Teacher reflects on what's right, wrong with public education
By Mark Storer Special to the Acorn

The discussion in our house right now centers on my 6-year-old daughter and her placement in first grade this year. She's excited about it, of course, and for the most part likes school. She did preschool and the one we chose was just the thing for her to really get into school and she has made quantum leaps in what she can do and how she thinks.

She loves school and we want that to continue.

But the reality is that by first grade, the demands on students are pretty specific and there is even a time set aside to teach them to bubble-in the answers on multiple choice tests- because they'll be taking a lot of them. That should never happen. So why is it happening?

Although the reasons are manifold, at the heart of the issue is still the ignorance and absurdity of what the No Child Left Behind Act calls "accountability." The act demands that students be able to perform well on tests, never mind whether or not the tests are accurate measures of what students can do.

As we've moved into the 21st century, suddenly our public education system dropped back into the 19th. It is understandable on one level that having standards and knowing "the basics" is important. While 21st century America is no longer an agrarian society where harvest time trumps classwork, our school system not only reflects that era in its physical structure, but the act has schools reflecting the past with its demands for rote learning, standardized tests and "accountability" that holds only teachers accountable.

Our public school system fails on so many levels, but the most valid failure, is the one in which we try ever harder to give students a "college preparatory" education by creating a culture and a curriculum that is the antithesis of what our colleges teach.

The United States is acknowledged worldwide for its postsecondary education institutions. Our colleges are second to none when it comes to matriculating students. Colleges and universities have consistently turned out students who are prepared for the world they are entering, trained to think, analyze and evaluate.

Students generally leave fouryear institutions in America with a well-rounded education that has prepared them for either a career, or perhaps more training in a graduate school. Still, the majority of students don't go to college.

Public education has failed to strike the proper balance between standards and innovation, between accountability and individuality. If we know anything about human beings in the 21st century, it is that we all learn differently, at different rates, and we are all motivated by different factors.

American colleges and universities have predicated their curriculums on these incontrovertible facts, but public schools that once perhaps paid too much attention to this knowledge now give it no credence at all.

This is the key reason behind what most educators call "the swinging pendulum." It seems that with public education nothing ever really changes- things just swing back and forth between political extremes.

The recent swing toward structure in the classroom ignores the many and varied ways in which students learn. Yes, we all agree that learning the basics and having standards are important and we should continue to teach those things in the classroom. But to make those the only matters of import and to revolve tests solely around them does not encourage innovative thinking, practical knowledge or even quality workmanship.

My experience as a high school English teacher has shown me that the students who come to my classroom with structure in their lives from home are the ones who succeed most. If parents are involved in their students' lives, give them a loving and disciplined home, provide opportunities for them to be involved in others' lives and play an active role in the family, those students do remarkably better in all things academic.

By the same token, students who are forced into specific structures and confines within the classroom tend to rebel against those structures, even if they are from well-structured homes.

Rather than providing structure at school and choices at home, it seems the other way around is far better. The curriculum of our schools has begun not so much to reflect the society in which it functions, but a unique society all its own in which the rules, structure and regulations resemble nothing in the "real world."

It's not all bad news, of course. There are some positives about focusing solely on tests and test scores. It is true that tests provide a very basic measuring stick for all students and that at some point everyone has to rise to the same standard.

The problem is that as schools focus more on test results and less on each individual, the propensity to judge a diverse society by a single standard increases.

That will lead to nothing but a slow death of academia and eventually to the dumbing down of public education.

Storer, a Camarillo resident, teaches journalism and literature at Adolfo Camarillo High School. He has been a public high school teacher for 17 years.