K12LEADERS

Category: Breakdown Spotlight

  • Why the Rush toward Generative AI Literacy in K-12 Schools May Be Premature

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    The emergence of generative artificial intelligence is driving a movement to rapidly embed genAI literacy — the understanding and skills required to responsibly and effectively utilize these technologies — into the fabric of K-12 education. While this work is well-intentioned, aiming to prepare children for a tech-centric future, the challenge lies in discerning the appropriate timing, speed and manner of integrating genAI literacy, and ultimately, the technology itself into K-12.

    One reason widespread genAI literacy in K-12 may be premature is the technology’s current state. The breakneck pace of development, coupled with underlying complexities and unknowns, makes it exceptionally challenging to provide evidence-based education. For instance, how genAI makes decisions remains a mystery, even to its creators. Anthropic CEO Dario Amodei, a leader in the field, recently suggested that genAI is “inherently unpredictable.” What’s more, the technology’s rapid advancement vastly exceeds the more measured pace of curriculum development and associated professional development necessary for high-quality instruction. This imbalance could put schools and districts at risk of constantly having to play catch-up with the skills and understanding needed to teach students how to use genAI responsibly, rather than concentrating on equipping them with a fundamental and lasting base of knowledge.

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    Second, an urgent push to incorporate genAI literacy in classrooms might lead to a low quality of tools, content and teaching as companies prioritize quickly getting their products to market over ensuring the rigor and educational integrity of their offerings.

    Related

    Iowa Professors Say Students Must Be Educated About Artificial Intelligence

    Third, genAI literacy — even if focused on responsible adoption — implicitly suggests that the technology is safe for children. Putting aside doomsday hypotheticals — in a recent poll, 50% of genAI researchers said they believe there is a 10% or greater chance that humans will go extinct from our inability to control the technology — existing problems, such as false information and misinformation, deep fakes, bias and phishing, highlight the fact that none of the current major genAI models, including ChatGPT, Claude, Bard and Co-Pilot, are being built specifically with kids’ safety in mind. 

    Finally, the push for widespread genAI literacy may detract from more pressing priorities. These include, somewhat ironically, systematic preparation for the adoption of genAI to minimize future risks, as well as investments in fundamental subjects like literacy, mathematics, arts and physical education. It might also drain crucial resources supporting students’ social, emotional and mental well-being, which will be especially critical to preserve amid looming budget challenges.

    Related

    7 Artificial Intelligence Trends That Could Reshape Education in 2024

    Still, while acknowledging these concerns, it’s also crucial to recognize the potential of genAI. Given its saturation in the public consciousness, completely dismissing genAI literacy would be naive. Responsibly integrating genAI literacy and adopting the technology in K-12 education is the obligation of all stakeholders: parents, teachers, administrators, philanthropists and policymakers. Here are five considerations:

    K-12 stakeholders should approach rapid classroom-based genAI adoption with deep skepticism : Recognize the potential of genAI but approach its integration into schools with caution. Decades of ed tech underperformance suggest that the notion of “adopt or get left behind” may be misleading. Taking a skeptical stance toward genAI could help identify areas where the technology can benefit students and isolate potential risks, thus fostering a deliberate and principled approach to incorporating genAI literacy in classrooms.

    Schools should offer genAI literacy to high school students only: Incorporate genAI literacy into regular academic classes rather than free-standing lessons, with a specific focus on its safe use, ethical considerations and development of the skills necessary to evaluate the technology’s effectiveness at real-world problem solving and task completion. The cognitive maturity of students in grades 9 to 12 will allow for a deeper and more nuanced understanding of complex concepts such as ethics and safety in the context of rapidly evolving AI technologies, which younger students — while adaptable and tech-savvy — may not yet possess. Developing appropriate teaching tools for younger students and training educators accordingly will take time.

    Schools should continue to focus on timeless skills : The shape of future job markets impacted by genAI is largely unknowable — remember predictions about the inevitable death of blue-collar jobs from artificial intelligence? So it is prudent to continue focusing on skills essential in a world where the only predictable constant is change: critical thinking, problem-solving, adaptability and ethical reasoning, as well as newer areas such as computational thinking.

