Why Our Current System of Education is Failing and Why Common Core Isn���t the Cure
Our current system of educating young children is based onage ��� and nothing else. Age grading was developed in 1848 andhasn���t been really challenged since. So, for over 160 years, we���ve putfive-year-olds in kindergarten, six-year-olds in first grade, seven-year-oldsin second grade, and so on. (Even one-room schoolhouses divided students by age.) This is all regardless of each student���s strengthsand weaknesses in individual subjects. Being passed from one grade to anotherwas based solely on if the student passed a majority of the subjectssatisfactorily ��� and those ���passing��� grades are highly subjective, especiallyin the lower grades.
There are exceptions; some parents decide to hold theirchildren back so they are older than their classroom peers, some parents pushtheir children forward, perhaps skipping a grade so they are younger than theirclassroom peers. However, on average, each grade of school is based on age andall students, regardless of their abilities, are grouped with others their sameage.
The thinking behind age grading is that most seven-year-oldscan learn what we classify as second-grade material, while a five-year-oldprobably couldn���t comprehend it and an eight-year-old would grasp the conceptsvery quickly and thus become bored. For a majority of humans, this approach hasworked adequately. Not truly successfully, but adequately, for 160 years.
But it has become abundantly clear that this approach needsto be reconsidered. We are at a crossroads in education, needing to keep upwith technology while preserving some form of logic thinking. Educators havedone an adequate job with the technology; students take numerous standardizedtests via computer these days, but have dropped the ball on having studentsthink logically. And then Common Core came along and tossed everything we knewout the window.
Truly, if you believe that the only way to conceive of 5x3is to only think of 3+3+3+3+3, then we definitely have failed, with a big fat ���F���.Logic dictates we can solve the problem with five 3s or three 5s ��� that���slogic. But Common Core teaches students that the correct breakdown of 5x3 is3+3+3+3+3 and that 5+5+5 is wrong.No, it���s not wrong; it���s an additional way of solving the problem and shouldnever, EVER be marked wrong. Marking it as wrong, even when it���s right, justmakes the student distrust both his/her own thinking, but to distrust theeducators as well.
So, Common Core (and its parent statute, the No Child LeftBehind law) is a failure, as most educators and parents would agree.But with no understudy in the wings, we are stuck with it, frustratingstudents, parents, educators, and administrators alike. So where do we go from here?What is the NBT?
First, I believe we need to re-think the age grading. Whilesome schools offer honors courses at the grade-school level, with the lack offunding and cutbacks most districts have to deal with, these honors courses arefew and far between. There is also the mainstreaming of those with mental andemotional disabilities that create chaos when dealing with a classroom oftwenty-five to thirty eight-year-olds.
(Please note that I am in NO WAY saying those withdisabilities should not get an education, to the best of their ability tolearn.)
What is needed is ability grading. Starting atsix-years-old, test the student on his/her abilities. If he/she tests at athird-grade reading level, put the student in a third-grade reading class. Don���tmake the student suffer through two years of reading below what they alreadyknow ��� it just frustrates the student and can make them act out.
I���m stating this because I lived it. In the fourth grade(nine-year-old) I was tested on my reading ability. I was reading at ahigh-school freshman level. There was minor talk about moving me up a grade, asmost of my other scores were above my level as well, but as I was already oneof the youngest students in my grade, it was decided to keep me in with mypeers. (I also was admonished back in the first-grade for writing cursivebecause ���it hadn���t been taught yet.���) I wonder where I���d be today if I���d beenable to truly learn at my level. (It got so bad that I never had to take home atextbook my entire senior year to study and still graduated with a 3.98.)
With ability grading, a six-year-old student may be in athird-grade class for reading, but be in with their own age peers for math.Having them change classrooms based on their ability might take some majorscheduling, but with today���s computers, it shouldn���t be the detriment ingetting our students to learn at their own level in various subjects. Gradeschool teachers would be assigned based on their ability to teach that subject ���just like in high school.
For example, a teacher is certified to teach math for gradesone through six. The typical school day can be divided up into six or sevenperiods; first period, the teacher teaches first-grade level math to anystudent who tests at that level. Second period, second-grade math, again to anystudent who tests at that level. Of course, the hope is to not have aten-year-old in a first-grade math class, but if that���s what is needed, that���swhat should happen.
All this takes into consideration the almost-perfect bellcurve of human intelligence (which most educators and politicians tend toignore ��� thus the ���No Child Left Behind��� act which has to be the most stupidpiece of legislation to come out of the Bush administration; well, behind thePatriot Act, that is.) There are those who will excel, typically your top 10%of intelligence, then there will be those that just will never get it, nomatter how much money you throw at them, those will be the bottom 10%. Theremaining 80% of us fall right in the middle, some of us on the lower end, someof us on the higher end.
