Dayton Daily News education reporter Scott Elliott writes about schools, kids, teaching and learning.
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Sunday, May 7, 2006
Silver bullet reform
In one way, David Brooks’ column Sunday in the New York Times annoyed me. (subscription required)
He starts out by describing the classic, 20-year-old experiment by Walter Mischel in which he promised 4-year-olds two marshmallows as long as they didn’t touch the marshmallow sitting in front of them until after he left the room and returned.
Here’s where he turned this into a an education policy lesson:
The children who waited longer went on to get higher SAT scores. They got into better colleges and had, on average, better adult outcomes. The children who rang the bell quickest were more likely to become bullies. They received worse teacher and parental evaluations 10 years on and were more likely to have drug problems at age 32.
The Mischel experiments are worth noting because people in the policy world spend a lot of time thinking about how to improve education, how to reduce poverty, how to make the most of the nation’s human capital. But when policy makers address these problems, they come up with structural remedies: reduce class sizes, create more charter schools, increase teacher pay, mandate universal day care, try vouchers.
The results of these structural reforms are almost always disappointingly modest. And yet policy makers rarely ever probe deeper into problems and ask the core questions, such as how do we get people to master the sort of self-control that leads to success?
Right off the bat, this column was shaping up to be a classic “silver bullet solution.” You know, another example of somebody who doesn’t pay much attention to the complexities of our vast, diverse and disconnected national education system and tells us there’s a stunningly simple road to wildly improving education in the U.S., in this case just by teaching kids self control.
We’ve seen this before, such as when Nicholas Kristof told us dumping teacher certification is all we need to do to get great teachers, or when Oprah Winfrey trumpeted a handful of small schools and charter school innovations as the antidote to our education woes, or there was John Stossel’s argument that school choice would make all public schools better.
But as I read the rest of Brooks’ column, a funny thing happened. I didn’t disagree with his premise.
In the column, Brooks goes on to argue that education policy, by it’s nature, tends to focus on grand scale changes — big, systemic reforms. And often, policymakers overlook the practical aspects of what’s need at the classroom level. Ideas like small schools, choice and teacher certification reform may, indeed, help improve some aspects of how kids learn. But really none of those ideas, by itself, has direct impact on what kids are taught or the way they are taught.
There probably isn’t enough deep thought about more basic problems, like how to motivate kids to want things that will help them learn. And too often, schools write kids off as unchangeable — believing, for instance, that a kid with little self control is just unmanagable. As Brooks discusses, even an impulse control problem can be improved, if only schools would recognize the need and have the expertise to employ strategies that work.
But those nitty-gritty issues are murky and complex, and often the solutions aren’t broadstroke. They aren’t even always the same for every kid. And they’re just flat not as sexy to say out loud as “free market reform” or “standards.”
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