    Philanthropy should focus on understanding and mitigating risks associated with genAI adoption: Funding should prioritize concerns about safety, privacy and well-being. Answering fundamental questions that can make genAI literacy more robust and rigorous should be the current focus. For instance, how will technology impact children’s sense of self? How will it impact cognition in young people? What systems must be built and data collected to determine the appropriate age to introduce classroom-based genAI tools?

    Philanthropy and policymakers must empower adults : One clear lesson from the social media experiment over the last decade is that adults must protect young people from the risks associated with new technologies. To do so, they need to understand those risks with nuance. GenAI literacy should be offered to educators, parent-teacher associations and professional organizations, among others, to equip adults with the knowledge necessary to safeguard young people and advocate on their behalf. 

    The sensible way forward is to focus on a balanced approach that prepares children for the future without overwhelming or misdirecting their learning experiences in the classroom.

    Related

    AI & Education: A Classroom Perspective on Looming Possibilities and Challenges

     

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  • 6 years after Parkland shooting, school librarian works hard to make her space the safest

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    Six years since the day everything changed, the library at Marjory Stoneman Douglas High School brims with resources to promote mental health. There’s a “Zen den” for resting and decompressing, a therapy dog named River, yoga equipment, a button-making station and smartboards that display videos of crochet lessons.

    Librarian Diana Haneski, River’s owner, puts a lot of thought into what to include in – and exclude from – the library’s collections. She opted to remove a Civil War-themed book with a rifle on its cover, for example, and to avoid other materials with imagery that could be upsetting. And she’s made sure to include a range of literature that offers students an escape from daily life, including sci-fi novels and youth-oriented magazines.

    Haneski, 63, winner of this year’s national “I Love My Librarian” award for her public service, sees such escapism and mental support as essential for herself and her students.

    Read more from USA Today.

    The post 6 years after Parkland shooting, school librarian works hard to make her space the safest appeared first on District Administration.

     

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  • Tennessee proposal would require schools to craft own AI policies

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    If the legislation is adopted, schools and colleges would need to develop artificial intelligence use policies for the 2024-25 school year by July 1.

     

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  • Low-income schools aren’t vetting ed tech, analysis finds

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    Higher rates of ads on school websites and lower access to devices paint a “disturbing picture” for these schools, says a tech safety organization.

     

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  • Pennsylvania moves to expand education funding statewide

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    Looking to tackle inequitable education funding across the state, Pennsylvania Gov. Josh Shapiro has…

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  • Should Parents Ever Be Held Responsible for the Harmful Actions of Their Children?

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    ​A jury convicted a mother for a mass shooting carried out by her child. Is this an important precedent or a dangerous one? 

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  • Doing Educational Equity Right: School Discipline

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    This is the third in a series on doing educational equity right. See the  introductory post and part two on school finance .

    If school funding is the issue around which it’s easiest to find common ground across left and right, school discipline might be the hardest.

    That shouldn’t be surprising, given how divisive our country’s debate has been on the related issue of criminal justice and law enforcement. Whether it’s violent crime on the streets or mayhem in the hallways, conservatives are going to focus first and foremost on law and order, while liberals will be concerned primarily with fairness and equal treatment.

    Nor do folks on right and left view racial disparities in arrests and incarceration—and suspensions and expulsions—the same way. For many on the left, such disparities are clear evidence of racial discrimination and injustice. Conservatives, however, view it as far more complicated, starting with the need to understand whether there are differences in actual behavior. If individuals from certain groups are more likely to commit murder, they will be more likely to be locked up for violent crime. If individuals from certain groups actually get into more school fights, they will more often be suspended or expelled—even if justice is meted out to individuals perfectly fairly and without bias .

    So how can we try to bridge these vast ideological divides? Let’s go back to my three rules:

    When aiming for equity, we should level up instead of leveling down.
    We should focus on closing gaps between affluent students and their disadvantaged peers, not between high-achieving students and their lower-achieving peers.
    We should focus equity initiatives primarily on class, not race.

