We’ve recently lost an advocate for effective education for our children.
“Vito Perrone Sr., a leading advocate for humanistic, regimentation-free public education and a mentor to several generations of liberal reformers who fought the tide of standardized testing, died on Aug. 24 in Cambridge, Mass. He was 78.
Among progressive reformers, Dr. Perrone’s commitment to flexible teaching methods and his opposition to standardized tests made him the conscience of the profession in the modern era, when financially stressed schools nationwide embraced standardized tests as a way to improve academic performance and streamline the teaching process.
In Dr. Perrone’s view, which he disseminated for 40 years as a professor of education, first at the University of North Dakota and later at Harvard, the excessive use of such tests warped the education process, inhibited children’s natural interest in learning, caused teachers stress and prevented them from carrying out their real jobs: instilling in children a love of learning and teaching them the principles of citizenship in a democracy.”
~excerpt from a recent New York Times article
Because I am a former teacher, the third paragraph evoked strong feelings in me. I have experienced what Dr. Perrone describes. When I taught school, so much of our time in the classroom was taken up with preparing for tests, drawing up reports on test results, setting goals for each child, and making plans for how to make every child score better on upcoming tests. As we became more and more rigidly scripted, finding time for the strategies I felt would be helpful for a specific child became increasingly more difficult. Soon, they had to be crammed in between the required lessons, if at all.
I have also never understood how testing was going to improve learning. What I experienced as a teacher was how much more our teaching time was seriously interrupted by testing. And too often, because I was teaching young children, testing results didn’t accurately reflect a child’s ability. For instance, my 1st and 2nd graders were tested using DIBELS. Part of this test requires them to sound out nonsense patterns of letters. Non-words. Some children could handle this, but I had some students that were excellent readers who simply could not sound out nonsense “words” and so their overall score fell. Similarly, some children who were more deliberate readers, or who were shy and uncomfortable with a stranger testing them, did not perform as well as they normally would. Again, their scores did not reflect their abilities. Essentially, testing did not help them learn nor did it help them love learning.
Having to watch students be put into special education due to the results of tests broke my heart. It did not matter that the children were completely capable of learning. And when I was asked to provide anecdotal material to support their inclusion in special education, I just couldn’t do it. I left the system believing it would be more likely I could help children than if I remained in the classroom. In 2006, I founded Child1st—my way of continuing to work for children, their parents, and for those educators that continue to find a way to reach children, one at a time.
I believe that educators like Dr. Perrone and thousands of teachers who remain in the public school system, passionate to really teach children, don’t have a voice that is heard. Policies are implemented by politicians; people who are far away from the classroom. No Child Left Behind has cut a deep swath through our public education system so that the “river” is now flowing in a direction many of us have come to lament. Certainly our children are losing out the most.
What I suspect will happen is that the more schools frantically try to raise scores and the more rigid public education becomes, the more effectively educating children will fall to parents. Parents can teach without the restrictions that exist in public schools today. They have the liberty of discovering the giftedness of each of their children, and are then free to choose an approach and a pace that works best for each one.
The article on Dr. Perrone ends like this:
“What if our children and young people learn to read and write but don’t like to and don’t?” he said. “What if they don’t read the newspapers and magazines, or can’t find beauty in a poem or love story? What if they don’t go as adults to artistic events, don’t listen to a broad range of music, aren’t optimistic about the world and their place in it, don’t notice the trees and the sunset, are indifferent to older citizens, don’t participate in politics or community life?”
With a teacher’s rhetorical urgency, he added, “Should any of this worry us?”
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