Thus, knowing that 10% of human intelligence will just never���get it,��� we need to re-think our goals for our education system. No matter howyou cut it, not everyone will go to college, even if college was free. Forthose, we have factory, manual labor, and some technical jobs, and alot of those with lower intelligence excelled in that type of work. We need toacknowledge this, not ignore it. There is nothing wrong with manual labor orfactory work and we need to stop demeaning these types of jobs.
And for those students on the top end of the scale, we needto challenge them. If that means we have a seven-year-old learning math at asixth-grade level, then so be it. As stated, we need to get rid of the ageisttheory of learning and play up our students��� strengths and give them extratools to shore up their weaknesses. While teachers would still learn how to teachat an ���x��� grade level, we wouldn���t call students by what grade they are in (nomore, ���wow, he���s smart for a second-grader��� or ���she doesn���t seem to be gettingit for a third-grader���). They are grammar students and that is it.
Somewhere around the age of ten or eleven, we would thentest them again to see who might be ready for junior high and who might need moreschooling before moving up (as I realize most school districts have differentbuildings for different grades at this time; an ideal situation would be ofcourse, to have K-12 campuses, but that���s a pie-in-the-sky ideal in today���seconomic climate.) Then a couple of years later, test again to see who is readyfor the high-school classes. A final exam around the age of seventeen todetermine, a) if the student is ready for graduation and b) where they shouldgo from there (junior college, tech/trade school, university, or additionalhigh school courses). Thus, the student is only subjected to three ���standardized���tests throughout their entire public educational career instead of the dozensrequired today.
Lastly, while advancing with peers is a time-honoredtradition, I think we place way too much emphasis on it. I truly believe thatif we challenge our students, give them tools to learn, to expand theirknowledge, to truly learn logic at their appropriate level, we could eliminatesome of the issues students currently face. Some students become bored and actout; some get frustrated because they just don���t understand the material andact out. Playing to their abilities in each subject can eliminate some of theboredom and frustration and the students can channel their energy into thisnew-found empowerment. I know nothing will ever stop the bullying completely,but I believe this approach can decrease the occurrences and possibly theseverity.
I would love for this to become a pilot project somewhere.It would take time and money, neither of which are in abundant supply when itcomes to education. To receive any meaningful results, it would need to be atleast a ten-year project with funding that can���t be cut off before the results(as happens quite frequently these days when there is a major politicalchange).
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/History...
There are exceptions; some parents decide to hold theirchildren back so they are older than their classroom peers, some parents pushtheir children forward, perhaps skipping a grade so they are younger than theirclassroom peers. However, on average, each grade of school is based on age andall students, regardless of their abilities, are grouped with others their sameage.
The thinking behind age grading is that most seven-year-oldscan learn what we classify as second-grade material, while a five-year-oldprobably couldn���t comprehend it and an eight-year-old would grasp the conceptsvery quickly and thus become bored. For a majority of humans, this approach hasworked adequately. Not truly successfully, but adequately, for 160 years.
But it has become abundantly clear that this approach needsto be reconsidered. We are at a crossroads in education, needing to keep upwith technology while preserving some form of logic thinking. Educators havedone an adequate job with the technology; students take numerous standardizedtests via computer these days, but have dropped the ball on having studentsthink logically. And then Common Core came along and tossed everything we knewout the window.
Truly, if you believe that the only way to conceive of 5x3is to only think of 3+3+3+3+3, then we definitely have failed, with a big fat ���F���.Logic dictates we can solve the problem with five 3s or three 5s ��� that���slogic. But Common Core teaches students that the correct breakdown of 5x3 is3+3+3+3+3 and that 5+5+5 is wrong.No, it���s not wrong; it���s an additional way of solving the problem and shouldnever, EVER be marked wrong. Marking it as wrong, even when it���s right, justmakes the student distrust both his/her own thinking, but to distrust theeducators as well.
So, Common Core (and its parent statute, the No Child LeftBehind law) is a failure, as most educators and parents would agree.But with no understudy in the wings, we are stuck with it, frustratingstudents, parents, educators, and administrators alike. So where do we go from here?What is the NBT?
First, I believe we need to re-think the age grading. Whilesome schools offer honors courses at the grade-school level, with the lack offunding and cutbacks most districts have to deal with, these honors courses arefew and far between. There is also the mainstreaming of those with mental andemotional disabilities that create chaos when dealing with a classroom oftwenty-five to thirty eight-year-olds.
