America's Misdirected School Reform Movement

Statement by George Leonard
California State Assembly Education Committee
February 27, 2002

The human brain is the most complex, most beautifully organized entity in the known universe. Weighing only some two percent of our total body weight, this greedy organ consumes around 20 percent of all the nutrients and oxygen in our blood. The number of possible connections among our 100 billion or so brain cells is greater than the number of atoms in the known universe. We are born with an overwhelming need, and a desire, to make more and more new connections. To learn prodigiously from birth to death is what makes us human.

Consider the fact that by the time our children start to school, almost all of them have completed one of the most spectacular learning feats on this planet: the basic mastery of spoken language-- with no formal instruction whatever. Rather than that, they've enjoyed a feast of high-intensity interaction with their learning environment, which in this case comprises all the adults and older children around them. Here are teachers who react immediately and positively to success, permit approximations, and aren't likely to indulge in lectures-that is to say, the best kind of teachers, the best kind of teaching.

Interaction, engagement, enjoyment. These are keywords for any truly successful school reform. Sadly, our efforts in this regard over the past two decades have, by and large, moved us in just the opposite direction.

We can date it back to April 26, 1983. That was when a report from the National Commission on Excellence in Education was released to the public. The report, A Nation at Risk: The Imperative for Educational Reform, was a Cold War document from beginning to end. I quote: "Our nation is at risk. Our once unchallenged preeminence in commerce, industry, science, and technological innovation is being overtaken by competitors throughout the world. . . . If an unfriendly foreign power had attempted to impose on America the mediocre education performance that exists today, we might have viewed it as a act of war. . . . We have, in effect, been committing an act of unthinking, unilateral educational disarmament."

The report promised fundamental reform but actually offered no significant changes in the way we educated our young people, but only more and tougher of the same: a longer school day and year, "far more homework," and much more time given to the academic basics--which, of course, translates to much less time devoted to the creative and integrative subjects. All this was underlined by a demand for a nationwide system of standardized achievement tests. The report was directed primarily at high school, where education reform is least effective. The students in the schools were hardly mentioned. As for that magical point of intersection between the learner and the learning environment, the very essence of effective education-not a word.

A Nation at Risk received spectacular publicity. It was followed by numerous other "reports" on education, most of them taking the same hard-line stance, while offering no real reform whatever.

We know now that the scare tactics used to justify this rigid, get tough approach to schooling were based on a false premise. The "unfriendly foreign power" (read: the Soviet Union) that supposedly was overtaking us was doing nothing of the sort. The Soviet Union, with an education system very similar to the one proposed in A Nation at Risk, was already in free fall toward the 1989 collapse of the entire system. And the U.S. was on the verge of the most spectacular period of technological innovation and economic achievement in world history.

Even the Japanese, with their traditional six-days-a-week, rigid, test-heavy education system, must have finally seen the error of their ways, revealed to them by their long technological and economic slump. In the year 2000, a commission appointed by the Japanese government to propose directions for the new Millennium recommended, among other liberating measures, that their schools reduce the compulsory academic school week from six to three days, thus making room for more individualized, creative education, less emphasis on testing.

And still we in the U.S. go right on, blindly and doggedly, marching in precisely the wrong direction. Today, the need for students to do well on standardized achievement tests dominates the entire educational enterprise. Anything not included on the test gets short shrift. At a time when our economy is based on innovation and out-of-the-box thinking, students are forced to focus ever more narrowly on rote answers to limiting questions. Our so-called reformers have not only put our schoolchildren in a box, but have also reinforced it with steel, locked it tight, and thrown away the key.

Recent research as well as old-time common sense tell us that what we practice is what we learn. And what are our kids now practicing? Too often, they're practicing checking the right answers on achievement tests. Is that what they'll be doing as grown-ups? And we shouldn't forget that for every hour spent practicing for the test, there's one hour less for real education.

"Far more homework," a key demand in A Nation at Risk, has produced results that are nothing less than scandalous. Some children in elementary school are being assigned up to two hours homework a night. Middle school students carry book-filled backpacks sometimes weighing twenty-five pounds or more. Actually, the cry for "far more homework" stands as a tacit admission that the schools, as now operated, are simply unable to get the job done themselves.

Yes, our wrong-way journey to educational reform has taken us to any number of unpleasant destinations. What, for example has happened to that blessed time for fantasy, imagination, and creative thought we call play? For that matter, what's happened to any and all vigorous physical movement? A 1998 study by the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention showed that only 26 percent of U.S. high schoolers were taking physical education daily, down from 42 percent in 1992, and probably still going down. Along with heavy homework demands and the appeal of television and computer games, this is producing something new in human history: we're now seeing an unprecedented number of extremely sedentary children with obesity, high blood pressure, premature heart problems, and even what some medical experts call an epidemic of Type 2, adult-onset diabetes.

Clearly, we can't blame the current direction of education for all these ills, but it must share some of the blame. Nor should we make today's teachers responsible for a situation they themselves often abhor. All across California, in fact, teachers who won bonuses of $591 in 2001 for raising their students' test scores registered their protest of our current testing mania by donating their prizes to innovative programs, scholarships, and charities.

For some 35 years, I had the privilege as a journalist of visiting scores of schools and hundreds of classrooms all across America, sometimes sitting at a child's desk for weeks on end, taking the child's viewpoint, sharing his or her experiences in class, at recess, at lunch, at home. Of course, I also interviewed teachers and administrators and education experts, but that's not enough.

Stay in a classroom for a few days or weeks and you'll share the unbearable boredom-and inefficiency-that's almost inevitable in frontal teaching, where the teacher stands or sits in front of the class pouring out a one-way stream of information. And you'll come to treasure those magical moments of learning when interaction, engagement, and joy are at their height. One of the next speakers will tell you of research showing that students' interest and enjoyment in class is a stronger predictor of college grades than are their high school grades.

Stay in class long enough and you'll also come to realize that effective schooling involves more than just what we call the mind. The mind/body split-one of the key elements in most of the so-called reform efforts-is, in fact one of the great obstacles to learning. From reading the reform proposals, you'd think that human beings are disembodied brains. But employers don't hire disembodied brains, nor can dehumanized, abstract thought solve the world's problems. The mutual entailment of sensing, feeling, and thinking becomes clearer every day. I very much doubt that any long-term educational improvement is possible without attention to such creative and integrative studies as art, music, dance, drama, physical education.

We are born with an awesome potential to learn and achieve. In the words of the late novelist, James Agee, our being cheated of it "is infinitely the ghastliest, commonest, and most inclusive of all the crimes of which the human world can accuse itself." When at last we create schools designed to release our children's enormous undeveloped potential, that era will be known for all times as education's finest hour.