What are the building blocks of a healthy body? What ingredients are required to ensure the building blocks are present and integrated correctly to maximize performance? Top athletes know how to fine tune their bodies for maximum output. They recognize the building blocks needed to assure the necessary ingredients are provided for optimum balance.
The three building blocks on which athletes train are:
- Highest Standards
- Proper Modeling
- Expert Coaching
This can be illustrated by a person who is sick and in the hospital. Even though the sick person may have a problem with one of several vital systems operating in their body, doctors don't ignore the healthy systems. They attend to the whole person with a view to the goal of optimum recovery. Those advocating for education reform would do well to keep this in mind. Otherwise, we may fix a broken part of a bigger systemic problem that doesn't really meet the need (like a mechanic replacing tires on a vehicle that has no brakes).
High StandardsEducation should always be designed with the highest goal in mind. We recognize the need for accommodation to meet the needs of some, however the goal should remain the same if society wishes to sustain itself in an ever-progressing way. After all, education is a function of culture to ensure its mores, ways, and beliefs are able to be propagated optimally.
Proper Modeling
Training requires a model that visually confirms the standards are high, the goal is possible, and there is help available to get us there. Among athletes in our earlier allusion, these models consist generally of the coaches and fellow athletes. Within the educational framework, proper modeling requires teachers, administrators, and the community at large to uphold the agreed upon building blocks. If any group of stakeholders demeans or depreciates one of the building blocks, the foundation will remain shaky at best.
Expert Coaching
Coaches know how to push players to the next level. Competent teachers know how to motivate students to grow in their understanding of subject-matter knowledge. Qualified, skilled, and competent teachers as well as administrators and even support staff, should be our baseline, not our goal. Settling for the next best thing does not lend to a firm foundation for the institution.
Balance
To maintain a balance, all the stakeholders (teachers, students, admin, and community) must agree on these three fundamental building blocks. Then, procedures to ensure their maintenance must be established. The education standards are designed as baseline standards not the goal toward which we press. Demanding proper modeling among our school staff is not asking too much. If I demand optimum performance from my body, do I feed it junk food? If we demand quality education from our children, do we supply them sub-par examples in the learning environment? And we must nurture the coaching skills that help students push the limits within their minds.
Challenges
Some proponents for school reform place too much emphasis on one building block to the exclusion of the others. This will not reform education but rather build another topsy turvy institution requiring more patches and bandaids in the future.
Changing ideologies, philosophies, mind-sets, and old-think attitudes, takes time but that time should be spent following the proper procedures to ensure a healthy balance of the three building blocks.
What are the baseline standards of an excellent education?
What requirements do we uphold for our staff who model the proper practices?
Are we nurturing an envelope-pushing generation with skilled teaching?
These three building blocks should be the foundation of our reform efforts. All other accommodations should not only support these building blocks, they must not detract from them. In other words, just because we desire to accommodate, say, English language learners (ELLs) in order that they too might reach the highest standards we have set, such accommodation must not retard the attempt of non-ELLs to achieve the same standards.
As an example, imagine the cruise control directions to "set your speed a little slower than the person in front of you." If everyone did this, we would be repeatedly adjusting our speed downward until we would slow all traffic to 35 mph, the minimum threshold for operating cruise control. Thus, the dumbing-down of the whole, the mediocre mainstream, the leveling of minds to the least common denominator in the name of accommodation rather than reaching the highest standards as our baseline.
The education system today is muddling along at 35 mph because of a wrong focus on accommodation for accommodation sake and because we want to prove we are doing a good thing, we teach to the standardized test instead of to the former high standards we once held. As a result, charter schools have become a popular alternative with each touting its strengths and unique approach to the challenge of the mainstream institution. This is a bandage approach because it abandons the teetering institution in its unstable state in order to build something new elsewhere. Is this the highest and best use of public monies? (posted 2/9/10)