(Please note that I am in NO WAY saying those withdisabilities should not get an education, to the best of their ability tolearn.)
What is needed is ability grading. Starting atsix-years-old, test the student on his/her abilities. If he/she tests at athird-grade reading level, put the student in a third-grade reading class. Don���tmake the student suffer through two years of reading below what they alreadyknow ��� it just frustrates the student and can make them act out.
I���m stating this because I lived it. In the fourth grade(nine-year-old) I was tested on my reading ability. I was reading at ahigh-school freshman level. There was minor talk about moving me up a grade, asmost of my other scores were above my level as well, but as I was already oneof the youngest students in my grade, it was decided to keep me in with mypeers. (I also was admonished back in the first-grade for writing cursivebecause ���it hadn���t been taught yet.���) I wonder where I���d be today if I���d beenable to truly learn at my level. (It got so bad that I never had to take home atextbook my entire senior year to study and still graduated with a 3.98.)
With ability grading, a six-year-old student may be in athird-grade class for reading, but be in with their own age peers for math.Having them change classrooms based on their ability might take some majorscheduling, but with today���s computers, it shouldn���t be the detriment ingetting our students to learn at their own level in various subjects. Gradeschool teachers would be assigned based on their ability to teach that subject ���just like in high school.
For example, a teacher is certified to teach math for gradesone through six. The typical school day can be divided up into six or sevenperiods; first period, the teacher teaches first-grade level math to anystudent who tests at that level. Second period, second-grade math, again to anystudent who tests at that level. Of course, the hope is to not have aten-year-old in a first-grade math class, but if that���s what is needed, that���swhat should happen.
All this takes into consideration the almost-perfect bellcurve of human intelligence (which most educators and politicians tend toignore ��� thus the ���No Child Left Behind��� act which has to be the most stupidpiece of legislation to come out of the Bush administration; well, behind thePatriot Act, that is.) There are those who will excel, typically your top 10%of intelligence, then there will be those that just will never get it, nomatter how much money you throw at them, those will be the bottom 10%. Theremaining 80% of us fall right in the middle, some of us on the lower end, someof us on the higher end.
Thus, knowing that 10% of human intelligence will just never���get it,��� we need to re-think our goals for our education system. No matter howyou cut it, not everyone will go to college, even if college was free. Forthose, we have factory, manual labor, and some technical jobs, and alot of those with lower intelligence excelled in that type of work. We need toacknowledge this, not ignore it. There is nothing wrong with manual labor orfactory work and we need to stop demeaning these types of jobs.
And for those students on the top end of the scale, we needto challenge them. If that means we have a seven-year-old learning math at asixth-grade level, then so be it. As stated, we need to get rid of the ageisttheory of learning and play up our students��� strengths and give them extratools to shore up their weaknesses. While teachers would still learn how to teachat an ���x��� grade level, we wouldn���t call students by what grade they are in (nomore, ���wow, he���s smart for a second-grader��� or ���she doesn���t seem to be gettingit for a third-grader���). They are grammar students and that is it.
Somewhere around the age of ten or eleven, we would thentest them again to see who might be ready for junior high and who might need moreschooling before moving up (as I realize most school districts have differentbuildings for different grades at this time; an ideal situation would be ofcourse, to have K-12 campuses, but that���s a pie-in-the-sky ideal in today���seconomic climate.) Then a couple of years later, test again to see who is readyfor the high-school classes. A final exam around the age of seventeen todetermine, a) if the student is ready for graduation and b) where they shouldgo from there (junior college, tech/trade school, university, or additionalhigh school courses). Thus, the student is only subjected to three ���standardized���tests throughout their entire public educational career instead of the dozensrequired today.
Lastly, while advancing with peers is a time-honoredtradition, I think we place way too much emphasis on it. I truly believe thatif we challenge our students, give them tools to learn, to expand theirknowledge, to truly learn logic at their appropriate level, we could eliminatesome of the issues students currently face. Some students become bored and actout; some get frustrated because they just don���t understand the material andact out. Playing to their abilities in each subject can eliminate some of theboredom and frustration and the students can channel their energy into thisnew-found empowerment. I know nothing will ever stop the bullying completely,but I believe this approach can decrease the occurrences and possibly theseverity.
I would love for this to become a pilot project somewhere.It would take time and money, neither of which are in abundant supply when itcomes to education. To receive any meaningful results, it would need to be atleast a ten-year project with funding that can���t be cut off before the results(as happens quite frequently these days when there is a major politicalchange).
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/History...
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