TIME FOR NO TEACHER LEFT BEHIND:

'Why Can't a Girl Have a Penis?': and other major issues in educational research. (Charlotte Allen, 05/18/2009, Weekly Standard)

There he was, Bill Ayers himself, sitting in a Marriott conference room waiting to partake in a session of the annual meeting of the American Educational Research Association (AERA). The former Weatherman, "unapologetic" (his own word) fugitive from justice, and hot potato of the far left whose acquaintance with Barack Obama in Chicago during the 1990s and unrepentant boasting about Weatherman bombings at the Pentagon and U.S. Capitol in the 1970s, prompted the Republican vice presidential candidate Sarah Palin to accuse Obama of "palling around with terrorists"--and the University of Nebraska to cancel a planned speech by Ayers last October. [...]

During my four days at the AERA meeting, I vainly searched for a single session whose panelists expressed some dissent from the baseline principle of progressive education: that teachers shouldn't directly impart information to their students but instead function as "guides," gently coaching them to "construct" their own knowledge about the subject at hand out of what they already know or don't know.

"Everyone here is a constructivist," Gabriel Reich, a genial education professor at Virginia Commonwealth University, told me at a reception sponsored by the John Dewey Society. (Dewey, a pragmatist philosopher who died in 1952 and taught for years at Columbia Teachers College, is regarded, alongside the Swiss cognitive psychologist Jean Piaget, as one of the fathers of progressive education.) Reich was trying to explain to me why it was presumptuous for professional mathematicians (and many parents) to be up in arms about the currently fashionable constructivist idea that instead of explaining to youngsters, say, how to do long division, teachers should let them count, subtract, make an educated guess, or otherwise figure out their own ways to solve division problems. College math professors may complain that young people taught the constructivist way arrive in their classrooms unable to perform the basic operations necessary to move on to calculus, but so what? "Why should we privilege professional mathematicians?" Reich asked. Long division, multiplication--"those are just algorithms, and a calculator can do them faster than we can. Most of the people here at this meeting don't think of themselves as good at math, and they don't think math is creative. [The constructivist approach] is a way to make math creative for many people who never thought of it that way."

There are no wrong answers in constructivist theory, so Reich, pursuing his mathematical theme, had a tough sell the next day when he presented a paper to his fellow educators arguing that the principles of constructivism should be modified a bit in teaching arithmetic. "I know some constructivists might take issue with what I'm saying," was his delicate way of telling his audience that when a student says two and two equals five, there might be a problem, if only with the child's non-constructivist parents who might have "right-answer" concerns. Reich was suggesting that the youngster's incorrect (or "incorrect") answer be "vetted by the class" to see if it "works." That way, he explained, "the students are learning to act as members of a mathematical community--they are becoming mathematicians."

It might strike an outsider to the world of ed schools as absurd to spend multiple minutes of precious math-class time having other students "vet" answers to problems that a teacher could explain quickly using simple objects. But a sense of disconnect between the pedagogic theory taught to ed-school students (nowadays called "preservice teachers") and their lived classroom experience after graduation pervaded the AERA sessions.

This was most evident at a session on "restorative justice," a trendy new technique for "classroom management" and dealing with teachers' biggest headache: disruptive and disobedient kids. Brenda Elizabeth Morrison, an education professor at Simon Fraser University, demonstrated "circle time," a restorative-justice alternative to expelling, suspending, or otherwise disciplining students who indulge in antisocial behavior. The aim was to create what Morrison called "communities of relationships instead of communities of rules."

In order to make us feel what circle time feels like (education theorists believe that future teachers should personally experience everything they teach their students), Morrison arranged the 15 of us in the room (four panelists plus an audience of 11) in a circle and had us pass around a small boulder on which was painted the all-caps word "HOPE." The mini-boulder was our "talking piece"--an "indigenous way of sharing stories and ideas," Morrison explained. Via the talking piece students are supposed to devise their own sanctions for "mistakes," as the restorative-justice people call actions like text-messaging in class, throwing objects, threatening the teacher, stealing, and other acts of malfeasance. Call me cynical, but I immediately thought of another good use for the talking piece besides restorative justice: dragging out circle time until it was too late for that history quiz I forgot to study for.

In a session titled "Cross-Cultural Conversations," Margaret Zidon and Jill Shafer of the University of North Dakota presented a research paper about exposing "Euro-American" students in a required adolescent-development class to "cultural diversity." Since nearly 100 percent of the population of North Dakota is of Scandinavian origin, the pair had a tough time finding culturally diverse people on campus to whom their students could be exposed. They eventually came up with a mostly Muslim group of foreign students studying English as a second language.

Like much research under ed-school auspices, Zidon's and Shafer's paper consisted mostly of a narrative description of their diversity experiment larded with citations to other scholarly papers. (The No Child Left Behind Act tried to set more rigorous standards for "scientifically based" educational research by requiring the retesting of observational data, but in 2008 AERA issued its own looser definition of "scientifically based" that gives broader license to anecdotal studies.)

Of course they oppose rigorous standards--they can't meet them.

Posted by Orrin Judd at May 12, 2009 6:54 PM