Join the conversation

I am sure that we all remember The New Teacher Project’s 2009 The Widget Effect and its claims “our school systems treat all teachers like interchangeable parts.” In many instances, that can be (or at least feel) true.

But reading through the fruits of yesterday’s Day of Blogging for Real Education Reform, I was struck by Michael Kaechele's somewhat similar perspective: “students are not widgets that can be taught by anyone using the same script.” And one of my takeaways from yesterday’s blogs was concern that the system and some of the reforms we pursue treat students as such. To transform the system, many educators seem to feel we have to get away from this mentality.

One example of the student-as-widget design of our current system: Age-based grade-levels. Ira Socol points out that age-based grades were not designed on any type of scientific basis, but to fill a need of an industrializing nation. He believes:

Age-based grades guarantee that no one who "starts behind" - the poor or anyone else not born to class and power - will ever catch up. Since grade level expectations are a step-by-step ladder, unless the people ahead of you fall off, you will never catch them or pass them. Age-based grades create disability - if you differ in developmental speed grade level expectations ensure that you will be [labeled] "retarded."

Teacher Ken also proposes moving away “from the entire cohort model to education.” He points out that:

The idea of children moving through subjects at the same pace because they happen to be approximately the same age might be good for the convenience of adults, but has little to do with how our children actually learn. First, not all learn at the same pace, and the cohort approach slows down those more gifted and goes too fast for some whose learning is not quite as accelerated. Second, not everyone develops at the same pace across all the domains we expect them to master in school.

Of course, I don’t know exactly what a school system without age-based grades would look like - what accountability would look like, what curriculum would look like, what the role of the teacher would be. Just about everything in our current system would need to change in some way. But we all recognize the need for major, transformative change...so is this a conversation we need to be having?

[Note: There were a number of other blogs on this and other topics posted yesterday. You can check them out on Twitter at #blog4reform, over at SpeEdChange {disclaimer: I did not know Socol was compiling that list when I chose to feature his post here}  or at the Cooperative Catalyst. Stay tuned as I reflect on some of the other reform ideas mentioned in the coming weeks.]