Back to School

“Teachers are the most important in-school factor [in a child’s academic performance]; we should not automatically assume that’s a desirable state of affairs.”

So concludes Daniel Willingham’s recent post on The Washington Post’s “The Answer Sheet.”

That piece struck a chord with me. Not because I think teachers should not be the most important school-based factor in a child’s education—I had never thought about that. But because I had never thought about that.

My immediate response to, “Teacher quality is the most important school-based factor” is, “We have to improve teacher quality.” That seems to be the immediate reaction of…well, everyone I can think of. I’d never heard anyone respond, “So let’s decrease its importance.”

Willingham suggests considering it, potentially by making teaching more consistent (perhaps by improving teacher preparation and/or using a curriculum to ensure that all students learn the same material), so that the individual doing the teaching won’t matter so much. To me it did not appear that he advocated this approach as much as he recommended questioning our basic assumptions. And I think that is so important.

It reminded me of a discussion I was at recently in which the distinction between “reforming” and “transforming” education was made clear. I have been hearing that a lot recently. And a post on AASA’s School Street by Francis Duffy just addressed the issue. According to him,

Education reform is a failed strategy because it focuses on fixing the broken parts of America’s more than 14,000 school systems (which is pejoratively referred to as piecemeal change) while sustaining the underlying paradigm that drives teaching and learning in those systems. Fixing the broken parts of any school system is a failed change strategy because the underlying paradigm has outlived its usefulness and effectiveness and nothing can be done to fix it—it has to be replaced.

He goes on to define a paradigm as “a set of theories, models, beliefs, and so on that influence the performance of an entire profession.”

In the conversations I have been hearing, people talk about shifting the paradigm, thinking outside the box and questioning our assumptions. A lot of times those dialogues are frustrating—I wind up thinking, “Did we even move an inch within the box?” We praise transformation, but talk about reforms.

But Willingham’s piece made me pause. We are so focused on improving teacher quality—changing the way teachers are evaluated, firing bad teachers, trying to hire good ones, experimenting with new forms of pay. And his purposed shift would redirect efforts into curriculum. Into teacher preparation. Or any number of other endeavors. It could be transformational.

Of course, I am not sure Willingham is right. He could be dead wrong. But proposed something completely different. He made me think. And I found that refreshing.

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