Post-9/11 Education

An excerpt from the Introduction:

This piece is a product of my time as a primary teacher from 1996 – 2009—the last ten years of which were in a low-income, Spanish-speaking community—when I experienced both the fruits of a renaissance and a subsequent reactionary clampdown in the field of public education under federal reforms.  The school culture mirrored the changing tenor of the times, from the post-Civil Rights/Vietnam era when everything could be questioned to the dawn of the post-911 era when meaning at its most limited was strictly enforced through a rigidly Top Down, one-way flow of communication. Under the rule of the standardized tests with its associated punishments, we went back to presenting truth as a long list of uniform right answers, enforced by fear of punishments, and coming from an impersonal, anonymous and supposedly objective authority—a “Because I Said So” approach to learning. We returned to a highly competitive view of learning which extends to labeling entire schools as “good” (smart) or “bad” (not so smart) based on tests which are designed to be graded on a curve.  (What the curve means is that even if everyone has mastered a required skill, such as sounding out short vowel words, the test still needs to be able to weed out the lowest 30% and give them an F.)  In this unfriendly climate, teachers were being treated as being lazy and unintelligent.  In many places, good teaching was no longer tolerated.  The consciousness-raising and progressive changes which had been taking place over the previous few decades in the teaching profession, and which reflected similar changes elsewhere in society, were as good as erased from history.

 

The progress that had been made previous to the institution of the reforms revolved around a valuing of a holistic, Big Picture viewpoint. There was great interest in how the whole could support the parts—or in how the different parts within the whole could support each other. As teachers, we aimed to bring in more of the real world and more of ourselves, and to engage more of the students' natural abilities. Common assumptions in many classrooms for many years were that learning required context as well as personal and social relevance; that teachers needed to address the whole person, including all the different learning styles—not just visual and verbal but auditory, kinesthetic (moving the body), musical, social, etc.; that integrating subjects—drawing dynamic connections between one course of study and another—enriched learning; and that assessments needed to be “authentic” (reflecting true strengths and weaknesses) and to inform teaching rather than just being done to label students.  (Why teach what students already know, or skim over what they need extra help on?  Ironically, the more that emphasis has been placed on assessment, the less room that classroom teachers have had to adapt their teaching to their students' needs.)

Because there is such a diversity of ways to learn, learning was viewed as a collaboration rather than a competition between students. For the same reason, “metacognition”—the ability to observe one's own learning style and thought process—was also emphasized. There was a sense that all of these changes were indeed part of a bigger picture of change: that labels on people and subjects alike had traditionally been misused and overused, placing unhealthy limits on learning and on the functioning of society as a whole.