In Schools We Trust: Creating Communities of Learning in an Era of Testing and Standardization - Softcover

Meier, Deborah

Softcover

ISBN 10: 0807031518 ISBN 13: 9780807031513

Verlag: Beacon Press, 2003

Inhaltsangabe

We are in an era of radical distrust of public education. Increasingly, we turn to standardized tests and standardized curricula-now adopted by all fifty states-as our national surrogates for trust.

Legendary school founder and reformer Deborah Meier believes fiercely that schools have to win our faith by showing they can do their job. But she argues just as fiercely that standardized testing is precisely the wrong way to that end. The tests themselves, she argues, cannot give the results they claim. And in the meantime, they undermine the kind of education we actually want.

In this multilayered exploration of trust and schools, Meier critiques the ideology of testing and puts forward a different vision, forged in the success stories of small public schools she and her colleagues have created in Boston and New York. These nationally acclaimed schools are built, famously, around trusting teachers-and students and parents-to use their own judgment.

Meier traces the enormous educational value of trust; the crucial and complicated trust between parents and teachers; how teachers need to become better judges of each others' work; how race and class complicate trust at all levels; and how we can begin to 'scale up' from the kinds of successes she has created.

Über diesen Titel

Über die Autorin bzw. den Autor

MacArthur Award-winning educator Deborah Meier is author of The Power of Their Ideas and Will Standards Save Public Education?. She lives in Hillsdale, New York, and Boston, Massachusetts

Auszug. © Genehmigter Nachdruck. Alle Rechte vorbehalten.

chapter one

Learning in the Company of Adults

One afternoon I find myself approaching a group of young teenagers hanging
out in our hallways. They aren't hanging out surreptitiously. They are not
always within earshot, but they frequently make it known that they are
nearby, where we adults are also hanging out—fixing our rooms, meeting
together informally, arguing about some important matter or other. They give
me the distinct impression that they want both to have their own world and to
be sure it is connected to ours.

Still I am obliged to remind them (and myself), "School was over an hour ago.
You can't hang out in the school like this; it's not safe." I mean safe for me,
of course. I am worried about liability issues. Some years earlier an amused
but genuinely curious adolescent boy had even put the irony into words for
me: "Do you mean it would be safer for us to be out on the street?" So as
usual I let it go with a warning that neither they nor I take seriously.

Two things move me about the memory of these events, and countless
others like them: the genuine, heartfelt desire of young people to be in the
company of adults who are doing adult work, and the way our institutions and
adult lives are structured more and more to keep us at a distance. As I think
back on more than thirty years in schools, I believe that the contradiction
between these two facts is the central educational dilemma of our times. In
those boys' desire to hang out with and around adults lies the secret, the key
to transforming our schools—and the key to the best avenues to learning.



A television interviewer talking to a group of high school dropouts some years
ago asked them whether they knew any grown-ups who were college
graduates. They all said no. Not true, I thought—since, after all, they had
known a dozen or more teachers over the years, all of whom had attended
college. But I was wrong. As I began to pay closer attention I realized that of
course they had not known any of their teachers. We adults were invisible to
them. In commenting to a friend about how disrespected I felt when some
teenagers poured in the subway car playing loud music, using what appeared
to me inappropriate public language, and dressed to shock, I was reminded
that, alas, my assumption that they were doing this "to annoy" might be
wishful thinking—maybe they didn't really register our presence at all.

It's a striking fact that kids don't keep a lot of company these days with the
kind of adults—in or out of school—whom they might grow up to be (or whom
we might wish them to grow up to be); in fact, they don't keep genuine
company with many adults at all beyond their immediate family. Our children
don't work alongside adults in ways that, for good or bad, were once the
norm for most young people in training to become adults. Even when they
take jobs, it's usually in the company of teenagers—at a Gap or McDonald's.

Is this phenomenon truly new? Yes. And does it have an impact on the trust
necessary for good schooling? Yes again.

A century ago, even less, children made the transition to adulthood early,
steeped in the company of adults. Surely by fifteen or sixteen, when a
majority of youngsters today are still a half dozen years or more away from
entering the adult world, most were already in the thick of adult lives: having
children, earning a living. They spent their time in the midst of multiage
settings from birth on—small communities, farms, workplaces where they
knew grown-ups intimately and knew a lot about how they went about their
work, negotiating their way through life. Being young in the olden days wasn't
idyllic, not by a long shot. It's useful to say this to oneself over and over. The
early immersion in adulthood that characterized life a century ago was for
many a source of enormous pain and hardship. Good people worked hard to
help create a longer and more protected childhood. But for good or ill, until
quite recently, most of the learning of how to be an adult took place formally
or informally in the company of grown-ups—by working alongside them,
picking up the language and customs of grown-upness through both
instruction and immersion, much as they had learned to talk and walk.

Children once learned the arts and crafts of being a grown-up by belonging to
a community whose habits and rituals they naturally absorbed. When I was
born, the majority of young people even in the United States never attended
high school, and what they learned from formal schooling was a very small
part of what counted for getting on in the world. Usually the trades they went
into were ones they were very familiar with and had observed for many years,
and thus taking on adult burdens came about gradually, step by step. The
passage from being a novice to becoming an expert was often very gradual
and had little to do with formal schooling. Children gradually absorbed—
sometimes uncomfortably—the skills, aptitudes, and attitudes that went
along with membership in the "club" of adulthood, in psycholinguist Frank
Smith's apt metaphor. They found the present and future predictable and, at
least in that sense, trustworthy. However conservative a vision such a style of
learning suggested—generation following generation in orderly progression—
it was the way most humans learned for centuries.

In seeking a substitute for the natural learning communities of yesterday, we
invented schools and then systematically began to downgrade anything
learned in nonschool ways. Schools bore the burden of replacing many if not
most of the functions of those former multiage communities—and at
increasingly earlier ages. In a daunting but perhaps not surprising twist of
fate, the schools that replaced those natural learning communities
simultaneously underwent a transformation too—toward greater
depersonalization.

Formal learning in particular deliberately ignored what might have been the
strengths of the traditional routes from childhood to adulthood. Most children
today are disconnected from any community of adults—including, absurdly,
the adults they encounter in schools. Many young people literally finish four
years of high school without knowing or being known by a single adult in the
school building. Dry textbooks and standardized curricula unconnected with
any passions or interests of children, delivered by adults in seven, eight, or
sometimes nine 45-minute time slots, dominate schooling.

We've invented schools that present at best a caricature of what the kids
need in order to grow up to be effective citizens, skillful team members,
tenacious and ingenious thinkers, or truth seekers. They sit, largely
passively, through one after another different subject matter in no special
order of relevance, directed by people they can't imagine becoming, much
less would like to become. The older they get, the less like "real life" their
schooling experience is—and the more disconnected and fractionated. As
my granddaughter Sarah tells me with delight at her new eight-period
schedule (which she knows I disapprove of): "But Grandma, it's more fun;
there's no time to get bored—you're in and out so fast, and you get a chance
to chat with friends between classes." Children are expected to learn to do
hard things in the absence of ever seeing experts at work doing such things—
to become shoemakers when they've never seen shoes or a shoemaker
making them.

We've cut kids...

Details zur Ausgabe

• Verlag: Beacon Press
• Erscheinungsdatum: 2003
• Sprache: Englisch
• ISBN 10: 0807031518
• ISBN 13: 9780807031513
• Einband: Taschenbuch
• Anzahl der Seiten: 208
• Kontakt zum Hersteller: Nicht verfügbar
• Verantwortliche Person: Nicht verfügbar