In Schools We Trust
Creating Communities of Learning in an era of Testing and Standardization
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3.0 • 1 Rating
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- $13.99
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- $13.99
Publisher Description
We are in an era of radical distrust of public education. Increasingly, we turn to standardized tests and standardized curricula-now adopted by all fifty states-as our national surrogates for trust.
Legendary school founder and reformer Deborah Meier believes fiercely that schools have to win our faith by showing they can do their job. But she argues just as fiercely that standardized testing is precisely the wrong way to that end. The tests themselves, she argues, cannot give the results they claim. And in the meantime, they undermine the kind of education we actually want.
In this multilayered exploration of trust and schools, Meier critiques the ideology of testing and puts forward a different vision, forged in the success stories of small public schools she and her colleagues have created in Boston and New York. These nationally acclaimed schools are built, famously, around trusting teachers-and students and parents-to use their own judgment.
Meier traces the enormous educational value of trust; the crucial and complicated trust between parents and teachers; how teachers need to become better judges of each others' work; how race and class complicate trust at all levels; and how we can begin to 'scale up' from the kinds of successes she has created.
PUBLISHERS WEEKLY
While policy makers agree that big city public schools are failing to meet children's needs, their solutions usually involve shifting responsibility to distant figures chancellors, mayors and relying on abstract performance evaluation tools, like standardized tests. From her own experience designing and operating various "alternative" public schools, progressive educator Meier (The Power of Their Ideas) has a different assessment: schools must be smaller, more self-governed and "places of choice," so kids and their families feel they are truly part of these "communities of learning." Students need to spend more time around adults who are doing adult work, which builds familiarity, trust and respect, as well as exposure to new skills. Families also need to be brought into the mix, so they're comfortable with the school, the teachers and the educational agenda. Teachers need time and space to develop collegial relations with each other, both to improve educational practices and to model responsible critical behavior for students. According to Meier, the currently fashionable educational panacea increased standardized testing is either irrelevant to academic excellence or an actual deterrent, as teachers teach to the test and ignore everything that's not on it. Likewise, teaching children test-taking techniques trains them to distrust their own intuition about what's right or wrong. Reliance on test results (which are largely meaningless, Meier says) denies parents' and teachers' ability to assess learning. This is a passionate, jargon-free plea for a rerouting of educational reform, sure to energize committed parents, progressive educators and maybe even a politician or two. , a nine-city author tour and a national print and broadcast campaign should help her book make some waves.
Customer Reviews
Three Parts: Mixed Results
Deborah Meier broke her book into three separate parts. The first part seems to be a long, convoluted, almost cathartic memoir of her experiences developing trust-based, small schools on the East Coast. Fair enough. She places a preeminence on trust for determining success in schools: trust in educators, teachers, students, administrators, races, genders...well, virtually everyone. The only response I have to such a concept is "of course!" No one works effectively and efficiently in any environment--or any kind of job--if they do not have trust from and provide trust to those with whom they work. It would seem that the first part of this book could be consolidated into a couple of pages.
Perhaps that's the point: today's school environment assumes mistrust on many levels. The worst of it starts when students do not trust their teachers. When in our culture did we cede power to the students to issue or withhold trust to their teachers and schools? I think that a lot of the "Back to Basics" movement is not just to address academic performance (however measured), but also to put discipline back into the schools the way that us older folks remember them: the teacher was always right, and the students were presumed to be at fault. Sadly, our educational system does not support that concept. Were teachers granted automatic respect and authority, as they used to be, then they would be much more effective in their classrooms. Of course, more students would be subject to disciplinary measures (or in current education-speak "consequences"), but perhaps if schools consistently expected standards of performance, with students being required to abide by those standards, then after a transition period, discipline might be restored to the classroom. Some parents would need to accept the fact that their children misbehave and are not perfect angels (and by extension, a smaller subset of parents may need to look in the mirror).
Part two does a very good job of discussing the problems with standardized testing. It should be noted that Meier wrote this book before Bush's No Child Left Behind policy and its requirement of annual standardized testing. Most of what she predicted would occur has occurred, and we are now discussing Obama's reform proposals. Part two is a quick read, especially since we now have empirical evidence about NCLB to support Meier's ideas.
Part three is essentially a series of pleas to not undertake measures that NCLB institutionalized. It is also a plea to allow for the extension of the small, trusting school concept. Perhaps it is interesting now from an historical perspective. Perhaps it will be applicable once again in the future.