One of my kids’ favorite Dr. Suess books was If I Ran the Zoo. It’s the story of a boy, Gerald McGrew, who has lots of ideas about improving on the ordinary boring group of animals in the local zoo. Things would be different if he were in charge! As a professional educator and somewhat competent grown-up, I often think, “If I ran the zoo…!” The reality is that I’m mostly glad to not be in charge. Education and life are difficult and I try not to blame people for not getting it right. Given that, I’ve been thinking about a couple of things…
Just in the last couple of months, I’ve encountered two important conversations about student learning in primary and middle schools that have concluded that we need to get back to basics, including relationship-building. As an educator interested in closing gaps in access and outcomes, I welcome these movements to improve the teaching and learning in classrooms for the benefit of all students. What I found very interesting is that experts today are describing classroom practice that is uncannily similar to what my children experienced from the mid-1980’s to about 2000. They went to a neighborhood public school where they were in multi-aged classrooms co-taught by enthusiastic, engaged teachers and paraprofessionals with, for the most part, no textbooks. Phonics - flashcards, “sounding out,” word recognition, and spelling - was a daily part of school and homework. But what we called “whole learning” was the ethic in the classroom. Kids learned about science by doing science, reading about research, building things, testing things using math skills and critical thinking. They worked individually, in small groups, and as a whole class. They had their struggles, but school was interesting and they learned! My oldest daughter was diagnosed with dyslexia in first grade and got excellent “special education” services through which she learned strategies to read and spell and, most importantly, to believe in her own capacity to learn.
Where did we lose our way? It’s easy to look back and see the ways in which things that seemed to make sense at the time were just wrong. For instance, at some point in the 1990’s, to address the reading deficits of many children, reading experts decided there should be less emphasis on phonics and grammar and that the most important thing was for kids to love to read and write; we shouldn’t limit them by focusing on sentence structure, the sounds of letters, and how words are formed. We should let them write freely and help them to use context clues to figure out words in reading. Listen to the podcast, Sold a Story (https://features.apmreports.org/sold-a-story/). (Here’s a rebuttal of sorts from the Reading Recovery people: https://readingrecovery.org/fact-check-three-things-hanford-got-wrong-about-dr-marie-clay/#:~:text=Marie%20Clay%20defined%20reading%20as,that%20meaning%20is%20the%20goal.)
I’ll leave you to sort through the controversy, but the fact is that, according to a National Assessment of Educational Progress (NAEP), in 2022, about two-thirds of 4th and 8th grade students in the US were not reading proficiently (https://www.nationsreportcard.gov/reading/nation/achievement/?grade=4). (Levels of proficiency were even lower for Native American, Hispanic, and Black students.) Back to my reflections about my kids’ classrooms, learning phonics and language mechanics AND learning to love reading and writing – and learning – can all co-exist!
Outside of specifically reading and writing, when I talk with teachers, including those who used to teach my kids, the No Child Left Behind legislation and its punitive standardized-test-based assessments were the major culprits in the ending of many effective, community-building, and engaging strategies for teaching and learning. Now the emphasis was on teaching so that individual students could get acceptable scores on standardized exams given in certain grades and the future of schools and teachers depended on getting every child to a specific standard. As a result, much of the fun went out of teaching and the pressures on schools and kids increased, exacerbated by the decrease in or total elimination of the kinds of activities that gave kids a break and exercised their creative, physical, and playful selves, like art, music, gym, and, in some cases, recess. (In addition to being fun, these “breaks” from academic work give kids, especially those who struggle, a chance to recover bandwidth, freeing up cognitive capacity for the next lessons.)
In Making Schools Work: Bringing the Science of Learning to Joyful Classroom Practice, the authors (https://www.tcpress.com/making-schools-work-9780807767382)
describe and give examples of teaching that cooperates with how human brains learn. In a webinar by several of the authors, the discussion was of practices and a classroom environment that was just like the ones my kids had 20-30 years ago.
Many of you are much more informed than I am about this research and the challenges of recovering learning viability in our preK-12 schools. Where I have experienced the results of what I have observed as a breakdown in education (however well-meaning as in the case of “leaving no child behind”) has been in the college classroom where so many students, especially those from marginalized groups and those who grew up in poverty, arrive with inadequate basic skills to learn and thrive in college-level work. What I have always believed – and what these recent conversations have affirmed – is that the underpreparedness of these students is often a result of choices we have made as a society related to acceptable levels of inequality in access to educational opportunity and schools that fail children and youth, not the individual deficits of students.
Even if universal educational reforms transformed every elementary school classroom immediately, we will still have many more years of students who have come through the current system arriving at college underprepared. Our approaches to teaching and learning should acknowledge our collective responsibility and we should recommit every day to making good on the promise of “education for all” by providing the supports to try to mitigate the negative consequences of ineffective school practices. It’s still true that no single one of us is in charge of the whole thing – thankfully, we don’t “run the zoo” – but we all have our spheres of influence, inside and outside the classroom, in which we can contribute to affirming practices that support student success.