What We Need to Face in American Education

WHAT WE NEED

TO FACE

IN

AMERICAN EDUCATION

By Bill Madigan

and

Gary Kroesch

Edited by Mike Hogan

iUniverse, Inc.

Bloomington

What We Need To Face In American Education

Copyright © 2011 by Bill Madigan and Gary Kroesch

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ISBN: 978-1-4620-0366-2 (sc)

ISBN: 978-1-4620-0367-9 (ebk)

Printed in the United States of America

iUniverse rev. date: 03/17/2011

Contents

Foreword

INTRODUCTION

1

Education for a Changing World

2

Need to Know: Brain and Learning

3

Need to Know: Race and Culture

4

Radical Balance:

Standardization AND Personalization

5

What We Need to Face About Gender, Sexual Orientation and Sexual Desire

and the Classroom

6

Resilience and Hidden Gifts

Foreword

As I considered the honor and the difficulty of writing a forward to a book written by teachers who rank at the top among the thousands I have worked with in the last 30 years, I kept coming back to Billy Madigan — ably assisted by his supportive muse, Gary Kroesch -- in the other roles in which I have known them: as writers, fathers, brothers, friends, surfers, fishermen, wine connoisseurs, gourmands, jokesters, and especially as prodders and pokers of educational bureaucrats like myself. They are complicated and challenging people, humorous, sentimental, and well informed.

In the end, however, I am guessing that if Billy and Gary had to pick a designation for their tombstones, it would read simply and elegantly, Teacher. And they would be so proud of that.

In the 21st Century and beyond, as we move - in the words of Daniel Pink - from the information age into the outsourced automated age, teaching will continue to be a daunting and rewarding profession. It has probably never been more challenging, as the data on teacher attrition from the profession tells us. But this should also be a time of optimism for the teaching profession, as we have more tools at our disposal than ever before and a national need that is compelling. This book is one of the best tools you will find.

I have often said that teaching was by far the best job I ever had, and nothing is more rewarding for us than to meet up with a former student and to hear from him or her that we did something that helped make meaning of the educational puzzle that is our school system. It is frightening how much they remember about what we said to them, how we behaved, and the example we set. Yet, it also seems today that teachers, as I once heard a colleague say, are Swimming for the bottom, moving into colder, deeper, and darker waters. At the very bottom, they find themselves grappling with accountability systems that focus on rote memory, with administrators (yes, I was one) whose changing priorities and aspirations make teachers feel like they are indeed drowning, and with a perception that public education is to blame for many social ills.

Billy and Gary, who are paramount staff developers, curriculum writers, and much-in-demand public speakers, receive multiple rewards because they not only get to hear from former classroom students—Madigan, they say, you were crazy and I didn’t quite get it, and now I know you were RIGHT!—But also hear from many, many current teachers with whom they work all over the U.S., at both the secondary and postsecondary level. I have witnessed on many occasions the magic they work in their training sessions, forcing their colleagues to think outside the box," but also to build a new box. They are always grounded in what we know works for students, but also understand how adults learn best.

Dr. David Conley has written brilliantly on how we prepare students for success beyond high school, so that they succeed in college and in their career path. He emphasizes content knowledge, academic behaviors, and cognitive strategies, among other concepts, as they keys to unlocking student potential. Billy and Gary understand that. But they also understand what our friend, the author Victor Villasenor told me about what a great teacher does. Preparing students for college is fine, he said. But the most important thing is to create a love for learning!

On some days, I am certain this feels like an impossible task. However, at well-managed, inspired, and coherent schools, teachers’ voices are encouraged, carefully considered, and affirmed. Spirited dialog among faculty is respected. And the development of our students takes center stage, as their voices are also heard and used to inform the work. Billy and Gary promote this on their own campuses. A colleague of mine, Mike Neece, who is one of our great leadership trainers, has said that our schools are perfectly designed for the results we are getting. But what are the results we really want and need, and how do we redesign our work to get better results? What are the results that our future demands?

Billy and Gary often say that our students have plenty of information, yet how do they make sense of it, and how do we assist their development and help them interpret the world? International measures such as the PISA test and national barometers such as NAEP tell us that our U.S. students are not keeping pace in their content skills, but more importantly, are also lagging in critical reasoning. On the PISA assessment of critical thinking, we once led the world and now rank in the mid-twenties against other industrialized nations. Our job is not to give them more information. They have plenty.

Billy Madigan, with help from Gary Kroesch, puts the burden on teachers to understand the world of their students, to recognize that they live in what some might call The Information Overload Age. As Billy has often said to me, our students have everything at their fingertips—whether they are skyping, blogging, chatting, networking, downloading—but, without the guidance of teachers who recognize the moral imperative of their work, our young people will literally remain in the Dark Ages.

