Network Schools – Wayne Gerseny to https://www.nytimes.com/interactive/2022/04/03/magazine/thomas-piketty-interview u w B l.html?h I’ll smid=url-share the Is for

Sabrina Imbler’s Popular Science article titled “4 Big Ideas on Fixing American Schools” opened with two promising paragraphs but ended with a thud. Here are the opening paragraphs:

In the American education system, the kids are not all right. Recent tests show that high schoolers haven’t improved in math or reading for the past 20 years, and middle schoolers have gone backward in their comprehension skills. All this comes after years of expensive education programs like No Child Left Behind and Race to the Top, which prioritized standardized test scores, not individual growth, to mark progress and groom students for college.

Expert educators contend that schools need to infuse more flexibility, creativity, and community into their practices in order for a diverse student body to succeed. We asked them to lay out the steps for this radical classroom transformation.

The Four Big Ideas came down to this:

• Play to students’ strengths instead of flagging their deficiencies
• Equip families to provide more effective support at home
• ‘Have students spend more time outdoors, which could mean more urban Greenspace
• Connect traumatized children with caring adult mentors, a role teachers should be expected to play

But the most obvious step American education needs to take is to STOP DOING WHAT IS NOT WORKING! If “years of expensive education programs like No Child Left Behind and Race to the Top, which prioritized standardized test scores, not individual growth” has not yielded the desired results, why keep doing it? Why waste more precious resources on something that works against the flexibility, creativity, and community needed to achieve success with diverse student bodies?

If we want to change the way we educate children, to make it more personalized, to engage parents, to get children outside, and to connect with children as human beings instead of automatons that spew information that is easy to measure but immaterial in our day-to-day life, why on earth do we keep testing them and using the results to determine who is “ahead” and who is “behind”?

Einstein’s now trite and overused phrase comes to mind: “Insanity is doing the same thing over and over and expecting different results”… and continuing a regimen of standardized testing and expecting different results is clearly insane.