves a lot of
credit for disentangling the term “progressive,” which holds sway in so much of
the education establishment, from “liberal,” which often metamorphosed into
“progressive” as the other term became the pejorative “L” word from the Reagan
era forward. One who emphasizes a
content-focused education may be politically liberal while considering as
anathema the principles that undergird the approach to education commonly known
as “progressive.”
As distinguished from the progressive
educators Kohn, Gardner, and Montessori, the content-focused Bennett and Hirsch
present ideas in their publications and public talks that can be distilled into
the following definitions of an excellent education:
An excellent education is a matter of parents
modeling a love of learning and an enthusiasm for knowledge that is then tapped
by teachers who engage students with a rich and rigorous core curriculum in
grade by grade sequence. [William Bennett]
An excellent education is a matter of
transmitting specified skill and knowledge sets mastered to the point of
automaticity, broadening and deepening core knowledge in careful grade by grade
sequence throughout the K-12 years. [E.
D. Hirsch]
Thus, for Bennett and Hirsch, strong liberal
arts content knowledge is the heart of an excellent education. I have heard Hirsch comment that he considers
lively teaching and student engagement important; for him, though, the process is that which
delivers the subject area content. It is
content, not process, around which he centers the Core Knowledge books under
his editorship, the foundation of the same name, and his conception of the
schools that he says we need but rarely get.
…………………………………………………………………………………………………………………………
The definition of an excellent education is
important. The widespread tendency for
upholders of the status quo and advocates for educational change alike to avoid
clarity and specificity in defining an excellent education is notable and lamentable.
If we agree that process is paramount, then
those whom we want to hire to preside over our children’s classrooms should be
good facilitators, asking good questions for students to ponder critically,
eliciting articulations from students as to their most passionate interests,
and guiding them toward sources of information on those personally chosen
topics for study. Educational
facilitators (teachers) in the progressive conception need not be experts in
subject areas; rather, they should be
reliable human portals to a world of knowledge open for exploration rather than
mastery.
If we agree, on the other hand, that content
is paramount, what we want is a specified, sequenced, grade-by-grade curriculum
across key areas of the liberal arts.
Adapting Hirsch’s presentation of subjects to be studied for Core
Knowledge acquisition, we could define these prioritized subject areas as math,
science (chemistry, biology, physics), history, economics, literature, and the
fine arts. Teachers in this conception
of an excellent education should be broadly and deeply knowledgeable at the K-5
level and experts in their fields at the secondary level.
So it matters.
Our failure properly to educate so many of our
children lies to a large extent in our own failure to decide what being an
educated person means.
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