Show Me How It Works

It was a sunny day in the city of Pisa. A crowd of university students, learned professors, and priests had gathered to watch Galileo perform an experiment concerning the Law of Falling Bodies according to the Law of Gravity The crowd stood at the base of the Leaning Tower of Pisa, so that they could learn and bear witness to this event. The year was 1589. According to Galileo’s reasoning that gravity pulls all bodies to the earth with the same acceleration, regardless of their weight. Galileo was experimenting to validate his reasoning and to act on it to or to find it untrue and discard it. Galileo dropped a ten-pound weight and a one-pound weight. Both objects hit the ground at the same time. Galileo now had evidence that proved his theory. However, his evidence disproved the thinking of the learned Aristotle, raised the ire of Aristotle’s followers and Galileo was forced to leave the university.

Galileo paid a heavy price for becoming the founder of modern experimental science. Of course, Galileo became a profoundly successful scientist who showed the world how to back up his discoveries with evidence. He was abused and persecuted for this thinking. The learned persons of his day who were the leaders of European thought were suspicious of anyone who dared speak against the conventional wisdom based on the ancient giants of thought such as Aristotle. Who was Galileo to question Aristotle? Before modern science what the wisemen and the scholars said was true. Proof was not necessary. Wise speculation was the king of thought. Two-hundred seventy-six years later, Dr. Ignaz Philipp Semmelweis incurred the wrath of his colleagues, because he waned them to wash and sanitize their hands after treating each patient before going onto another. Dr. Semmelweis presented evidence that doctors themselves were infecting and killing their patients. Not only did they ignore the evidence, they had Dr. Semmelweis taken to the insane asylum. However, he was finally vindicated by the work of Joseph Lister in 1865.

Those of us who have been trained as professional educators have been taught that the scientific method or the method of intelligence is part of a basic education. We begin teaching our charges to look for the evidence behind the facts that they state. We teach children that we live in an evidenced-based world. We must understand the ways in which we can apply the scientific method to our everyday learning experiences. So, we are mystified when the leaders of school reform in the 21st century America seem to have discarded any practice of supporting policies that have been rigorously tested in the classroom by competent veteran teachers. Instead, school practices advocated by our modern versions of Aristotle who think up wonderful ideas which they are too busy to test out properly. They and their cadre of followers are currently leading some of the most misguided school reform practices known to man. They advocate dictums which are false. They make up statements and promulgate them as facts about schools because they know that the public schools do not have either the clout or the money to refute them. Besides, they are assisted in their perfidy by leaders in the public school who have been commandeered to support these misguided enemies of public education. They work under the guise of being helpful to children.

At first, we were excited by the concept of charter schools. It seemed that the federal government under the auspices of No Child Left Behind proposed these schools as a remedy for failing public schools. These schools were supposed to allow teachers to try out innovative ideas that would help struggling students. Albert Shanker, president of the American Federation of Teachers, who envisioned charters run by teachers where teachers sought out the lowest-performing students, the dropouts and the disengaged, and then figured out and developed strategies for helping them. These teachers wanted to do educational research in their classrooms. Instead of becoming small entities run by veteran teachers who had learned the best and most effective practices by doing, the concept of charter schools was taken over by the corporate reformers. The charter school movement has become the enemy of public education for several reasons.

True school reform must be based on honest language that is used to clarify a position, not on grandiose obfuscation about magic silver bullets. One cannot make things better by weaving myths into fact and insisting that they are true with no evidence to back them up. In a democracy, decisions must be made with the participation and the involvement of those who are affected by the decisions. We cannot make our schools better by ignoring modern thought leaders in both science and democracy. This is the twenty-first century. Wise decisions must be based on evidence.

In our city, we have several charter schools. I decided to work in one. The first thing I found out was the school paid teachers $10,000 less per annum than the public schools. There was no union or tenure. Any teacher could be fired on the spot. Each teacher was assigned numerous extra duties to be performed without any extra pay. There were several vacancies on the staff. There was no reading teacher, no music teacher, no eighth-grade math teacher. The second-grade teacher sought and secured a better job. There was no replacement, so one of the teaching aides was assigned to teach second grade. Mrs. Ernest was very pleased to be elevated to the rank of teacher. She had served as a teacher’s aide for many years and felt that she knew how to teach. Though she had no formal training beyond high school, she felt qualified because of her experience. She worked hard and earnestly. She came early and worked late. She brought in tons of work. She seemed happy even though she had no concept of what the second-grade students should be learning. But she managed and completed the year with the highest praise from the school leadership. Similar visits to other nearby charters taught me that staffing vacancies haunted all of them. It was frightening to me to find that educational institutions purporting reform and the practice excellence of classroom instruction often manned their classrooms with teacher who were not even certified.

If our nation is serious about school reform, we would follow the suggestions of Diane Ravitch in Reign of Error. There is strong undeniable evidence for each of these solutions.

Solution 1
Provide good parental care for every pregnant woman.

Solution 2
Make high-quality early childhood education available to all children.

Solution 3
Every school should have a full, balanced, and rich curriculum, including the arts, science, history, literature, civics, geography, foreign languages, mathematics, and physical education.

Solution 4
Reduce class sizes to improve student achievement and behavior.

Solution 5
Ban for-profit charters and charter chains and ensure that charter schools collaborate with public schools to support better education for all children.

Solution 6
Provide the medical and wraparound social services that poor children need to keep up with their advantaged peers.

Solution 7
Eliminate high stakes standardized testing and rely instead on assessment that allow students to demonstrate what they know and can do.

Solution 8
Insist that teachers, principals, and superintendents be professional educators.

Solution 9
Public schools should be controlled by elected school boards or by boards in large cities appointed for set term by more than one elected official.

Solution 10
Devise actionable strategies and specific goals to reduce racial segregation and poverty.

These solutions are well-known and have been rigorously proven. Classroom teachers can attest to their effectiveness. It is shameful that corporate school reformers have hijacked the movement by advocating faux reforms such as charter schools, merit pay for teachers, sending young, poorly trained teachers into classrooms, etcetera, getting their information from superintendents rather than from classroom teachers, reusing unproven measures over and over again after they have failed to work. Through these practices, the State Departments of Education and Federal programs have unwittingly become the enemies of public education. Hard evidence must be compiled, disseminated, and promulgated to help corporate educational reformers find their way back into the fold. At least the evidence that we have could persuade them to befriend public education by working within the parameters of what we know makes schools more effective. Maybe, they can apply the principles of the superior education that they have received to their work for school reform. It would be a good thing for all of us to support these solutions that are known to work.