Together, Madigan and Kroesch have over 60 years of teaching experience. More importantly, they remain learners, constantly seeking out new insights about the world, the latest research on teaching. Countless times, I have received emails from Madigan (or Mad Dog, as I call him) telling me I needed to read the latest article in the Atlantic on how children develop their behavior patterns, or referring me to the work of Sir Michael Rutter, Daniel Pink, and countless others.

As you read this book, prepare to be inspired, but also prepare to be challenged. Prepare to do the best work of your life every day. That’s what Billy and Gary expect. That’s what they do.

Robert Gira,

AVID Executive Vice-President

INTRODUCTION

For the first time in human history, we are living in an age where the youth of our nation know more about society’s cutting-edge tools than the adults charged with passing society’s technical and cultural knowledge on to them. Most of our young people have far more facility with computer and telecommunications technology than our teaching corps – and, generally, that gap only widens as students travel from elementary school all the way to university and beyond.

Teens and young adults are thumb-typing at lightning speed, blogging, skyping, twittering and surfing YouTube on a regular basis. Television, the medium of today’s adults, is fast being left behind in favor of the Internet. Small wonder. Instead of that well-documented wasteland of platitudes and cloying commercial messages, young people find that the Web is their entree to a fascinating new world – in a way and at a time they want. It’s, literally, the whole world at their fingertips – or just the slice of it that suits each individual. It’s not the same refried cop show/medical show/lawyer show that someone else has been broadcasting in that time slot since before they were born. The Internet is this incredibly vast, mostly uncontrolled, highly personal – and, yet, anonymous – landscape whose scope is so vast its depths will never be fully plumbed. You never have to cross the same river twice. Nothing in human history can compare to its power, variety or the speed with which it has become the dominant cultural medium. Virtually nonexistent in 1995, by 2000, it had permeated every aspect of our social and business lives.

How are we to respond? Our children can search any topic, watch any video, or order a bottle of single malt any time they want as long as they can type in a valid credit card number. Many are members of massive social networks -- some 4 million on Facebook alone – where innocents mingle with predators. There is absolutely nothing to prevent our young people from wandering into the less savory corners of the Web, and many of them do. They can have secret conversations and virtual liaisons with strangers across town or around the world. They also can tailor their world view to their liking, frequenting only those websites and online organizations that agree with their belief systems – be they religious, political or nihilistic.

But their sophistication with technology notwithstanding, most of our students are still children or teens whose mental and emotional development is, literally, stuck in the Dark Ages. As we will explore in later chapters, human physiology has not kept pace with new technology, and this presents new pitfalls, dangers and challenges for both our society and our young people who are quite simply growing up too quickly.

It’s a brave new -- and, often, dangerous -- world that today’s youth must learn to navigate. Now, more than ever, they need educators to step up and teach them how to be critical thinkers able to discriminate between the true and the merely seductive, to see beyond the glossy veneer on harmful websites, harmful ideas and, sadly, harmful people in both the real and cyber worlds. We need to spend a little less time teaching students how to take standardized tests and a lot more time developing their critical faculties, so they will be able to solve life’s problems, profit from challenging situations, and understand the increasingly complex world they must ken at an earlier and earlier age.

No matter how they want to be perceived, students are not fully formed adults with the necessary life experiences that seem to be a pre-requisite to wisdom. They are children with not-yet-fully formed mental and emotional faculties; and, no matter how mature their bodies may be, how hip and intelligent they may appear, they are still not-yet educated, not yet ready for a challenging world and, thus, ripe for victimization. Without a critical mind, how can we expect them to navigate the ever-expanding world that is being created at an ever-faster pace on the Web and in the classroom? We need to teach them how to cope; and that requires a new balance between standardization in education and literacy in problem-solving and creativity.

We who have this sacred charge must expand our repertoire beyond the minimum expected and even the ceiling imposed by an administrative framework that is – let’s face it – stultifying. We must raise our game to a new level and achieve our goals in spite of the system. We can’t allow the various educational labels and classifications to impede us – problem children, special needs and the rest of it. We must look past the labels and foster a new appreciation for the innate gifts and human potential of each child-learner. Each child with problems is an opportunity to make a difference in a young life.

We must combine the hard science of teaching with the soft art of educating, combining what we do with who we are. It’s a difficult balance to achieve because of the human and organizational tendency to swing, pendulum-like, from one extreme to another. Introducing new ideas that break a mold can be a difficult and slow process. At the moment, education is bogged down in an obsessive-compulsive attachment to what is measurable and testable. Well, the world asks a great deal more of educators than what can be easily tested.

New approaches and new paradigms will be needed if we are to successfully engage students who are totally immersed in a world that developed long after most of us reached adulthood. There is a generation gap here. Even though we educators also utilize the Internet, we don’t do it in the same way, visit the same sites, or have the same interests as our students. We aren’t part of their texting cliques, and don’t keep up with the twists and turns in their slang and cultural mores. We moved