My Turn: Forget the Fads

—The Old Way Works BestWhat will fix public education? A teacher, a chalkboard and a roomful of willing studentsBy Evan KeliherNEWSWEEK
Sept. 30 issue — I’ve never claimed to have psychic powers, but I did predict that the $500 million that philanthropist Walter Annenberg poured into various school systems around the country, beginning in 1993, would fail to make any difference in the quality of public education. Regrettably, I was right.BY APRIL 1998, it was clear that the much-ballyhooed effort had collapsed on itself. A Los Angeles Times editorial said, “All hopes have diminished. The promised improvements have not been realized.” The program had become so bogged down by politics and bureaucracy that it had failed to create any significant change.How did I know this would be the result of Annenberg’s well-intentioned efforts? Easy. There has never been an innovation or reform that has helped children learn any better, faster or easier than they did prior to the 20th century. I believe a case could be made that real learning was better served then than now.Let me quote Theodore Sizer, the former dean of the Harvard Graduate School of Education and the director of the Annenberg Institute for School Reform, which received some of the grant money. A few years ago a reporter asked him if he could name a single reform in the last 15 years that had been successful. Sizer replied, “I don’t think there is one.”I taught in the Detroit public-school system for 30 years. While I was there, I participated in team-teaching, supervised peer-tutoring programs and tussled with block scheduling plans. None of it ever made a discernible difference in my students’ performance. The biggest failure of all was the decentralization scheme introduced by a new superintendent in the early 1970s. His idea was to break our school system into eight smaller districts—each with its own board of education—so that parents would get more involved and educators would be more responsive to our students’ needs. Though both of those things happened, by the time I retired in 1986 the number of students who graduated each year still hadn’t risen to more than half the class. Two thirds of those who did graduate failed the exit exam and received a lesser diploma. We had changed everything but the level of student performance.What baffles me is not that educators implement new policies intended to help kids perform better, it’s that they don’t learn from others’ mistakes. A few years ago I read about administrators at a middle school in San Diego, where I now live, who wanted a fresh teaching plan for their new charter school and chose the team-teaching model. Meanwhile, a few miles away, another middle school was in the process of abandoning that same model because it hadn’t had any effect on students’ grades.The plain truth is we need to return to the method that’s most effective: a teacher in front of a chalkboard and a roomful of willing students. The old way is the best way. We have it from no less a figure than Euclid himself. When Ptolemy I, the king of Egypt, said he wanted to learn geometry, Euclid explained that he would have to study long hours and memorize the contents of a fat math book. The pharaoh complained that that would be unseemly and demanded a shortcut. Euclid replied, “There is no royal road to geometry.”There wasn’t a shortcut to the learning process then and there still isn’t. Reform movements like new math and whole language have left millions of damaged kids in their wake. We’ve wasted billions of taxpayer dollars and forced our teachers to spend countless hours in workshops learning to implement the latest fads. Every minute teachers have spent on misguided educational strategies (like building kids’ self-esteem by acting as “facilitators” who oversee group projects) is time they could have been teaching academics.The only way to truly foster confidence in our students is to give them real skills—in reading, writing and arithmetic—that they can be proud of. One model that incorporates this idea is direct instruction, a program that promotes rigorous, highly scripted interaction between teacher and students.The physicist Stephen Hawking says we can be sure time travel is impossible because we never see any visitors from the future. We can apply that same logic to the subject of school reforms: we know they have not succeeded because we haven’t seen positive results. But knowing that isn’t enough. We should stop using students as lab rats and return to a more traditional method of teaching. If it was good enough for Euclid, it is good enough for us.Keliher is the author of “Guerrilla Warfare for Teachers: A Survival Guide.”© 2002 Newsweek, Inc.

這幾年新式教學法引發的討論令人眼花撩亂。原本立意甚佳，也有教育理論支持的創新做法，如一綱多本、建構式數學、全英語教學等等，在台灣的正規教育以及補教界實施多年，似乎只有看到更多的問題，而未見具體的成效。問題的核心究竟何在，眾說紛紜。但是已經看到不少學校教師與家長大聲疾呼回歸過去傳統制式的作法。
原來，向來被台灣不少人士奉為理想國的美國也有類似的教育問題。Evan Keliher 是一位退休的中學老師。他自己經歷了這些教育的改革與創新實驗後，他的結論是：別再推陳出新了，一個老師、一張黑板跟教室一群有心向學的學生才是真正的教育之道！這是希臘哲老歐幾里德幾千年前就已經實踐的教育方法，也是看過各校嘗試過各種聯合教學、分段教學、同儕學習等等新式教法無效之後，他提出的復古主張。
Keliher 有一個觀點很值得警惕，他認為實施新式教學法的學校往往不去看其他學校的前車之鑑，拿了經費一頭就去做，因此即使在同一地區也看到不少學校重蹈失敗的覆轍。但是，也是身為老師的我，還是不免要問：那一群「有心向學」的學生從何而來？那位老師啟發能力不足怎麼辦？不就是這位老師與那些學生不一定存在，才讓很多教育人員不斷要找尋新教學方法嗎？
文章原始出處：NEWSWEEK September 30, 2002, US Edition
--文章作者；Evan Keliher
--本文來源：http://teachmath.net/Newsweek.html