Finding Solutions to Oregon's Education Problems

Phil Robbins

It is one thing to define the problems and shortcomings of the education establishment; it is quite another to find solutions that work in the real world.  Let's summarize some of the problems previously discussed in this blog and then look at some alternative approaches to solving these problems.

• Inadequate reading instruction in the first and second grades leading to poor student achievement in the higher grades.
• Inadequate composition (writing) instruction in the junior and senior years in high school leaving large percentages of students incapable of doing college work.
• Both of these skills along with the inability to do higher math lead to expensive remedial courses in the first year of college that do not earn credit toward a college degree.
• Politicians pour billions of dollars into areas that have little or no effect on student achievement such as salaries, insurance, facilities, fuel and lowering class size.  With respect to class size, does anyone seriously expect that lowering class size from say 27 to 25 students will have any effect upon the student's ability to read, write or do math?
• Only one to two percent of most budgets are allocated to textbooks and teaching materials, the basis for student achievement.  A great teacher without textbooks and other teaching materials has as much chance of educating students as a first-class carpenter trying to frame a house without a hammer, saw and a square.

                 New Approaches to Solving These Problems            In this post I'll discuss a few of these problems in a general way and then specifically and in detail in future posts.

Reading                                                                                                        Reading instruction must have a strong, systematic phonics component if students are going to have a good foundation for reading advanced materials, becoming good spellers and developing extensive vocabularies.  For several decades there has been a great debate on the pros and cons of the whole language approach and the phonics approach to teaching reading with the whole language approach holding sway with the majority of educators.  Because of the dismal results, about fifteen years ago the public and legislatures began demanding a return to phonics, so today there is usually a mixture of both approaches being taught in most classroom, with mixed results.  It is not a question of whether phonics is taught but to what extent and how it is taught.  There is a better way, and I'll discuss a program that works in detail in my next post.

Writing                                                                                                     Writing well in college requires knowledge of composition, grammar, punctuation as well as the ability to think. In most school districts there are some language arts teachers that do an adequate job of teaching composition, but most do not.  How do we know?  It is reflected by the large numbers of entering freshmen failing college writing placement exams.

There are a number of reasons for this.  Whereas today schools tend to put a great deal of emphasis on reading and math, most schools do not demand the same level of excellence in writing.  Most language arts teachers are not writers themselves and do not have a strong first-hand knowledge of style principles, idea development devices or the various kinds of formatting used in report writing.  Not only that, few teachers want to spend endless hours reading and evaluating hundreds of pages of student writing, much of which is mind numbing and riddled with errors.

Furthermore, there is the problem of textbooks.  There are some schools where students are taught without textbooks in some subjects.  For instance, instead of assigning a student a grammar book, the teacher gives him a handout sheet with an assignment and a few instructions on it that was obtained from the Internet.  By the same token, teachers' lesson plans are often downloaded from the Internet for free or on a paid subscription basis.  One can only guess at the quality of this kind of curriculum planning and execution.

Schools as Information Repositories                                                    Schools, and public schools in particular, have an almost monopolistic hold on learning materials and the means of dispensing education.  At the end of a semester, a student goes on to another class or summer vacation, and the sources of his learning (textbooks, other teaching materials and teacher knowledge) remain with the school.  Nothing goes with the student; there is no way for him to review or reflect on what he has learned during the school year.  Thorndike's and Ebbinghaus's forgetting curves set in, and without reinforcement it is not long before he has forgotten most of what he had learned.

This need not be the case.  Many parents often do their best to have educational materials in the home.  This is most important in skill subjects such as reading, writing, math, grammar and punctuation--things that don't change much.  Modern technology makes possible putting whole textbooks on a 15-cent CD or a 25-cent DVD.  The real problem is that politicians at all levels perpetuate the traditional monopoly by their funding practices instead of looking for solutions outside the box.  For instance, why not put information, exercises and so forth on a CD and give it to the student to take home and keep?  Think of the range of possibilities?