    The first rule is by far the most important, yet rarely gets discussed as part of the school discipline debate. And that’s because most of our arguments are about how adults should respond to student misbehavior. Should teachers send kids to the principal’s office? Should principals suspend kids, and for which kinds of infractions? Should school-board policy ever include expulsions, and what safeguards should be in place? How to make all of this less racially biased?

    But those decisions are downstream from student behavior itself. And the first goal of any student discipline policy should be to help students behave better —to “level up.” In other words, we should reject the “soft bigotry of low expectations” when it comes to students’ comportment in classrooms, hallways, and the cafeteria, just as we reject it when it comes to our beliefs around what “certain kids” can learn.

    We should avoid at all costs, then, any policies that indicate to kids that they can get away with bad behavior—cussing out their teachers; bullying their peers; interrupting instruction; much less engaging in violence. And we should focus instead on schoolwide approaches to helping students meet high behavioral standards.

    To be clear, I don’t have in mind the old-school “no excuses” fetishes around matching socks, tucked-in shirts, and silent hallways, but standards of behavior that we’d expect to see in any well-run, joyful, learning-focused school.

    That means modeling good behavior for students; holding them accountable for infractions; working proactively with families when there are bigger issues; and supporting teachers when they try to hold the line.

    Now let’s bring in rule number two. In this context, it means paying just as much attention to well-behaving students as to their misbehaving peers. That’s one of the purposes of office referrals and suspensions—to “put out” the misbehaving kids so that their peers can return to learning (or, in the context of hallways and lunchrooms, to feeling safe). And that’s critical! We know from several high-quality studies that misbehaving students can wreak havoc on their peers—both in terms of making their behavior worse, and in driving down student achievement. Given that high-poverty schools struggle the most with disciplinary challenges, keeping disruptive students in classrooms only widens the achievement gap. Such policies also drive teachers crazy—and drive many of them out of the profession, or at least out of high-poverty schools.

    Yet even discipline hawks—I admit to being one—must admit that suspending or expelling students from school is extremely problematic. A growing body of evidence demonstrates that these practices have troubling consequences for the students subjected to them, even after controlling for underlying factors that might have contributed to students’ misbehavior in the first place. And it doesn’t take a Ph.D. to understand why that might be. Many misbehaving kids are coming from broken homes and/or dangerous communities. Making them spend days or months on the streets, away from opportunities to learn, is hardly going to do them any favors.

    What we need, then, are well-designed interventions for misbehaving students—especially chronic and violent offenders—that help them learn to improve their behavior, keep them learning academically, and protect their peers from further disruption along the way. That’s a tall order, but a number of schools and districts are experimenting with various approaches, from much-improved versions of in-school suspensions to “alternative placements”—other schools that kids attend for short to medium periods before returning to their home campuses.

    None of that is easy, and like everything in education, this will only work if we get the details right. That means a lot of trial and error and continuous improvement. But do you know what will make that even harder? Viewing any effort to address student misbehavior as racially tainted.

    Which brings us to rule three: focusing primarily on students’ socioeconomic status instead of race. Now, as I wrote in my introductory post, we can’t ignore race entirely. American education has a long and sordid history of discriminating against kids of color, especially Black children, including the use of suspensions and expulsions in racially biased ways. The Office for Civil Rights has a clear and compelling mandate to step in when schools or districts treat individual kids differently on the basis of their race (or other protected categories). Conservatives need to acknowledge as much.

    But liberals need to be willing to embrace the complexity of this issue. Yes, Black students are suspended or expelled at disproportionate rates. But if we control for class, we see that most of those disparities disappear. That’s because kids growing up in poverty are much more likely to experience all manner of challenges that make it more likely for them to misbehave in school—and that’s true whether we’re talking about White, Black, or Brown students. Kids without a father in the home are more likely to get in trouble at school. Kids from dangerous neighborhoods are more likely to get in trouble at school. Kids dealing with lead poisoning are more likely to get in trouble at school. Kids who are victims of abuse or neglect are more likely to get in trouble at school.

