The Meta-Problem in Education That No One is Talking About

(Written October 2, 2010)

My new gig is going reasonably well, for anyone who is interested. I think we are making some progress in arts education in West Virginia, though really it is too early to tell. All the Debbie Downers among my friends tell me that nothing is going to change, nothing ever has changed, a proposition that is demonstrably false. Others seem surprised that in the two months I've been working for the West Virginia Department of Education that I’ve not doubled arts funding in every county and fixed everyone’s schedules. Both of those issues are pretty far from my control, but I’m doing what I can. As predicted, I do miss teaching. That’s no surprise to anyone, least of all myself. I just hope that the work I am doing will yield some results over the coming years. Building 6 is a remarkably less stimulating environment than the music classroom and I will return to it if I don’t see fruits from my labors in the coming two or three years.

A lot of the work I am doing is self-directed. I see a problem that I want to fix and I try to address it the best way I can. To that end, we (and I’m using the plural pronoun there literally, not like the papal “we”) are working on issues like our dance certification, art and music teachers in every elementary school, professional development for administrators on arts education, and more. Other tasks get assigned to me, either because I show an interest in them or because I’m the new kid on the block and it’s easy to give me assignments. So I’m on a committee for promoting student engagement, answering questions about the issue of creativity in the classroom, meeting with a work group dedicated to parental involvement and serving as a liaison from WVDE to the Martin Luther King Celebration planning committee. Still other jobs are handed to me because someone else sees their importance and thinks I’m the one to do them. These are the trickiest ones, because they seem to take up a lot of time and sometimes I’m not entirely sure that my skills are matched to the task. I’m working on one like that right now.

The Office of Instruction has been asked to provide professional development sessions at an upcoming Title I conference for educational leaders from around the state. These would be primarily principals and superintendents, I believe. My session is being co-presented with our Science Coordinator. It is entitled, “Why You Should Still Teach Science, Social Studies and the Arts.” Take a minute and let that sink in. Got it? Jack Deskins, who has spent most of his professional life teaching teenagers how to finger concert A-natural is charged with convincing educational leaders that the core academic subjects of science, social studies and the arts are important enough for children to learn. For those of you not from the greater Bridgeport area, I will try to explain.

For schools to make Adequate Yearly Progress (AYP), the federal measure that determines if yours is a failing school, certain data is collected. Specifically, states test their students using some sort of nationally-normed, standardized instrument. In West Virginia, ours is called the Westest. The Westest purports to measure academic achievement in English, math, science and social studies – most of the core academic subjects (ahem). Yet for purposes of federal accountability, only English and math data are used. The thinking behind that is . . . well, honestly I have no idea. Someone in the federal government believed (and still does) that literacy and numeracy are the only skills that matter. Not only that, but only those English and math skills that can be readily measured on a standardized test matter (“No sonnets for you, Jimmy!!!”).

A few weeks ago, the Board of Education in Harrison County, West Virginia, made a startling announcement. Well, startling for anyone who does not understand cause and effect. They announced that they would no longer be teaching science and social studies to their elementary students. Their reasoning (tee hee) went like this: since the federal government only requires minimal language and math scores to make AYP, we are going to pour all of our efforts into those two academic areas. (Interestingly, they did not mention the arts. I am assuming that Harrison County will continue its practice of offering minimal arts instruction to its elementary students.)

Now your humble narrator and one of his stalwart colleagues are charged with changing the minds of those who might follow this questionable practice.

I could talk about this issue specifically at length. That there are those in positions of educational leadership who do not view the potential loss of culture, the scientific method and law as significant seems beyond distressing. But as I was preparing my session for this week, another issue seems to loom larger.

Suppose for a moment that you are a principal or superintendent looking at your low language and math scores and wondering how you are going to address the problem. What skills are you going to use? Well, it will require analysis and critical thinking to understand the meaning of the data and the attendant issues. It will require collaboration as you seek to maximize human resources in your office and in your school(s). And it will require imagination, creativity and problem-solving skills as you look for new solutions. After all, simply doing the same thing you have always done is not working.

In other words, you will need that 21st Century skill set that we know our students need in the world they will inhabit when they leave our classrooms. We recognize that our students will not succeed if they possess only those basal skills that an educational framework rooted in the Industrial Revolution is designed to provide. (Incidentally, those basal skills are still the only skills that standardized tests are able to measure.) Most of our students cannot leave high school and go to jobs in the mines and factories. Most of those jobs have been lost to automation and Asia (read Dan Pink).

The problem of poor-performing schools is a 21st Century problem. I do not mean to imply that it is new this century, merely that the problem itself is a classic example of one requiring those skills. The “meta-problem” is that most of our administrators have a skill set rooted in the 20th century. That is to say, many of them may have scored well on both the verbal and math on the SAT. It doesn’t matter. They lack the ability to think critically, collaborate, solve complex problems, imagine and use creativity. These are just the skills necessary if we hope to have students who can think critically, collaborate, solve complex problems, imagine and use creativity.

This is why those educational leaders do not understand the problem they are facing. Let me give you an example.

If you were an administrator, you might intuitively believe that the solution to low reading comprehension would be to drill students on words and definitions. Your intuition would be wrong. Students do not acquire language through word banks, although most of us can remember weekly spelling and definition tests all through our education. How do they learn words and their meanings? Through experience. Let me illustrate further.

A child might first encounter a spiral looking at a snail shell. She would note the pleasing shape and might even be interested enough to attempt to reproduce it through drawing. Then she might visit a building with a spiral staircase and something in her mind would connect the shape to the snail and the drawing she made. In science class at school, she might see diagrams of a geological time spiral or pictures of spiral galaxies. When she encountered the definition of spiral – “A curve on a plane that winds around a fixed center point at a continuously increasing or decreasing distance from the point” – that sentence would have meaning for her, rooted as it was in her prior knowledge. Later, when she encountered spiral algorithms in math or read a sentence that said, “His life was a downward spiral,” those experiences would deepen her understanding of what those six letters could mean. If she encountered a piece of music where the composer tried to create the feeling of a spiral descent, she would recognize it. You could probably add to these experiences.

Jung believed that the purpose of life was to create meaning. At their best, schools are places where students learn habits of mind and symbol systems that allow them to find and create meaning in their world. If we have administrators who fail to recognize this, then schools will continue to teach children a minimal set of increasingly irrelevant skills. The meta-problem facing our schools is not a lack of skills, it is a lack of imagination.