Our Teaching Methods, and Theirs
To the Editor:
Re “Why Other Countries Teach Better” (“Numbers Crunch” series, about the teaching of math and science in the United States, editorial, Dec. 18):
You describe top-ranking school systems in Finland, Canada and Shanghai. While your recommendations are excellent on the whole, missing from your analysis is not only what we should do but also what we should not do — and there are some policies that we should stop immediately.
None of the school systems you endorsed have policies supporting fast-track teacher certification programs or salary bonuses for teachers who boost test scores. None have systems of sanctions for struggling schools with rotations of principals and staff in and out that erode trust and destroy community. None set up win-lose competitions among neighboring schools.
Instead, teachers and schools in challenging circumstances receive additional supports, including from more successful schools, so that they can identify problems quickly and resolve them.
America can’t just adopt policies from high achievers while continuing with those that have failed us. Stopping destructive policies is at least as important as adopting promising ones.
DENNIS SHIRLEY
ANDY HARGREAVES
Chestnut Hill, Mass., Dec. 18, 2013
ANDY HARGREAVES
Chestnut Hill, Mass., Dec. 18, 2013
The writers, professors at the Lynch School of Education at Boston College, are the authors of “The Global Fourth Way: The Quest for Educational Excellence.”
To the Editor:
Your editorial laments the poor showing that public education in the United States makes in international comparisons. Institutional changes needed to address all these shortfalls will take time, but a solution for one of the problems — funding inequality — is more quickly within our reach.
A federal guarantee of dollars per pupil, set at a rate matching some of our best public school districts, using tested “maintenance of effort” formulas and with federal strings limited to nondiscrimination and correct accounting rules, would assure all our children a well-funded public education wherever they happen to live.
Similar federal help was used to fund our Interstate highway system. Surely in today’s internationally competitive economy, universally available quality education is as important a national goal as an Interstate highway system.
WILLIAM R. ANDERSEN
Seattle, Dec. 18, 2013
Seattle, Dec. 18, 2013
The writer is professor emeritus at the University of Washington School of Law.
To the Editor:
Costa Rica provides another international lesson. In this small Central American country — with a per capita gross domestic product less than one-fifth of the United States’ — students averaged 407 on the 2012 Program for International Student Assessment math test, in fourth place in Latin America (United States students averaged 481, below the developed-country mean). Since 2011 Costa Rica’s Constitution obliges the state to invest a minimum of 8 percent of G.D.P. in education.
If the United States were to do this, we’d have a national education budget of about $1.3 trillion instead of some $70 billion. That would go a long way toward addressing the pervasive mediocrity of so many of our public schools.
MARC EDELMAN
New York, Dec. 18, 2013
New York, Dec. 18, 2013
The writer is a professor of anthropology at Hunter College and the CUNY Graduate Center.
To the Editor:
Re “Even Gifted Students Can’t Keep Up” (“Numbers Crunch” series, editorial, Dec. 15): Although more effort and resources have clearly been needed to help lower achievers and disadvantaged students, that should never have been accompanied by the nearly total abandonment of official attention to the gifted, as has sadly been the case for decades.
The argument that the intellectually gifted can manage by themselves is ludicrously shortsighted and class biased. We never make that argument about the athletically gifted, for example. And the argument assumes that the gifted come mostly from privileged classes that have private means to advance their young.
Paying appropriate attention to gifted students of all backgrounds will benefit not only them and the country as a whole, but it can also have an incentivizing effect on students at all levels and from all social groups.
PETER KAHN
Ithaca, N.Y., Dec. 15, 2013
Ithaca, N.Y., Dec. 15, 2013
The writer is professor emeritus of mathematics at Cornell University.
To the Editor:
Your editorial reflects a terrible truth. I am home schooling my gifted eighth grader this year, at his request. Ask him why he doesn’t like school, and he will reply that his teachers focus on drilling facts into the heads of every learner so that all can pass the standardized tests that supposedly measure academic progress.
He asked to stay home so he didn’t have to spend time “listening to teachers repeat facts that I can read in the book or on the computer.”
JAN FRANK
Bloomfield Township, Mich.
Dec. 15, 2013
No comments:
Post a Comment