Paul Tough's Helping Kids Succeed includes many depressing statistics, most of which contribute to an indictment of the contemporary school reform movement. However, Tough cites other evidence which helps explain why reformers were so vehement in demanding transformative change and blowing up the education "status quo." The evidence Tough cites from Robert Pianta, Joseph Allen, James Stigler, and James Hiebert includes the facts that are the most painful for teachers to contemplate.
Pianta's researchers studied elementary instruction and "found that in almost every school they observed, the instruction students received was repetitive and undemanding, limited mostly to the endless practice of basic skills." Pianta et. al also found:
Students in schools populated mostly by middle-class-and-above children were about equally likely to find themselves in a classroom with engaged and interesting instruction (47 percent of students) as in one with basic, repetitive instruction (53 percent of students). But students in schools serving mostly low-income children were almost all (91 percent) in classrooms marked by basic, uninteresting teaching.
Stigler and Hiebert documented an international pattern that was complementary to what Allen, Pianta and their team saw in American classrooms. In contrast to the normative basic skills approach to math, in Japan, "41 percent of students' time in math class was still spent on basic practice -- churning through one problem after another -- but 44 percent was devoted to more creative stuff: inventing new procedures or adapting familiar procedures to unfamiliar material."
On the other hand, it is hard to say how much of the retrograde instruction in high-poverty American schools is a longstanding norm, and how much of it reflects ways that output-driven school reform took lousy schools and made them worse. When I entered the inner city classroom in the early 1990s, I was stunned by the great teaching talent in my underperforming high school. Unfortunately, too much of the instruction was characterized as "feed the chickens," where teachers skillfully tossed out information, and students in the front half of the classroom gobbled it up. Those in the back, and the "hall walkers" scattered on the edges of the school's property, were free to learn - or not.
Many teachers wanted to teach in an engaging and holistic manner, and they were capable of doing so in orderly environments. But, worksheet-driven malpractice was commonly imposed because it was the best way to keep classes under control. Drill and kill worked like the swaddling of ancient days; by squeezing the energy out of the classroom, it resulted in acceptably quiet classes where kids turned their brains off and copied the answers out of textbooks.
Tough reports that Pianta's professional development, without the punitive portion of the Gates Foundation's approach to teacher evaluations, improved practice and raised student performance. My Teaching Partner enhanced "personal interactions in the classroom between teachers and students" and helped "build a 'positive emotional climate.'" Tough also describes an EL charter middle school's lesson on political debates of the 1790s. Students created "posters with slogans and arguments supporting the case for their vision of government," and prepared for a debate, as the "teacher glided from table to table, asking questions and offering advice."
In other words, Tough praises the type of professional development that was common when I entered the classroom, as well as the aspirational goals that most of our teachers had for their practice. In my experience, test-driven reform drove that sort of enriching professional development from the inner city. Accountability-driven reformers, rightly and wrongly, argued that the gains from such teacher training were too modest, and progress was too slow. They correctly complained that too many teachers felt free to blow off the lessons offered in disconnected workshops. They wrongly ignored a point which Tough makes, and failed to recognize the chicken and egg question that cuts both ways in schools where students (due to the pain they bring to class) are "often unruly and underperforming." Yes, better instruction would reduce the disorder but it is hard to teach in an authentic manner when facing "patterns of behavior that are self-defeating: fighting, talking back, acting up in class."
Speaking solely as a high school teacher, I'd offer a concurring opinion in regard to the pedagogies praised by Tough. Having participated in fantastic cooperative learning, I am a true believer in progressive, experiential methods when they are done well enough to focus on learning objectives, motivate students, and help them grapple with the learning process. Teamwork also builds a broader awareness, teaches synthesis, and creates a peripheral vision that is required to understand the seamless nature of reality. To truly understand a blade of grass, students still need to understand the universe. In the same vein, to provide authentic instruction, teachers must come to grips with the way in which their classroom is a part of the larger school system and part of the community infrastructure in which these children live.
But, as Tough acknowledges, we can't ignore the chaos which is common in so many inner city secondary schools. That is one reason why I'm impressed with Richard Clark, Paul Kirschner, and John Sweller, and their paper "Putting Students on the Path to Learning." It warned teachers that cognitive research has determined that public school students need "fully guided instruction," where teachers fully explain the concepts which students need to learn. Partially guided is not enough, especially for low-skilled, high-challenge students. They recommended that teachers preview the main idea of the lesson, use a variety of media to show students how to work through the problem they are studying, give step-by-step explanations, and then walk them through class procedures.
Regardless of that limited dissent, I've often mourned the lost opportunity of the early years of school reform before it morphed into anti-teacher corporate reform. Part of the problem was that the elite non-educators didn't know what they didn't know about poverty and school systems. They made a snap conclusion that the system was unfixable. They thus made reckless gambles in the faith that incentives and disincentives would create something unknown but different. Tough, on the other hand, writes, "We don't need to know exactly what to do in order to know that we need to do something." The difference is that Tough would experiment in ways that may or may not produce scalable winners, but that would not produce inevitable losers.