Education Stimulus Needs to Stimulate Students
The Stimulus Package provides $5 billion for Education Secretary Arne Duncan to back new approaches to modernize our educational infrastructure. But while schools, especially in urban areas, are in dire need of modernization (wouldn’t hurt to start with clean and safe bathrooms), spending billions upgrading the physical environment without also fixing the broken kids who end up dropping out (a report by America’s Promise Alliance concluded that nationwide over 50% of our students drop out of school every year) just applies an expensive, albeit cosmetic-only face on a half empty future for both the students and society as a whole.
To be sure the Stimulus Package is a spending bill, but we must spend smartly in education. Keeping kids engaged and in school is a cost-cutting measure that positively impacts a child’s emotional and physical health as well as their effect on the not-so-far-in-the-future worlds of business, art and culture. The savings to institutional and governmental support systems, based on those who will stay in the system rather than drop out, is palpable in real dollars.
The good news is that accomplishing this is no great mystery. The mystery is how a system so filled with such smart people has seemed to miss the obvious for so many years. You engage a student’s interest in learning by learning what interests them. From that we build curriculums that both interest and teach.
Each individual’s interest and talent may not come in a neatly wrapped package of our standard educational foundation for teaching the 3 R’s, but we need to tap into the place where the child’s fire and comprehension lives and build from there. Better to start with what they understand than what they don’t; with what drives them, not what pushes them away; with what changes them for the better, not what inhibits their desire to learn.
In most cases our present educational process makes an effort to teach the same thing to in the same way to every individual student, using the same techniques and expecting the same result. But with each student’s individual experience and level of expertise, how in the world would we ever expect any diverse group of children to learn the same way or at the same speed?
Most important in any teaching proposition is establishing the proper place to start. Just below failure, there is actually a place of knowledge, a place of comfort, and therefore a viable learning tool. Of course, what is comfortable for the student may be an uncomfortable place for a system now encumbered with a teaching to the test mentality based on standard academics. But with all the years of causing discomfort for the student, it’s only fair to take on a little of their apprehension. Today we may need to tap into music, sports, video games, even the street to reach some students. But once you build a mechanism around their familiarity, it is on that foundation that we can begin to construct a complete education, learning other subjects, even those academic.
It’s is not about embracing incompetence or lowering standards, but about having students recognizing their own strengths, NO MATTER WHAT THEY ARE, and using them as a jumping off point.
Accountability, such as what was pounded into the system through No Child Left Behind, should not only come in test scores, but in what should be the goal of any educational work: how well does it work as the student transitions out of the theoretical trappings of memorized test answers and into the real world of survival, jobs and dealing with everyday obstacles.
It’s the old parable of either feeding a villager fish for one day or teaching the villager to fish so he can eat forever. We tap into what drives a student, we learn how the student can drive themselves. Is there any teacher out there who wouldn’t want to trade in their time teaching to the test for teaching to a class full of students who want to learn?
Of course there are systemic reforms that need to take place. It will take time and startup money (though far less than we are throwing away presently), but if there be any time to do so, the Stimulus Package says it’s now.
Last week, President Obama said that “What I’ve asked (Education Secretary) Arne Duncan to do is to make sure that he works as hard as he can over the next several years to make sure that we’re reforming our schools, that we’re rewarding innovation.” Duncan said money in the Stimulus Package will be for “pushing a significant reform agenda.”
Money that benefits both teachers and students.
Stimulating.
Steve Young is author of “Great Failures of the Extremely Successful…Mistakes, Adversity, Failure and Other Steppingstones to Success” and the “Teaching Through Familiarity” program (www.greatfailure.com
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“…engage a student’s interest in learning by learning what interests them. From that we build curriculums that both interest and teach.”
That’s all well and good and a fine idea, but even before that can be done, students MUST be able to read.
Without that ability they can’t larn ‘nuthin’ ’bout ‘nuthing, no matter how interested they are.
About five years ago, former Los Angeles Mayor Jim Hahn released a study stating that approximately 60-percent of L.A.’s residents are functionally illiterate.
Nothing has changed since then; our schools are as bad now as they were then with very high failure and drop-out rate, and L.A.’s has fallen more deeply into a state of third world-edness.
The learn by learning from the student works for kids from K through 12 and includes reading and comprhension.
SY