    In every case, these situations are tragic—as is the fact that Black students in America are three times as likely as their White peers to live in poverty, and six times as likely to live in deep poverty. Thus, it’s just a matter of basic math that Black students on average will be more likely to misbehave in school than their peers—not because they are Black, but because they are suffering the ill effects of poverty.

    But guess what: The (few) studies that have been able to control for underlying student behavior find that the racial gaps in punishment shrink to almost nothing. Not zero—indicating that some racial bias remains and must be addressed. But it’s very much on the margins, not the center of the story.

    To conclude, here’s how we might find common ground around this most vexing issue:

    Put real effort and resources into helping students meet high behavioral expectations.
    Develop alternatives to out-of-school suspensions and expulsions that address the needs of chronically or violently misbehaving students, while protecting the sanctity of the classroom for their teachers and peers.
    When working to root out racial bias in exclusionary discipline, control for differences in student misbehavior, or, if that proves impossible, at least control for students’ socioeconomic status.

    The way to “make school discipline more equitable” isn’t by letting kids get away with misbehavior, but by helping all kids, from every group, learn to behave well. We might never fully achieve that lofty objective, but we’ll be a better country if we try.

    Michael J. Petrilli is president of the Thomas B. Fordham Institute, visiting fellow at Stanford University’s Hoover Institution, and an executive editor of Education Next .

    This post originally appeared on the Fordham Institute’s Flypaper blog.

    The post Doing Educational Equity Right: School Discipline appeared first on Education Next.

     

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  • Why $2B in New School Funding Is Leaving Minnesota Districts Scrambling for Cash

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    When the Democratic “trifecta” in control of Minnesota’s House, Senate and governor’s office announced last spring’s K-12 education finance bill, there weren’t enough superlatives in the thesaurus to fuel the sound bites. The more than $2.2 billion in “new” spending on public schools was “historic.” The number of initiatives funded was “sweeping,” the predicted outcomes for students and teachers “life-changing.”

    Now, district leaders statewide are scrambling to explain to their communities that, in fact, they are facing massive cuts. In many places, balancing the budget will mean layoffs or school closures. 

    Like their counterparts throughout the country, Minnesota school systems are facing the one-two punch of the end of COVID recovery aid and enrollment losses — in many places, going back years — that means less per-pupil state money. School funding experts call this a fiscal cliff.

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    “That is No. 1 with a bullet on any superintendent’s whiteboard,” says Kirk Schneidawind, executive director of the Minnesota School Boards Association. 

    The state’s second-largest district, St. Paul Public Schools projects a $150 million deficit for the 2024-25 academic year. Minneapolis Public Schools anticipates a $116 million shortfall. Even the most prosperous Twin Cities suburbs are stuck explaining the disconnect to families who moved there for their well-funded schools.

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    The confusion among members of the public who think the schools are awash in cash has real consequences, says Schneidawind. Last year, half of school system funding referenda failed at the ballot box, depriving districts of millions more.

    Billions in new state funding and a fiscal cliff: How can both be true? Here are four critical — and much misunderstood — aspects of the looming crisis.

    More Money, More Strings

    With Democrats in control of the Capitol for the first time in more than a decade and a $17 billion surplus in state coffers, most policymakers assumed the question wouldn’t be whether education would see a spending boost in 2023, but how big it would be and how the pie would be divided. 

    “My messages to families, to students, to teachers, to support staff is, ‘This is the budget for many of us who taught for decades, this is the budget we’re waiting for,’ ” Gov. Tim Walz, a former teacher, said at the start of the session, according to the Star Tribune newspaper. “This is the transformational moment.” 

    As he signed the education finance bill into law in June, Walz called it “The Minnesota Miracle 2.0” — a reference to a sweeping school finance reform measure of the 1970s that earned then-Gov. Wendall Anderson a photo on the cover of Time magazine. 

