A Plague on Both Your Houses

A recurring theme in the new Diane Ravitch book, The Death and Life of the Great American School System, is her disillusionment with the business model as applied to education. She complains that the school system is increasingly being run by businessmen, who aren't even trained educators.

Fie! Away with you all, I say!

On the one hand, businessmen have brought us the current obsession with standardized testing, accountability, and merit pay. We all know the disastrous effect this has had on education. These ideas don't necessarily work in the business world, either.

On the other hand, educators have brought us one silly fad after another, from Balanced Literacy to fog-brained math curricula. Their attempts to reinvent the wheel have left us mired in jargon and foolishness.

We need new voices in the education debate. How about listening to parents and kids for a change?

[Overachievers' footnote: "A plague on both your houses", often misquoted as "A pox on both your houses", was a curse uttered by the dying Mercutio, referring to the houses of Capulet and Montagu. From Shakespeare's "Romeo and Juliet", of course!]

We Lurch From Fad to Fad

So I've been reading the new book by Diane Ravitch, The Death and Life of the Great American School System.

I read for at least 20 minutes every night, then I log the amount of time I read and the number of pages. My husband signs the log, so as to encourage me to take responsibility for my reading, and he nags me about it if I forget to fill the log out. Once a week, I write out an answer to a question he assigns; for instance, "what do you think will happen next?" or "tell me about a similar incident in your own life."

When I finish the book, I'll build a diorama in a shoe box, illustrating an important scene. I'll most likely forget about the diorama until the last possible moment, and then the whole family will run around like the Keystone Kops in an effort to scare up the necessary craft supplies.

I love reading! Don't you?

Well, of course I'm not doing that. But that's how a lot of our kids are being taught to approach reading. Diane Ravitch gave me a name for the madness: it's called "Balanced Literacy", and it's just one of the many educational fads that she documents.

As Ms. Ravitch writes:

Such approaches had been criticized in the early days of Balanced Literacy. In 1987, educators P. David Pearson and Janice A. Dole warned: "We have to consider the possibility that all the attention we are asking students to pay to their use of skills and strategies and to their monitoring of these strategies may turn relatively simple and intuitively obvious tasks into introspective nightmares."

Any parent who has lived through this regime, which hit us out of a clear blue sky like the output of a passing pigeon, can tell you the result. Balanced Literacy is a sure-fire, guaranteed technique to make even the most literate child resent and avoid reading.

There has got to be a better way.