My working hypothesis for this editorial series relates to the future of our American society, as well as to some statistics quoted back in Part One, which came from the Colorado Department of Education.
The board directed districts to communicate the requirement to all K-3 teachers by December 1, 2020, and ensure teachers meet the new January 2022 deadline. Districts, BOCES and charters that do not meet the requirements will be ineligible for READ Act funds for the 2022-23 school year.
Only 40% of Colorado’s third graders are meeting expectations on the Colorado Measures of Academic Success tests in English language arts, yet research shows that students need to learn to read at grade level by the end of third grade so they can read to learn in fourth grade and beyond.
As noted previously, the CDE has received millions of additional tax dollars since 2013 to fund the state’s “READ Act”… somewhere in the neighborhood of $230 million extra… to help students with “SRD” (Significant Reading Deficiencies). Schools have applied those dollars to the tracking of students, and to special remedial efforts to address the young students, K-3, who struggle most with reading and writing skills.
But we also note that 60% of Colorado’s third grade readers are, reportedly, not able to read at “third grade level.” If indeed a fourth grader must be able to read at “fourth grade level” in order to succeed in fourth grade and beyond — because the instruction is book-based — then we appear to have a serious problem on our hands.
For those caught in the middle of this slow-moving disaster — the students, the teachers, the administrators, the parents, the state bureaucrats — the solution might appear to be “increased training in the execution of a failing system.” For those of us standing outside the school walls, such an approach might sound ludicrous.
Here are some pieces of the puzzle, briefly laid out where we can examine them.
1. Schools in America were, and still are, based upon a semi-military model developed in Prussian schools in the late 1700s.
For most of human history, education has functioned on what I call the “Master and Apprentice” model, where an individual student learns at the knee of an older person, based on a course of study specifically chosen by the student (or by the student’s parents). This model, while by no means ‘perfect’, had both educational and economic advantages, because the Apprentice typically helped the Master with necessary but menial tasks, while receiving ‘one-on-one’ training.
The Prussian model turned education on its head by ‘standardizing’ the instruction process, placing a roomful of same-aged children under the command of an all-powerful teacher — the Captain of the classroom, who was tasked with enforcing obedience, and getting all the student to study the same lessons, whether or not the students had the slightest interest in the subject matter. The US began adopting this model in the mid-1800s.
This model was not especially effective at imparting “learning”, but it trained the Prussian children — and later, the American children — how to be obedient and how to follow orders, with corporal punishment used as one of the primary enforcement tools.
Because it’s impossible, practically speaking, to teach 30 students with different abilities the exact same lesson, schools became dependent upon textbooks and “homework” as necessary to the instruction process. When students failed to learn lessons, the teacher was relieved of responsibility for the failure, because — obviously — the student was not reading carefully, and probably not doing their homework.
The failure emanated from the student, not from the teacher or the system.
This system had certain economic advantages over the Master and Apprentice model, because now one adult could supervise 30 students, which allowed another 29 adults to spend their days working in the factory.
By the 1990s, however, corporal punishment had been outlawed, and state governments were putting in place ‘accountability’ systems, including statewide standardized tests, that made the teacher and the school district — not the student — responsible for student failure. But much of the overall system remained largely unchanged from the system put in place in Prussia in the 1700s. And because ‘success’ on a standardized test now depends heavily on a student’s ability to parse text, reading has become more important than ever to the overall ‘success’ of a school or school district.
2. But has reading become less important to the rest of society? That’s a question that I’m considering in this editorial series, and for a specific reason. I hinted previously that learning typically takes place most effectively when the student deems the information or skill useful. “Useful” can mean, the ability to earn a living as an adult. “Useful” can also mean something as relatively insignificant as the ability to impress a friend, or as seeing the letter “A” marked at the top of your classroom quiz.
But learning comes in two basic forms. When you are purposely learning something because you perceive the information or skill will contribute to your future happiness as a person, the learning is likely to remain in your “long-term memory”. But much of the learning that takes place in a typical classroom is likely to land in the student’s “short-term memory” and disappear within a few weeks after the test is administered.
When a typical American child looks around at the real world, outside of their classroom, they will rarely see adults reading books, or newspapers. They will see people watching TV… and playing games on a computer… and changing the oil in Dad’s truck… and washing dishes… and ordering stuff on Amazon… and talking on the phone… and a million other things. But they probably will not see anyone reading a book for pleasure. (And that includes their teachers at school.)
Most of the human activities a child observes, in 2020, do not involve ‘reading’ at all. Why would they intrinsically feel attracted to that activity in school? Perhaps they are not. If that’s the case, then schools focused heavily on teaching “reading” will be attempting to impart a skill that the child views as relatively insignificant — and perhaps rightly so.
3. The jobs available in America’s future will not necessarily look like the jobs that were available 10 years ago.