    Yet even before the ink on Walz’s signature was dry, school leaders were bemoaning the fine print. In the end, the change to the basic revenue formula increased per-pupil funding from $6,863 in 2023 to $7,281 in 2025. 

    Eight months, later, they’re still doing the math, but the Minnesota School Boards Association, the Association of Metropolitan School Districts and others estimate that up to half the $2.2 billion had already been earmarked for as many as 65 new mandates, ranging from free meals for all students to menstrual products in school restrooms.

    Lawmakers also extended unemployment insurance to cover bus drivers, some substitute teachers, cafeteria workers, classroom aides and other seasonal workers. This made Minnesota the first state to mandate this benefit for hourly employees, but it was unclear who will pay the premiums in the long term.

    After a grueling fight, the legislature allotted $135 million to pay for the first year of unemployment insurance premiums, promising to revisit funding in the future. District leaders were only partly appeased, noting that even if the state subsidized the premiums going forward, the employees who typically staff summer programs could choose not to.

    Related

    Downsize Schools, or Keep Them Open & Hope Students Come Back?

    Nearly $75 million is allotted to help fund a new law requiring science-backed literacy curriculum and instruction. There is $45 million for new school librarians, $15 million to support “full-service” schools — which provide health and social services to families — and money for new ethnic studies materials, Naloxone and efforts to retain teachers of color. 

    Funding for K-12 education, which makes up nearly a third of the state budget, is $23.2 billion for fiscal years 2024 and 2025.

    Welcome though the money and new benefits are, says Schneidawind, districts will still have to scramble to cover some costs. Part of the difficulty of calculating just how much that will be is that school systems keep discovering new ways that the costs are showing up. The private companies that supply substitute teachers, for instance, are passing along their new state benefit costs.

    Most likely, the cavalry is not coming. Like many state legislatures, Minnesota’s meets on a two-year calendar. Last year was the current cycle’s budgeting year; when the 2024 session begins Feb. 12, lawmakers will focus on capital and infrastructure bonding bills. 

    How ‘New Money’ Becomes a Cut

    Every year, after the legislative session gavels to a close, lawmakers of both parties go back home to boast that they boosted K-12 spending by adding to the state’s general fund. They rarely mention that school funding has, by many calculations, not kept up with inflation. 

    One way this has traditionally been accomplished is by cutting or not increasing funding for services paid for out of other parts of the budget, such as special education and English learner instruction. School districts must then divert the “new” money to make up the shortfalls, in what’s referred to as a cross-subsidy. For the current fiscal year, Minnesota schools are spending $750 million just to fill the special education funding gap — by far the largest.

    Districts have long pushed to end the practice, which many say may aid officials’ re-election efforts but has cloaked a steady erosion of state funding. With a budget surplus estimated at $17.5 billion, lawmakers last year said it was time to fully fund the cross-subsidies. 

    Gov. Tim Walz, however, only wanted to reduce the special education gap by half, preferring to spend more on required paid family leave and other new programs. In the end, though, that didn’t happen. The funding set aside to offset special education losses was reduced to cover just 44% of the gap — freeing up almost the exact sum needed to cover seasonal workers’ unemployment benefits for one year.

    The upshot: Historic infusion notwithstanding, Democratic lawmakers say there is still an $800-per-pupil gap between funding levels 20 years ago and today, adjusted for inflation. That does not reflect recent cost increases in transportation, labor and other areas, says Scott Croonquist, executive director of Minnesota’s Association of Metropolitan School Districts. 

    The Democratic head of the House Education Finance Committee, Rep. Cheryl Youakim defended the outcomes, saying the 2023 increases closed the inflationary gap by one-third. “There has been 20 years of underfunding in education and that can’t be turned around overnight,” she says. “Our districts still do have needs.”

    Bad News at the Ballot Box

    In November, the Rochester, Minnesota, public school system lost a technology funding referendum by 318 votes. As tiny as the margin was, the impact was tectonic. 

    The levy would have generated $10 million a year for a decade, freeing up $7 million a year the cash-strapped district currently spends on technology to reduce class sizes and stave off the impact of falling enrollment. In short order, Superintendent Kent Pekel announced that the district had no choice but to close three schools and cut transportation costs by changing attendance boundaries. 

