Hat tip to you, Mr. Churchill

"No matter how beautiful the strategy, one must occasionally look at the results." -Winston Churchill

So I have begun to read "The Global Achievement Gap" by Tony Wagner.  Some of my same questions and frustrations are beginning to come back to the front of my mind.  First, why is it that we are willing to have a political class stand in the way of what everyone essentially agrees are what we need to teach students to be successful in the world of the future?  What I mean is that colleges and businesses alike agree that we need to be teaching students to be thinkers, to be problem-solvers, to be able to work collaboratively, and to be able to be flexible.  However, the political class essentially pushes all of those things OUT of the system by implementing huge amounts of standardized testing that results in bad teaching that results in the exact OPPOSITE of what we claim we want.

How do we turn a ship like this around?  And it gets even more complicated.  For example, all 50 states require students to complete courses in Advanced Math (Algebra, Geometry, Calculus, etc.) in order to graduate high school.  They do this because 95%+ of colleges require this for admission.  But if you actually look at the math that most people do in their adult lives it involves computation, statistics, and probability.  But statistics and probability aren't even really taught in most high schools and are very rarely required in college majors.  Colleges say that students are unprepared for math in college but then require courses that don't ask students to learn the type of mathematical thinking THEY want!  How messed up is that?!?!  And there is no research to link success in Algebra to success in college or life - all the statistics show are correlations, not causations.  But most students and/or people wouldn't know the difference because that is statistics - and they never had to learn it!  Of course, if some of the esteemed members of the House and Senate had taken statistics, they would probably know that having a goal of 100% of students "passing" is statistically unreasonable as well.

It just seems to me that so many people agree about what it is we want our students to know and be able to do, but we continue to have a system that is testing, and therefore mandating, the complete opposite.  These are some of those instances where it is mind-boggling to me that so many people refuse to look at results - they only want to talk about how they THINK their strategy is going to do something to make a difference (see the Churchill quote above).  Whether it does or not is meaningless.  If, in fact, it does the exact opposite of the intent, who cares?

I'm blessed to be working in a small school system where we can actually try to do something to course correct this problem, but we are still saddled with the ridiculous expectations by the state and NCLB.  It isn't that teacher accountability isn't important.  It is that we are holding teachers and students accountable to the wrong standards.  It is such a huge problem, I don't know how you could ever reasonably expect to make a dent in it.  I'll leave that to others for now, while I keep trying to help my school figure it out on our micro-level.  Until we can get schools out of the hands of people who are only looking for headlines and are trapped in a revolving door of elections, I don't see how we can really expect to move forward from this.  It still amazes me that we have a bunch of people who spend most of their lives OUT of the classroom (if they were ever in it to begin with) making the decisions about what should be going on INSIDE the classroom.  It becomes clearer and clearer that most politicians see teaching as a job and not a profession.

I'm not sure if all this makes sense.  My brain has so much swimming around in it, I don't know which way is up right now.  I'm mostly venting and trying to get it all out on paper so that I can try to figure out what I really think.