Dozing Into Oblivion With Old School Ways

According to Ventura County Supt. of Schools Charles Weis, if Rip Van Winkle were to return from snoozing in the Catskills today, the only building he would recognize would be the schoolhouse. Learning has undergone little change since Washington Irving’s short story was published in 1820.

As Ventura County residents count down to 2000, public schooling still slumbers within the “sage on the stage” paradigm. Centuries of the lecture method, characterized by tidy rows of diminutive desks and untidy walls of creaky chalkboards, thumb their nose at the ready availability of new technology as well as copious research documenting the various ways children learn. Even the textbooks students lug around in overloaded backpacks are unnecessarily huge, hefty and high-priced.

Consider, instead, allowing the personal computer to relocate the teacher to “guide on the side,” free to offer up dazzling multimedia presentations, present a multitude of multidisciplinary lesson plans or call on cyber-support systems to permit individualized pace independent of age or grade level.

Why has no paradigm shift been forthcoming? Progress in pedagogy seems irreversibly pegged to education’s geologic rate of change.

Educational institutions stuck in tradition, however, will soon snore into oblivion. Smart schools, many of which have already forged reciprocal relationships with local business, are busy updating classrooms into pupil-friendly work spaces and gearing mission statements toward turning out an employable product.

Private schools heeded the wake-up call. Public educators alternately napped or pined for a friendly face in the governor’s office. The nightmare of burgeoning support (the Public Policy Institute of California contends that 53% of Golden State adults favor school vouchers) has the Old School in schooling rushing to rub sand from drowsy eyelids.

No gubernatorial candidate stayed better on message or waved a wetter finger in the political winds than Gray Davis. Californians demanded reforms. Davis’s appointment of former state Sen. Gary Hart to the new post of California education secretary underlined his campaign commitment to levitate the Golden State out of the test score / graduation rate cellar.

Davis’s four-pronged plan is a good start, despite the unmistakable queasiness of the California Teachers Assn. (million-dollar contributor to the Davis campaign) with requiring instructors to assess each other’s competence in the classroom. Furthermore, Golden State legislators (you don’t want to know how either laws or sausages are made) have yet to run Senate Bill 1 (accountability), SB2 (exit exams) and reading improvement measures through the legislative meat grinder. Various vociferous voices do, however, agree that speed kills and suggest taking a lesson from the nearly instantaneous implementation of class-size reduction before trained teachers and adequate space could be made available.

Ventura County has been happily beta-testing most of Davis’s “big ideas” already. Reading improvement is an objective on both sides of the Conejo Grade. The Oxnard Union High School District routinely exit-exams graduating seniors. Carol A. Bartell, dean of the school of education at Cal Lutheran University, contends that, around these parts, accountability is a train that has already left the station. She depicts Ventura County as a place where diversity is seen as desirable and people really care about each other’s kids.

In Ventura County elementary classrooms, early indicators of class-size reduction effects, albeit anecdotal, are largely positive. Despite the flap over phonics (the latest “F” word) more time spent per student enables the teacher to select from a repertoire of reading strategies instead of the method du jour.

The single factor preventing Ventura County middle and high schools from likewise slicing student numbers in English, math and science courses is a nationwide shortage of qualified teachers.

Perhaps the solution to that puzzle can be found in cajoling local folk ready to embark on second or even third careers to opt for the psychic income of teaching over the big bucks of private enterprise.

Washington Irving was born the youngest of 11 siblings. Before reaching the tender age of 16, this self-confessed “poor scholar” had already failed in four schools. The “Father of American Literature” did manage, however, to profit from time well-spent in the family’s amply stocked library.

There ought to be a lesson in there somewhere.