So the Portland School District has concocted a fancy new "community" partnership --Connected by 25-- to combat the city's high school dropout problem, funded to the tune of $646,000 by (of course) the Gates Foundation.
Save your money, Bill Gates. The solution to the apparent dropout epidemic is really pretty simple: Make high school more interesting for more students. That what Cleveland High dropout Courtney Palmer says works at her new school, Open Meadow:
“ 'The teachers here make it more interesting; it makes you want to learn
about it,' she says. 'In other classrooms they say read this text and
it’s so boring, kids are looking at the ceiling, wondering what it has
to do with you.' ”
Another word for "interesting", or not boring, is relevant. The first step to keeping kids in school may be to throw out the textbooks, which are boring, as well as expensive and filled with irrelevance, and then to replace them with real books that may actually engage students like Palmer. I wrote about the possibility of ridding the district of textbooks in greater detail last July.
There are two obstacles to throwing out the textbooks and making learning relevant to the lives of the students in our classrooms --namely, Vicki Phillips and Bill Gates. Phillips wants a standardized curriculum which is much easier to implement with textbooks. And she wants a more "rigorous" curriculum. So does Vicki's new boss, Bill Gates.
Many of our policy makers, like Oregon Governor Ted Kulongoski, have bought into the "academic rigor as school reform" argument. He said as much after listening to Gates deliver a speech to U.S. Governors:
" 'If there is anything I have
learned (at the summit), it's that Oregon has to get better in setting
high standards. We are going to have to demand more,' Kulongoski told a
working group that included three other governors and former Colorado
Gov. Roy Romer, now the Los Angeles schools superintendent."
In that post written a couple of years ago, I questioned whether making high schools harder, and therefore to many kids even more boring, would actually reduce the high school dropout rate. What I said then still goes today --I don't think so!
Nor do I think that a course of study that actually engages students is dumbing down the curriculum. Quite the opposite. If you give a student a text written in Greek knowing that the student has no understanding of Greek, you condemn the student to learning nothing. Zilch. Nada. That's dumbing down the curriculum. Same with any textbook that is either too difficult or too entirely beside the point. And all textbooks are like Greek to many students, either too difficult and/or too irrelevant. Or boring.
Rigor, as I understand it, is simply using the same approaches that have failed in the past, only making them harder. High expectations, another name for academic rigor, merely leads to higher levels of frustration for struggling students, the ones most likely to drop out before they finish school.
High expectations, moreover, is an insult to educators. It implies that, prior to its widespread acceptance as a panacea for what keeps Johnny from learning, "low expectations" once defined the mission of the school.
And that, quite obviously, is pure nonsense.
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