Mar 9, 2020

Chapter Sixty-Four >>>>> Prevailing Conceptions of What Constitutes an Excellent Education

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.
 
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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.
 
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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.
 
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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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