And while our Secretary of Education at that time responded that "Average is not good enough for American kids," he also predicted that "No Child Left Behind" would improve the results. It didn’t.
Meanwhile, Poland, which had struggled its way out of the grip of Communism to create its increasingly strong economic system, took on a complete overhaul of its educational system. In 1998, their new minister of education put into play a four-part system of reforms. Part one commanded more rigor in the curriculum: "The new program would lay out fundamental goals, but leave the details to the schools. At the same time, the government would require a quarter of teachers to go back to school to improve their own education."
The second reform mandated that standardized tests would be taken at regular intervals throughout their schooling, at the end of elementary, junior high, and high school. These tests would "identify which students – and teachers and schools – needed more help. For older students, the tests would also have consequences, determining which high schools and then universities they could attend. For the first time, the students would take the university entrance exam at the end of high school, and the exams would no longer be graded by local teachers (italics mine)." As an old teacher, I can see the value in the latter stricture, which would obviate the possibility of pupil/teacher dynamics that might cause a grade to be lowered or raised arbitrarily.
The third reform raised the expectations for what kids could accomplish. It mandated an extra year before the students were tracked into university preparation or trade schools. The results were more than just revealing; they were striking.
The fourth reform gave the teachers autonomy. They were able to select "their own textbooks and their own specific curriculum from over one hundred approved options” (again, italics mine). With such a large choice from which to choose, it is unlikely that any teacher would be forced to teach from something she or he found ill-suited to her or his own style and/or beliefs.
All those changes were supposed to happen in one year. As one can imagine, there was a huge uproar. The new system began in 1999. In 2000, for the first time ever, Polish fifteen year olds took the PISA. Those children had grown up under the old system. The tests placed them twenty-first in reading and twentieth in math, below average for the developed world. Three years later, the PISA was taken by children who had spent their early years in the old school system, and their more recent years in the new. This time, Poland ranked thirteenth in reading and eighteenth in math, which put them just above the US in both subjects.
One factor stands out in all the countries that consistently rank high on the PISA, and that is something that Ms. Ripley defines simply as "rigor." I take her use of the word to apply to every aspect of education: teachers must be well-trained and well-paid; curricula must be demanding; grading must be fair and accurate; failure appears to be not an option; parents must work in tandem with the schools. And I would add that perhaps most important of all, students must understand that they are capable of learning, and are in charge of what their lives will become because they have acquired the knowledge necessary to move forward.
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As someone who was once in charge of teaching the alphabet to children in my early childhood classroom, I must echo an emphatic Yes! to the notion that teachers must be well-trained. I once observed a classroom full of would-be elementary teachers, where the teacher, a full professor in the School of Education, began her lecture on how to introduce letters by saying: "You show the children this alphabet (holding up a plastic capital B), and you tell them: "This is a B. It says "BUH."
Well, sorry, but the plastic B is a letter, not an alphabet. And it does not say BUH. If it did, you would have to say BUH-aseball or BUH-lue or BUH-ig. The sound made by the letter B is the merest plositive breath of air between the lips, accompanied by a very slight guttural push that slips into the vowel or consonant following it. The correct way to teach it in isolation is to make just the sound without extending it to the following letter or letters, although usually the students themselves will start using it enthusiastically in all sorts of combinations.
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