Column on education

I am delighted that school supplies are being provided in a variety of places for our students at the Market Street block Party or local parks. I sincerely wish that I would see the libraries populated with the eager of eyes young people waiting in line for ice cream or a pony ride.

I have concerns about educational achievement. Permit me an old person get off my lawn moment. I just received a rant on Facebook about the constant misuse of pronouns in formal settings, such as news reports.  Aside from arguments over standardized testing, I notice a decline in basic educational skills.  I am tired of going to the store and giving back three pennies to even out the change and have the clerks look at me in stunned silence. When I review scholarship applications, I am stunned by the writing quality of excellent students. Yes, they are active in an avalanche of activities, but that seems to preclude an even cursory glance at what they have written or actually rewriting their task. In an election year, I am tired at the blank states of basic incomprehension of the basics of our political system.

When reports come in that almost half of Detroit students are functionally illiterate, alarm bells should go off. On the other side, we have class and racial disparities in taking Advanced Placement classes.  When I was young the Coleman Report on education indicated that the quality of the school itself was less important than the social background of students. Parochial schools do well because merely being there indicates a family desire to use education as a stepping stone for advancement. Poverty relates to educational achievement. Our local community college, Lewis and Clark, does exemplary work. Too much of the time of the school is doing remedial work just to get students to a decent starting point. It is as if they deem it necessary to redo high school math, reading, and writing.

Most weeks, I go to East and have children read to me aloud for the ROAR program. It is remarkable how that little bit of extra practice has helped students with literacy. On the other hand, it cannot be a replacement for serious work done at home. At the same time, we spend enough money per pupil, have good curricula, and know so much about best practices in education.

I realize that no evaluation instrument is a perfect measure of educational quality. At the same time, it is obvious that promotion and even graduation rates are not good indicators for educational achievement. The PARCC (for Readiness in College and Careers) test at East shows 24% of the children doing well. It points to basic skills, needs for improvement, and higher level skills. Yes, no evaluation can measure everything, but surely this is a warning bell. Teachers mention the problems with evaluative instruments constantly, but I am mystified how people whose job it is to evaluate educational attainment, in part, are so resistant to measures of educational performance. I don’t hear similar complaints about the SAT or ACT. After all, many colleges combine grades and the standardized tests as a predictor for college achievement. So it could be that when tests are threatened to be used as devices to measure teacher performance, and connect those to salaries or benefits, that is when the critique becomes fulsome. We know, empirically, that good teaching can raise the overall performance of a classroom, but it impossible to believe that teachers can magically transform social attitudes, social conditions, and enforcement of educational attainment.

Education is an intrinsic good, as it deepens a person and broadens horizons. We know that the economic environment requires a higher level of competence and higher order analytic skills. OK is not good enough for the onrushing world of work.