not an anomaly

In today's Arkansas Democrat-Gazette newspaper, an article presents an interesting insight into remediation rates, which is the number of students graduating from high school that will require preparatory or remedial courses in reading or math upon college enrollment. Fewer than 10% of those students requiring remediation graduate from 4 year colleges, so fixing the remediation problem is crucial to our children's success.

Districts Deal with Remediation by Scarlet Sims.

The state-wide rate is 45.1 percent, but there are pockets like the Decatur School District in Northwest Arkansas with rates much higher. The 2009 remediation rate for Decatur was 87.5%, equivalent to that of the poorest areas of the Arkansas delta. The high rate in Decatur did not catch the superintendent by surprise: "It's not an anomaly. That's kind of the way it's been here for a long time." Which raises the question, "Why don't they do something about it?" And if students know so little about reading and math, how much more are they missing about science, history and political science? Are we supposed to have confidence that these students can be entrusted with democracy?

The standard approach is to blame the teachers for failing schools, but there are things that only the very best teachers can fix, like kids who have learned to not care about learning. Sophomore Logan Jamison explains it as follows: "Why know when Christopher Columbus sailed the ocean blue when you are laying bricks?" Logan's ambition is to become a bricklayer like his father and grandfather, and you can't get kids to suddenly become interested in math and physics if they don't see the point. Obviously no one has helped Logan to understand the interrelationship of all things.

Pushing abstract academics in place of hands-on relevant learning to kids who are not ready to embrace abstract learning is counterproductive. Not only is it ineffective, it creates resistance to learning and attitudes of hostility toward academics that can last a lifetime and even be passed to the next generation. One of the outstanding characteristics of education in Finland is the notion that all children should have training in sloyd, just as all students should have training in math, science, language arts.

When Uno Cygnaeus, founder of educational sloyd, was given the responsibility by the Russian Czar of forming the Finnish Folk Schools, he created a culture of learning, and without that culture, children fail to see the relevance of things that we all know to be important to them.

"We're all mystified," explains John Tuthill, associate vice president for student learning at Northwest Arkansas Community College. "We blame the high schools, they blame the elementary schools, and the elementary schools blame the parents."

The important thing is not the assignment of blame, but the question, "How do we dig our way out of this educational morass?" The situation with remediation rates is not an anomaly, but a predictable consequence, in some areas and with some students, of social and economic class expectations having to do with disparagement of the importance of learning.  How do we fix things? Establish a culture, based on a renewed understanding of hands-on learning and its impact and implications for all students. We are all smarter when our hands are engaged in learning.

In the meantime, our Nation's First Full-Time High School Culinary Program Opens. It really doesn't matter whether you learned your fractions in the wood shop, or student kitchen. Or home kitchen or granpa's woodshop for that matter. But what matters is that the hands provide the means through which to grasp learning. Do it with your hands, and ideas take hold. Where they will take you from here, God only knows. Make, fix, create.

Here's an article that sings the praises of standardized testing. A must read. Standardized Testing: The New Wild West by Tod Farley, author of Making the Grades: My Misadventures in the Standardized Testing Industry