A few years ago I was sharing a table at a conference with a public school superintendent from the State of Maine. She was telling me about how she and her board where contemplating turning down federal funding because of their objection to the standardized testing required by the No Child Left Behind act.
Curious about this, I asked if they had banned all testing in the school district. She gave me an odd look, then said, “Of course not!”
To which I asked, “So you accept testing by teachers, who often don’t agree on what should be taught, let alone tested on, and who usually have little understanding of the statistical underpinning of test validity, coverage, repeatability and reliability, but you reject testing by organizations who bring all of those traits?”
Red faced, she got up from my table, huffed at me, “what do you know about education” and left for presumably friendlier company.
Her question is valid. The truth is, I have no basis to speak from the perspective of an educator. I did however, have the rare and privileged opportunity to spend two years embedded with a group of high school teachers; an unacculturated outsider who had been given unfettered access to view a school system from within. And while I make no claim to be educated in the art of teaching, it proved an enlightening opportunity to view our system of public education as a complex adaptive system.
The intent of the project to embed an engineer in a school, from my sponsor’s point of view, was to facilitate the formation of community-school programs, with a two part goal:
- To allow community members to have some, albeit minor influence on school curriculum; and
- To promote more interest for students in math, science and engineering careers with the long term goal of helping to feed their talent pool several years down the road.
The benefit from the School’s point of view was to bring more resources into the school, and to create more student engagement with the added visibility of “real world” relevant math and science applications. It didn’t hurt that it turned out to be a great marketing tool for the superintendent in fundraising campaigns.
In truth, I don’t know much about teaching. I took a year of math for elementary school teachers in college, which helped me help my children with homework in grade school. Beyond that, have no teaching background, no coursework in educational theory, child development theory, or pedagogy, and very limited classroom teaching experience. But I do know a little bit about systems theory, and as an outsider, embedded in a school system, I observed a pretty dysfunctional system.
To illustrate this dysfunction, consider the lunchtime table I was at one day as the teachers were bemoaning just how unprepared their students were in their advanced placement courses. After listening to the discussion for a few minutes, I asked, “so I’m just curious, how many algebra one teachers you have in the school?” The answer that everyone agreed on was seven. So then I asked, “and they all give the same midterm and final exams, right?” At this point, you could have heard a pin drop.
After a few moments, one of the teachers piped up and with a bit of surprised stuttering said, “But, but if we did that, we’d miss the teachable moment.”
To which I asked, “So, why would you expect your students to NOT be unprepared for your classes? You have seven teachers, teaching and testing for seven different sets of content in the preceding classes, and your expectations of content form an eighth permutation of expectations of antecedent knowledge.”
I view the process of educating our children within the metaphor of a professional sports team. You need talent to succeed, for sure. But place eleven talented football players on a field with no coordination, and you have a loosing team. To succeed, you need that talent, and you need good coaching, and you need a playbook, and you need peer mentoring and practice, and repetition, and yes, and probably most important, you need a shared goal.
So, what do I know about education?
Virtually nothing about teaching. However, from my experience as an un-acculturated outsider embedded in an educational system, I do know that the system we call public education has a lot of opportunity to improve as a team.