    Three weeks later, the Mayo Clinic stepped forward with a $10 million donation intended to stave off the pain — but only for a year. District leaders will use that time to prep for a do-over, hoping 2024’s presidential election draws more voters than the referendum did and that a majority will agree to the tax.

    When Pekel took over as superintendent in July 2021, he realized that years of eroded state funding was only one factor wreaking havoc on his budget. The district had been adding staff but losing students for a decade, albeit at a slower rate than many school systems. Instead of using federal COVID aid to close the gap, which would have postponed the fiscal reckoning, he cut $7 million in 2022 and $14 million last year.

    In addition to the technology levy that failed at the ballot box last fall, the district depends on revenue from a larger operating levy. If it can’t get that approved, Rochester leaders will have to find another $10 million to cut in 2024 and $17 million in 2025. 

    According to the school boards association, voters rejected half of operating levies on the ballot throughout the state last year. Perhaps anticipating this, lawmakers last year allowed districts to renew levies once without going to the voters. Schneidawind anticipates 50 school systems will take advantage of the new law this fall.

    The Other Postponed Reckoning

    Pekel is one of a few Minnesota superintendents who decided not to use pandemic relief funds to close pre-existing budget gaps. Many districts spent large swaths of their COVID recovery aid staving off tough issues posed by declining enrollment. Faced with a competitive labor market, many boosted educator pay. For example, despite years of shrinking enrollment, Minneapolis Public Schools added 400 jobs.

    In addition to explaining to families and staff about the imminent loss of federal funding, many districts must now grapple with how to communicate why the boost in state aid won’t head off cuts.

    Next door to Minneapolis, the Robbinsdale Area School District is predicting it could end the current fiscal year $2.1 million in the red and may need to cut $17 million to balance the books next year. This can’t be accomplished without layoffs. 

    In January, school board member Kim Holmes acknowledged that decisions by the board and district leadership will make balancing the budget especially painful.
    “We misstepped,” the suburban news site CCX Media quoted Holmes as saying. “This board misstepped, the administration misstepped. If we weren’t tracking historical decreased enrollment — and one of the biggest things they told us not to do with [COVID] dollars was hire positions — and we did it. So we have to come out and take some ownership.”

     

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  • Why John Dewey’s vision for education and democracy still resonates today

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    ​John Dewey was a proponent of active learning. FatCamera via Getty Images

    John Dewey was one of the most important educational philosophers of the 20th century. His work has been cited in scholarly publications over 400,000 times. Dewey’s writings continue to influence discussions on a variety of subjects, including democratic education, which was the focus of Dewey’s famous 1916 book on the subject. In the following Q&A, Nicholas Tampio, a political science professor and editor of a forthcoming 2024 edition of Dewey’s “Democracy and Education,” explains why Dewey’s work remains relevant to this day.

    Why revisit John Dewey’s philosophy on education and democracy now?

    I think it is time to revisit Dewey’s philosophy about the value of field trips, classroom experiments, music instruction and children playing together on playgrounds. This is especially true after the pandemic when children spent significantly more time in front of screens rather than having whole body experiences.

    Dewey’s philosophy of education was that children “learn by doing.” Dewey argued that children learn from using their entire bodies in meaningful experiences. That is why, in his 1916 text, “Democracy and Education,” Dewey called for schools to be “equipped with laboratories, shops, and gardens.”

    Dewey argued that planting seeds, measuring the relationship between Sun, soil, water and plant growth, and then tasting fresh peas made for a seamless transition between childhood curiosity and the scientific way of looking at things. Dewey also encouraged schools to create time for “dramatizations, plays, and games.”

    In his 2014 book, “An Education in Politics: The Origin and Evolution of No Child Left Behind,” the political scientist Jesse H. Rhodes shows how business groups and certain civil rights groups advocated federal laws that required states to administer high-stakes tests. This focus on tested subjects means that public school students in places such as Texas have less time for arts education.

