Place equity at forefront in education debate

This was written by my friend and colleague J-C Couture who is an executive staff officer with the Alberta Teachers' Association. While I wish he did blog and tweet, he does not. I'll let you know if I ever convince him otherwise. This post was originally found here.

by J-C Couture

In recent weeks, there has been much hyperventilating concerning government efforts to fundamentally redesign Alberta's K-12 curriculum based on the five year-old promises of Inspiring Education.

A small but vocal segment of this province has been gathering the tinder for what could become a season of wildfires. Calls for "back to the basics" and a return to more testing are being countered by those who question Alberta's overloaded curriculum while calling for more local flexibility for schools. Adding potential fuel for a firestorm is the exit of Alison Redford as premier, leaving Education Minister Jeff Johnson with an orphaned mandate and an image in some people's eyes as advancing an ambiguous agenda of "21stcentury learning" hatched by an inner circle of advisers.

Whether it is the competitive energy expended over international rankings, the current hand-wringing over memorizing multiplication tables or bemoaning the decline of phonics instruction - Albertans' deeply rooted anxieties over what counts as learning (remember the existential threat from the Japanese in the 1980s?) perpetuate our collective inability to address the systemic barriers to student learning.

According to Joel Westheimer, one of Canada's pre-eminent educational researchers, these interminable curriculum debates obscure larger social problems that stand in the way of a great education. Rather than polarizing debates over content versus competencies or traditional versus progressive education, the greatest impact on student learning is support for students in the early years of development and provision for optimal conditions of learning throughout schooling. Renowned scholar David Berliner and his team take Westheimer's point further. In their recent book, 50 Myths and Lies That Threaten America's Public Schools, Berliner concludes the impact of the quality of teaching on student learning contributes 10 per cent of the variation in outcomes. Student background, community characteristics and other variables shape 60 per cent. Further, his team found that no credible researcher disputes the claim that teacher and school programming combined determines more than 30 per cent of student learning outcomes.

This is all not to say teaching, curriculum and what goes on in schools do not make a difference. But Albertans cannot lose sight of the fact with family and community characteristics determining more than 50 per cent of the chances for students to succeed in school, equity ought to be our strategic priority. Unfortunately, the current curriculum flare-ups distract us from the reality that among peer countries of the Organization for Economic Co-operation and Development, Alberta along with the rest of Canada ranks 17th out of 20 in terms of income

inequality, with one in seven children living in poverty in the province.

In a two-year national study involving more than 600 principals from across Canada that we undertook with the Canadian Association of Principals, school leaders report that rather than being able to focus on instructional leadership and supporting their teachers, they are increasingly struggling to mitigate the negative impacts of growing income inequality, the brittleness of families and increasing psychosocial problems of children and youth.

B.C., Saskatchewan, Nova Scotia and other far less economically advantaged provinces than Alberta have made huge strides in their education systems by focusing on the systemic barriers to learning. Quebec's comprehensive daycare system is yet one more example of how addressing the readiness to learn can lead to huge gains in learning. While we are materially some of the richest people of the planet, Alberta remains at the bottom of the 25 economically advanced jurisdictions with respect to children's readiness to learn by age six.

Alberta teachers are mindful that literacy and numeracy will always be part of the eternal golden braid of learning. In a recent visit as part of the three-year-old educational partnership, Krista Kiuru, Finland's minister of education and science, remarked that as with her country, Alberta remains among the select few "education superpowers." With our Finnish colleagues and other international partners, Alberta teachers understand that the goal of creating a great school for all students will not be achieved through a preoccupation with finetuning government-mandated curriculum documents, obsessively testing students on the so-called basics or aggressively chasing competitive rankings.

Our schools are constantly renewing and recreating themselves. The 19,000 new students expected to enter next year and the 144 babies born every day in this province deserve more than the current curriculum brush fires - they deserve our sustained commitment to equity. This will ensure a great school for all students and our province's vibrant future.

Should schools just get back to basics?

I've heard a lot of people complain about school. I've worked with unhappy parents and angry students who have shared with me how they have been wounded by school. I've listened to politicians and policy-makers describe why schools need to improve. In fact, I spend a good chunk of my time on my blog writing about how school should look a little less like school.

I even participated in Alberta Education's Inspring Action that engages Albertans in a dialogue about transforming our education system, but I have never, and I mean never, heard anyone ever suggest that what school needs is more lectures, more direct instruction, more worksheets, more textbook drills and more rote learning.

When I hear someone say that we need to get back to basics, my immediate response is "when did we leave?" In his book The Schools Our Children Deserve, Alfie Kohn writes:

Proponents of traditional education often complain that the model they favor is on the wane. They're apt to describe themselves as a brave minority under siege, fighting an uphill battle for old-fashioned methods that have been driven out of the schools by an educational establishment united in its desire for radical change. 

Such claims are understandable as a political strategy; it's always rhetorically advantageous to position yourself as outside the establishment and to describe whatever you oppose as "fashionable." To those of us who spend time in real schools, though, claims about the dominance of progressive teaching represent an inversion of the truth so audacious as to be downright comical. As we slip into a new century, traditional education is alive and well - as I see it - damaging a whole new generation of students. If this isn't always obvious, it may be because we rarely think about how many aspects of education could be different but aren't. What we take for granted as being necessary features of the school experiences are actually reflections of one kind of schooling - the traditional kind. 

Consider: Just as we did, our kids spend most of their time in school with children their own age. Most of high school instruction is still divided into 45-50 minute periods. Students still have very little to say about what they will do and how they will learn. Good behaviour or meritorious academic performance, as determined unilaterally by adults, is still rewarded; deviations are still punished. Grades are still handed out; awards assemblies are still held. Students are still "tracked," particularly in the older grades, so that some take honors and advanced placement courses while others get "basic" this and "remedial" that. Kids may be permitted to learn in groups periodically, but at the end of the day eyes must still be kept on one's own paper. Even from a purely physical standpoint, schools today look much as they did decades ago.

