Education stimulus needs to stimulate students

From the BCCT.

Education stimulus needs to stimulate students

The stimulus package provides $5 billion to modernize our educational infrastructure. Schools, especially in urban areas, are in dire need of modernization (wouldn’t hurt to start with clean and safe bathrooms). But until we confront the educational system’s failure to keep kids from dropping out before graduation, the billions in expenditures will only be putting a pretty and expensive face on a half-empty future for both the kids and society as a whole.

Rather than aggressively working to reverse the dropout problem, some cities already have raised the white flag. Philadelphia School District Superintendent Arlene Ackerman’s decision — “Imagine 2014” — to turn over 35 poor-performing schools to outside organizations is a clear signal that Ackerman and the school district have no idea how to turn around these schools. Shuttling off the schools and their at-risk students outside of the system without first revamping how we approach teaching those so seemingly resistant to learning is just a relocation of the same problem.

Keeping kids engaged and in school is a cost-cutting measure that positively impacts a child’s emotional and physical health as well as his or her effect on the world at large. The savings to institutional and governmental support systems, based on those who will stay in the system rather than drop out, is palpable in real dollars.

That’s real stimulus.

The good news is that accomplishing this is no great mystery. The mystery is how a system filled with smart people has seemed to miss the obvious for so many years. You engage students’ interest in learning by learning what interests them. From that, we build curriculums that both interests and teaches. Better to start with what they understand than what they don’t; with what drives them, not what pushes them away; with what changes them for the better, not what inhibits their desire to learn.

Our present educational process makes an effort to teach the same thing in the same way to every student. But how in the world can we expect all children, as diverse as they are, to learn the same way or at the same speed?

Most important in any teaching proposition is establishing the proper place to start. Just below failure there is a place of knowledge, a place of comfort and, therefore, a viable learning tool. Of course, what is comfortable for the student may be an uncomfortable place for a system now encumbered with a teaching-to-the-test mentality based on standard academics.

Today, we may need to tap into music, sports, video games, even the street to reach some students. It’s not about embracing incompetence or lowering standards, but having students recognize their own strengths, no matter what they are, and using them as a jumping off point.

Accountability, such as what was pounded into the system through No Child Left Behind, should not only come in test scores, but in what should be the goal of any educational system: How well it works as the student transitions out of the theoretical trappings of memorized test answers and into the real world.

It’s the old parable of either feeding a villager fish for one day or teaching the villager to fish so he can eat forever. When we tap into what drives a student, we learn how the student can drive himself or herself. Is there any teacher who wouldn’t want to trade in his or her time teaching to the test for teaching to a class full of students who want to learn?

Of course there are systemic reforms that need to take place, and last month President Obama said he asked Education Secretary Arne Duncan “to make sure that we’re rewarding innovation.” Duncan said money in the stimulus package would be for “pushing a “significant reform agenda.”

Money that benefits both teachers and students.

Stimulating.