To our collective detriment, U.S. public education has become so insanely politicized that it’s damn near impossible even to have a reasonable discussion about educating our children, never mind actually do something to improve education. One popular dividing line: reading instruction.

Back in the day, schools used phonics as the primary method for teaching kids to read. But, according to a book I’m reading, “[phonics] was gradually abandoned because of increasingly obvious defects and shortcomings. Nevertheless,” the author continues, “it seems apparent today that in throwing out phonics, the educational theorists threw out the baby with the bath water.”

Familiar, yes? The phonics/anti-phonics debate. The pro-whole language/anti-whole language debate. The desire for some to return to the good old days of reading instruction, which magically — as often happens in distant memories — worked for just about everyone. Or the desire for some to eschew anything from the past and to use only newer methodologies and, as my book points out, “‘reading clinics,’ staffed by ‘reading specialists,’ to attempt to remedy the defects of early instruction.”

The yin and yang of educational theories. The us vs. them mentality. The I win/you lose educational machine. That’s where we are today.

Here We Go ‘Round In Circles

Apparently we were there yesterday, too. The book I referenced above, Learn to Read: A Linguistic Approach, was published in 1961. (The bulk of it was written in the early 1940s, but it wasn’t published — and it’s introduction, which I quoted, wasn’t written — until 1961.) The phonics debate to which it refers was raging in the 1950s, fueled in part by the 1955 book Why Johnny Can’t Read, by Rudolph Flesch. The introduction to Learn to Read says Flesch “voiced in concrete terms a vaguely felt but widely experienced dissatisfaction with current [aka, 1950s] instruction in reading in the elementary schools of our country.” Flesch advocated “a return to materials and methods long since discarded.”

You know, phonics.

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Tags: educational choice, homeschooling, learning, phonics

CNN has the news that Tennessee is going to make gym mandatory five days per week for its public school students. They’re doing it, they say, to address the rampant obesity among even the youngest students.

I have a simpler solution. It’s called RECESS. How about schools reinstate THAT instead of creating yet another bureaucratic, red tape machine that, in this case, doesn’t really do students any more good than letting them play outside for 30 or 40 minutes a day?

And it wouldn’t hurt if schools stopped selling nutritionally horrid lunches, either. In my local elementary school, pizza is available every day. That means a kid who’s on a subsidized lunch plan or whose parents send her to school with lunch money every day can eat pizza five days a week. And nobody cares.
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Even though I’ve paid my bills by creating online training programs, in a previous post, I objected to laws that would require public school students to take at least one online course.

I still object, even though I know that online courses offer students many benefits: flexibility, variety, a potentially diverse “classroom” population, lower cost, and a high dose of learner control.

That said, online courses aren’t a good fit for everyone. Students uncomfortable with computers may have trouble working online. Others may lack the discipline to complete self-paced courses: in the corporate world, at least, online course drop-out rates are very high. Some students may have learning styles best suited for the classroom’s more personal approach.

And of course, some content does not lend itself well to learning while at a distance from one’s peers or instructor or while using a computer. For example, courses that teach interpersonal skills are usually better suited to face-to-face meetings.

That’s why students shouldn’t be compelled to take even one online course if they don’t want to.

A Pinch of This, A Dash of That

The corporate training industry has come full circle in the past few years: first, trumpets blared that damn near all corporate training should be delivered online. Content is king, they said. Think of the cost savings, they said. Then reality struck, and training professionals realized that any one learning modality won’t fit everyone all the time.

So lately, the corporate training buzzword has been “blended learning,” in which courses are delivered through a variety of learning modalities. What determines the blend? The learning objectives, the content, the student population, students’ purpose(s) and goals, and yes, even the cost of the instruction. Good training programs take all of those factors into consideration.

Shouldn’t public k-12 education do the same thing?
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Why is it that the educrats (hat tip for the term to The Education Wonks) must take something and shove it down everyone’s throats? Michigan allows public school students to take online courses for free, enabling them, if they so choose, to learn subjects not offered in their schools. Of course, rather than leave online learning as an option, Michigan lawmakers want to force ALL students to do it.

