Is this still relevant today?

Written in 1988 – Published in the Des Moines Register

Early Puritans were said to have devised a test to see whether a person was a witch.  The accused was placed on a stool and dunked into a pond.  If she was not a witch she would drown. If she was a witch she would not drown and then could be taken out and burned at the stake.  This was an early form of assessment.

Recent articles in The Des Moines Register tell us that the business community feels that something is very wrong with education.  The business leaders are criticizing the ability of some students to communicate verbally or in writing and their ability to carry out written instructions.  The Iowa Business Education Roundtable Task Force wants to change education from a process orientation to a product orientation and to restructure Iowa schools K-12.  They are advising the Department of Education to come up with significant changes in the educational system They feel that their plan will become an “Iowa Initiative for World Class Schools.”

They fee we should decide what to produce and then produce that product.  Their Iowa system should be based on results.  They would reward those schools that perform the best, help those that need remedial help and penalize the ones that cant seem to make the grade.

I feel that this ignores the human factor and forgets the fundamental concept that the school is a community and not a factory. We do not have the prerogative of rejecting the raw materials that come to us that are substandard.  We man not throw out the product that does not meet a certain quality.  We are not able to recall the defective product that “slips through” quality control.  We are not able to control the variables in our students to the same extent that a business is able to demand in its raw material.

Schools have students for about one-sixth of the time from ages 5 through 17 or 18.  During that time we are expected to educate, socialize and produce a worthwhile contributing member of a society that says it holds one set of values but too often sends the message that the exact opposite is what is important.

We are expected to take the child who regularly has no breakfast (or sometimes no dinner or no breakfast), the child who witnessed mother being beaten by father, the twelve year old girl who was passer around to her parents friend, the ones who tried drinking and smoking pot they obtained from their parents, and turn them into a “product” that will somehow magically reach a standard set up for us by some businessmen.

We were told that there was a sense in Iowa that the schools were not working.

I would maintain that, perhaps, the sense should be that society is not working.

The very scary thing about the Iowa Futures Group is that it would use assessment procedures very much like the dunking stool to determine whether a school was doing its job.

It we don’t drown we will be burned at the stake.

Even though they suggest that a variety of tools would be used to assess the schools, in reality they would have to have some form of “standardized” test to compare one product with another.

I am fearful that this tool would become the dunking stool where schools would be tested to see if the job they were doing produced the “right” product.

If not the burning might consist of being held up to ridicule much as sinners were placed in the stockade in that early Puritan community.

This will lead to less sharing about what is working and more competition and will set education back and in the long run will hurt our society and our economic system

Our educational system is not perfect and there is always need for change.

In a democracy change should come from the grass roots and it should reflect the community.

Change should not be rushed into for the sake of itself but should be tested and tried and proven.

Factors such as class size and availability of material and assistance that affect the quality of school life and enable the teacher to do his or her job should be equalized.

Assessment should be driven by the curriculum rather than by some outside group that does not understand that we are not a factory but instead are a community of living human beings, each of whom has a different background, motivation and aspiration.

I would suggest that business people such as the Iowa Futures Group should readjust their “sense” that the schools are not working.

They should realize that perhaps it is society – the society they helped create and structure – that is not working.

They should take a long hard work at that society.

Then they should put their efforts into helping that single-parent family, that battered mother and that sexually abused 12 –year old along with all the myriad of other probles that affect our effectiveness.

Once some of those problems are taken care of there also will be a dramatic improvement in the schools and the “product” that the schools and society together are able to produce.