Deliberate Dumbing Down of America Public Education

A–54 performance examinations as well as assessments of the quality of students’ work as revealed through portfolios, exhibitions and projects. But this is not our only resource for this proposal. Many of the states and districts in our consortium are themselves leaders in the national move ment to create high standards and new forms of student performance assessment. Vermont, for example, is pioneering the development of portfolio assessment. Pittsburgh developed one of the first and widely admired systems for assessing higher order thinking skills. And Kentucky is investing $29 million in the development of a whole new system of student performance assessment that will advance the state of the art. The approach we plan to use for assessment will provide a powerful tool for this purpose. At its heart is the idea of setting tasks for students to do. It is the performance of students on these tasks that will be assessed by the system. To a significant extent, the tasks, by defining students’ work, will define their curriculum. (p. 9–10) Along with the Alliance states and school districts, it is committed to developing… outcome standards that will enable our Partners to create performance-oriented systems for the delivery of health and human services that will parallel what we propose for schools. (p. 14) Changing the district and state systems from rule-driven, input-oriented systems to output-driven, performance-oriented systems will be as hard to achieve as the changes we described for schools and just as necessary. It is one of the most difficult design challenges we face.... We believe that, at its core, this is best thought of as a problem in the design of a very large staff development effort, an effort to enable thousands of people to develop the skills, attitudes and values to transform schools and communities all over the United States.... For years, most staff development has been based on learning from theory that is divorced from practice. We envision learning by participation in a community of practitioners, a community that includes people at every level of mastery. How can we create such a system for the teachers and others in our sites? In the classic model of learning through practice, the newcomer joins the work environment of a master, learning by participating in all of the activities of that environment. This works when newcom ers are to be socialized into established and well-functioning communities of practice. But our problem is how simultaneously to create a new system and socialize educators to function within it. There are few, if any, schools that are already effectively carrying out an integrated program of transformed learning and teaching meeting world-class standards, joined with a social service program and engaging parents and the community in the process. Neverthe less, we believe it is possible to design a continuing professional development program that includes the essential elements. There are five such elements: • Observation and modeling. Newcomers spend a significant amount of time observing mentors at work. From this observation, they learned to discriminate good from poor practice and acceptable from unacceptable outcomes. Observation is not haphazard. It is mediated by conversations in which critical features of the work are pointed out and processes are analyzed. Our development program must provide opportunities for this kind of supported observation and analysis of the work of “masters.” • Active practice. This is the heart of it; those who are developing their skills work at the job they are learning, rather than learning about the job. Either in their own schools or in those in which their mentors teach, teachers will actively practice the new kinds of teaching for which we aim. • Scaffolding. But by definition, they don’t yet know how to do these tasks—they are still learning. How can they manage this practice then? The answer is scaffolding.