Three Unhelpful Ideas About Schools

In this Education Week article, James Nehring (University of Massachusetts/Lowell) says three bad ideas are making the rounds among education writers these days. “For each of these ideas,” says Nehring, “there is a better way that will set us on a more constructive path.”

• Bad idea #1: Educators have a lot to learn from the medical profession. This has intuitive appeal, and the improved training of physicians over the last 100 years is a useful model. “But there’s a problem,” says Nehring. “Education is not like medicine. In medicine, a doctor treats one patient at a time for a physical or psychological malady. Educators, on the other hand, see large numbers of students all at once, for an extended period of time. Doctors work mainly in the realm of the biological and chemical. Educators work mainly in the realm of behavior and attitudes.” A better analogy is public health – a field that has struggled to change many Americans’ diet and exercise habits. In teaching and public health, human judgment plays a major part – and that can’t be dictated by a checklist of research-based practices. 

• Bad idea #2: Learning higher-order skills will guarantee students a better income. It’s true that a lot of low-skill jobs have disappeared from the economy, but better skills won’t lead all young people to the Emerald City. Indeed, there are a lot of angry twenty-somethings who aren’t finding the jobs they were promised, and those who wind up in service jobs find they don’t have unions to fight for a decent wage. Nehring isn’t saying we should stop teaching higher-order thinking, but he believes the rationale should be civic and moral, not economic: “We need skills for crucial civic tasks, like organizing peers to stand up to a powerful employer, or lobbying legislators for laws that serve the public good. We need these skills also for the personal fulfillment that comes from an ability to more deeply engage with the world.”

• Bad idea #3: Education is the interaction of teacher, student, and content. The idea of the “instructional core” is appealing because it suggests that education is the combination of only three key variables, says Nehring, and there’s a causal chain from what teachers do with curriculum to what students learn. If this is true, then it makes sense to link student promotion and teacher evaluation to test scores. “But actually there are thousands – millions – of variables influencing the classroom,” says Nehring, “like the fight the student had with her mother last night, or the verdict just delivered on a widely televised and racially charged murder trial, or the first warm day of spring, or the classmate in the third row who just made a loud noise, or a dragonfly poised on the widow sill… A good teacher carefully reads and takes into account all the things going on in a student’s environment. A good teacher identifies and organizes materials that are responsive as much to mandated content as the more immediate context of a student’s life. A good teacher recognizes that when it comes to teaching and learning, causality is inconveniently complicated.” 

“Think Education Is Like Medicine? Think Again” by James Nehring in Education Week, Aug. 28, 2013 (Vol. 33, #2, p. 32, 28), www.edweek.org 

From the Marshall Memo #500