Why Our Schools Are Failing- Part 3

 

Blog # 101 – Why Our Schools are Failing – Part 3

 

The Fundamental Issue

 

There is no doubt that measured by the end product, learning, our schools are hopelessly inadequate. Their structure and organization are archaic and unresponsive to change. There are far too many cooks trying to run the kitchen from lowly vice-principals to state commissioners.  The regulations defy logic and are foisted upon schools and districts from on high, often with little discussion or consultation. The unions, advocates and disgruntled teacher are another anchor to progress. All of these issues are real and need to be addressed on a daily basis by school administrators. They do have some wiggle room, but they often do not use it wisely. Despite all of these obstacles, they are not the real reason that our schools are failing. The real fly in the ointment is our lack of adequate and appropriate teacher training.

 

I tell people that while I was being trained as a teacher, I could put all of the useful information that I was given into a thimble and still have room for my finger. When I underwent training as a school principal, I was one of only three candidates that each board could select and enrol. I felt honoured to have been chosen as one of only three until the first day of classes when the coordinator asked that we not bring our golf clubs to class. I assumed that he was joking. He wasn’t.

 

The weeks were filled, one day after the next, with a legion of speakers proffering their advice. Coordination of topics and what was to be covered in the course was almost completely absent so we heard many variations on the same theme with little if any  research and no data to substantiate anything that were saying.  In frustration, I actually took some of my “learning disabled” students to the class and did a demonstration lesson on how to teach adolescents to read. This followed a speech from the front of the room by an “expert” who had no data, and no idea about what he was talking about. I thought a live performance with real kids might make a fine rebuttal. My colleagues had never seen or heard of the method. They did note that these adolescent  students worked hard, stayed on task and were mastering the lesson. Despite this, there was also no great rush of questions when they saw with their own eyes, in real time, what was possible. They were principals-to-be, teaching was no longer their job. Apparently academic leadership and the adoption of proven methods weren’t either.

 

Education is one of the last disciplines to ignore and even reject scientific data. The proof for that is simple. I have been training teachers for more than forty years. I almost always begin my presentation with a single question, “What do you know about Project Follow Through?” I can bet a huge amount of money that not a single hand will be raised. If by chance someone does raise their hand and describes any or all aspects of Project Follow Through, my follow-up question is, “Where did you come by that information?” The answer invariably is, “I read your book.”

 

Teachers are completely unaware of the longest- running, comparative study of sixteen different educational methods involving a half-million underprivileged children from across the U.S.A. for almost a decade at a cost of $2.2 billion dollars. Nobody who trained them ever presented the results of this research to them, never did a comparison of the methods and suggested that, based on the replicated data, they should learn one or both of the only two models that showed positive gains for kids.  Nobody trained these teachers in how these methods worked, or the theory and research that allows us to understand why these methods worked like they did then and still do now.  Instead they send the teachers out to create “lesson plans” which have no empirical data to show that they will be effective. The kids become the guinea pigs and they take the fall when the instruction fails.

 

I used these methods we in the special education classes that produced sufficient gains to have parents asking  to have their regular fifth grade student transferred into our special ed classes so that s/he could be as skilled as their “special needs” child.  These are also the methods that the system shut down when we became an embarrassment and were disposed of under the guise of budget cuts. These are the same methods I have used in my school and learning centres for 35 years which allow me to offer a no-questions-asked money-back guarantee for learning. Try to get that from your local public school.

 

You cannot blame the teachers for school failure. They are not and have not been given the training and supervision in either Direct Instruction or Behavior Analysis that would allow them to use these methods successfully in their classrooms.  In fact, they have never even been made aware of the largest research study ever done in education. These systems are skill-based.  Developing the necessary skills requires training and supervision. Without the skills in place, teachers will fare no better with one of these programs than they would with  any other program that is foisted upon any untrained teacher.

 

I recently trained staff for Dr. Will Burrow in Sabbatus, Maine. He monitors their progress and supports their efforts. He has consistently over the past five years been able to return a large number of special needs students back to regular classrooms because they now have the skills to keep up with the curriculum and with their peers. His most notable project was to group all of the students –at –risk who were registered in kindergarten into a single classroom with a competent caring teacher and two aides. By the end of the year, all of these children had learned the skills necessary for success in first grade. When you use the methods well, the results speak for themselves.