While it's true that traditional education can be found in rich and poor communities, the truth is that poor children are often subjected to poor teaching more often than their affluent peers.

In his article The Pedagogy of Poverty Versus Good Teaching, Martin Haberman writes about a typical form of teaching that has become accepted as basic. Children living in poverty are often provided a wealth of ritualistic routines that have teachers lecture, test and punish non-compliance while the students play a passive, seated role of regurgitating factual information. In this environment, Haberman explains, students can 'succeed' without ever becoming engaged or thoughtful.

Like Haberman, author Jonathan Kozol adds: "The children of the suburbs learn to think and to interrogate reality," while inner-city kids "are trained for non-reflective acquiescence." Paulo Freire's book The Pedagogy of the Oppressed further outlines the oppressive nature of an education that is simply done to us by someone else.

Debra Stipek, dean of School Education at Stanford University puts it this way: "Drill-and-skill is not how middle class children got their edge, so why use a strategy to help poor kids catch up that didn't help middle class kids in the first place?"

In his article Poor Teaching for Poor Children... in the name of Reform, Alfie Kohn outlines a stinging indictment of the sit-and-get, spew-and-forget characteristics of a traditional education. Kohn writes:

The pedagogy of poverty is not what’s best for the poor. There’s plenty of precedent. A three-year study (published by the U.S. Department of Education) of 140 elementary classrooms with high concentrations of poor children found that students whose teachers emphasized “meaning and understanding” were far more successful than those who received basic-skills instruction. The researchers concluded by decisively rejecting “schooling for the children of poverty . . . [that] emphasizes basic skills, sequential curricula, and tight control of instruction by the teacher.

Learning is not like instant mashed potatoes; kids have not been through an industrial process of cooking, mashing and dehydrating to yield packaged convenience learning that can be reconstituted in the classroom in seconds by simply adding direct instruction and testing.

To suggest that school for any student, regardless of their socio-economic status, needs to be less actively child-centered and more passive not only ignores 60 years of research, but it also borders somewhere between ridiculous and asinine.

Let them eat grit: 4 reasons why grit is garbage

It is tempting to see education as the great equalizer that will allow children to overcome differences in background, culture and privilege. It would be convenient if poverty was not an explanation for poor academic achievement.

We all want children to be resilient and persistent in the face of challenges. However, as a teacher who already teaches children to develop a growth-mindset and resiliency, I am uninspired by pundits claims we just need more grit from students.

We know that affluent children who have opportunities and support to learn tend to out-score their less privileged peers. While there are outliers and exceptions, this is not up for debate.

Education systems around the world are being challenged to provide a more equitable system that allows all children, regardless of their background, culture or privilege, to be educated at a very high level.

When pundits call for more grit and resiliency, they aren't talking about all children. No one is demanding that high-scoring students show more grit. When people call for more grit they are talking about the low scorers -- and we know the low scorers tend to be children who are English language learners, special needs, living in poverty, suffering from mental health problems or are for complex reasons generally difficult to educate.

When we say that students need more grit and resiliency, we are really saying to these disadvantaged children that they just need to try harder. This is asinine for a couple reasons:

Firstly, children in poverty are often the ones facing the most challenges and are already exhibiting impressive amounts of resiliency. I teach in a children's inpatient psychiatric assessment unit, so I work with these kids daily. It's easier for children to "pull up their socks" if they own socks. These children don't need grit -- they need their basic needs met.

Secondly, too often the argument for more grit in children is an abdication of the system's responsibility to make things more equitable. I'm all for growth-mindset and resiliency, I teach it everyday, but they are not systemic solutions to inequality and inequity. Systems thinking tells us that improving education has less to do with characteristics of individual teachers and students and more to do with priorities of schools and school systems.

Thirdly, children who are a challenge to educate, whether they be English language learners, special needs, mentally ill, easily frustrated or chronically irritable, don't need to be reminded of our expectations or told to try harder. If we resign ourselves to thinking children just need more grit, we might be tempted to frame this as a motivation problem that can be solved with rewards and punishments. We need to move away from the mindset that says children will be successful if they want to and move towards the mindset that says children will be successful when they can. 

Lastly, for every time we encourage kids to not throw in the towel or to get back on the horse when they fall off, we need to reflect on the environments children are living and learning in and the tasks they are required to do. Sometimes the child's environment is abusive and neglectful, and sometimes the tasks required of them are developmentally inappropriate or simply unengaging and irrelevant -- either way, more grit might teach kids how to play a game stacked against their favour without teaching them how to change the game.

I've also found that the people who call for more grit from students tend to also be the people who claim we need to go back to basics -- to which I ask, "when did we leave?" Alfie Kohn writes:

The notion that our schools have strayed from the old-fashioned teaching that used to be successful is dead wrong on two counts. First, old-fashioned methods weren’t all that successful in the past either. It may not be easy for us to admit, but those methods caused countless people to give up on school and think of themselves as stupid. Even people who used to be successful students often don’t show much depth of understanding, much capacity for critical reflection, or a lifelong love of learning.

People who call for more grit and a back to basics approach tend to suffer from what Jamie Vollmer describes as Nostesia which "is a hallucinogenic mixture of 50% nostalgia and 50% amnesia that distorts rational thinking."

It's easy to call for more grit.

It's easy to cry that we need to go back to basics.

It's easy to blame the kids and the schools.

It's easy because it means we don't have to reflect inward - rather we just have to look outward. Challenging one's own practices and system priorities can be tough but nothing will ever change and schools will never improve as long as we place all the responsibility for change and improvement on students and schools.