Once considered the domain of home-schooled students, K-12 online learning is a fast-growing option for public school students in rural, urban, and suburban areas. Michigan lawmakers are likely to pass legislation soon that will require high school students to take one course online before they graduate.

Why can’t lawmakers just let students have some damn choice in the matter? Why must they always force students to do something the lawmakers think is good for them, regardless of what students want to do? What is so very wrong with some students taking online courses and other students NOT?

Hey, lawmakers, leave those kids alone.

One of my high school English teachers liked to remind us students that he had more control over our grades than we did. We spent about 3/4 of one marking period working only on grammar and sentence diagramming, which most of the class learned well enough to get high scores on the quizzes and tests. After we finished our grammar section, I had a very high A average, as did most of my friends.

But I didn’t get an A for the marking period. The teacher designed the grammar section to end with enough time left in the marking period for us to read and be tested on “Death of a Salesman.” The teacher himself called the test “the death test” and bragged that nobody ever got an A on it. The goal of the test was to pull down our grades and reduce the number of A’s given out that marking period. I scored in the low 50s on the test and, as a result, got a B on my report card, in spite of the fact that I’d gotten a high A on everything except that one test. The same thing happened to a bunch of my classmates, too.

Imagine if my teacher had been required to give not grades but a specific evaluation of what we’d learned that marking period. He would have had to admit that I’d mastered the entire grammar curriculum and that I’d done poorly only on the literature test (which tested the the singular skill of regurgitating, word for word, the teacher’s interpretation of the play). Such a system would have completely emasculated this guy’s power play with our grades.
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But I’m not quite sane, either.

At least according to this learning style quiz at CNN.com.

I thought it would be fun to take the quiz to see what learning style(s) it would assign to me. I’m pretty self-conscious about how I learn, so I was mostly curious about the quiz itself.

The first sign that trouble was brewing: the quiz has a total of five questions. You can’t get a very good sense for someone’s learning style(s) from five questions, but I figured I’d give it a shot anyway. Then, when I clicked “submit,” I got this message:

Now, I’m not saying I’m not split between two personalities. What I’m saying, Mr. Invisible Quiz Maker, is that I don’t need to examine my choices again. I know exactly how I answered each question. My answers weren’t wrong; your quiz stinks!

Nice try at saying “No two learners have the same style or personality,” on the one hand and then on the other, telling me that you can’t cram my square peg into one of the few round holes you’ve decided everyone should fit into.

I guess it didn’t occur to Mr. Quiz Maker that someone might learn in more than one way, that not everyone would fit neatly into a single learning style category.

If I’d tried to think of a better way to disprove the point of the quiz, I don’t think I could have.

Once considered the domain of only deeply religious families who didn’t want to send their kids to secular schools, homeschooling has been gaining popularity among not-particularly-religious families. In “Meet My Teachers: Mom and Dad,” Business Week covers the growth of homeschooling specifically within the “creative class.”

According to Richard Florida, author of The Rise of the Creative Class and The Flight of the Creative Class, the creative class consists of educated, affluent people who, um, “create for a living”:

[They]…seek not only fulfilling jobs, but also tolerant and vibrant communities and cities. This new class of workers does not define itself by national boundaries, but is highly mobile, willing to relocate for the best social, cultural, and economic opportunities. The creative class, 38 million strong in the U.S., produces a disproportionate share of wealth, accounting for nearly half of all wages and salaries earned - as much as the manufacturing and service sectors combined.

Sounds like a pretty good life:

Highly educated? Check.
More than adequate income? Check.
Freedom to live where you want? Check.

So what do they have to complain about, these jazzy, improvisational creators? School, apparently. If they don’t like their public schools, the creative class can presumably find a different community with more suitable schools. Or they can pony up and send their kids to private schools — in fact, some of these parents attended elite private schools themselves. But they’re homeschooling their kids instead. Why?
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