    What role did Dewey see for public schools in preserving democracy?

    For Dewey, modern societies can use schools to impart democratic habits in young people from an early age. He argued that the “intermingling in the school of youth of different races, differing religions, and unlike customs creates for all a new and broader environment.” Dewey was writing as millions of European immigrants were arriving in the United States between 1900 and 1915. Dewey believed that schools could teach immigrants what it means to be a citizen and incorporate their experiences into American culture.

    Dewey’s view of the schools remains relevant today. In the 2020-21 school year, more than a third of the country’s children attended schools where 75% of the student body is the same race or ethnicity – hardly the ideal conditions for Dewey’s vision of democracy.

    Dewey opposed “racial, color, or other class prejudice.” Segregated schools violate Dewey’s ideal of treating all students as possessing intrinsic worth and dignity. Dewey believed that democracy means “that every human being, independent of the quantity or range of his personal endowment, has the right to equal opportunity with every other person for development of whatever gifts he has.” Democratic schools, for Dewey, empower every child to develop their gifts in ways that benefit the community.

    Dewey espoused the idea of learning by doing.
    JHU Sheridan Libraries/Gado via Getty Images

    How closely does today’s education system resemble Dewey’s vision for education?

    I would argue that the education system resembles the vision of modern testing pioneers like Edward Thorndike more than Dewey’s.

    Dewey thought that standardized tests serve a small role in education. He believed that “the child’s own instincts and powers furnish the material and give the starting point for all education.” Dewey maintained that teachers need to use student interest as the fuel to propel students to learn math, reading and the scientific method, and standardized tests serve mainly to help the teacher identify where each student “can receive the most help.” In his lifetime, Dewey opposed proponents of intelligence testing, such as Thorndike.

    But the testing proponents seem to be winning. According to a 2023 Education Week survey of teachers, nearly 80% feel moderate or large amounts of pressure to have their students perform well on state-mandated standardized tests. According to one principal, “There’s too much pressure put on these kids for testing, and there’s too much testing.”

    Dewey’s vision of education is teachers nurturing each child’s passions and not using tests to rank children. For many teachers, U.S. public schools are far from realizing that vision.

    How popular are John Dewey’s views today?

    Dewey’s ideas were controversial during his lifetime. They remain so to this day.

    In 2023, Richard Corcoran, the president of New College of Florida, criticized “the Dewey school of thought” for training students to become “widget makers.” According to Corcoran, Dewey thought that “if we can teach (people) just enough skills to get on the assembly line and help us with this Industrial Revolution, everything will be great.” Corcoran is right that Dewey thought that schools should teach children about industry, including with hands-on tasks. But Dewey opposed vocational education that slotted children from a young age into a career path.

    “I am utterly opposed,” Dewey explained, “to giving the power of social predestination, by means of narrow trade-training, to any group of fallible men no matter how well-intentioned they may be.” Dewey thought that children could learn about history and economics from using machinery in schools. However, he opposed a two-tiered education system that denied working-class children a well-rounded education or that equated human flourishing with making widgets.

    Educators and scholars such as Diane Ravitch, Deborah Meier and Yong Zhao cite Dewey and apply his insights to current education debates. Those debates include topics such as the place of standardized testing in schools, the freedom of the classroom teacher and the need for schools to build trust with families and community members.

    Zhao, for instance, argues that Dewey outlined a way to address education inequity that does not rely on closing gaps in test scores. Dewey’s idea, according to Zhao, is that all children should have a chance to express and cultivate individuality, learn through experiences and make “the most of the opportunities of present life.”

    Dewey believed that “democracy is a way of life.” He also believed schools could teach that lesson to young people by allowing people in the school to have a meaningful say in the aims of education. For many people who read Dewey today, his call for democracy in education still resonates.

    Nicholas Tampio does not work for, consult, own shares in or receive funding from any company or organization that would benefit from this article, and has disclosed no relevant affiliations beyond their academic appointment.

     

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  • ‘Schoolyard bully’: Utah school board member Cline slammed for post about student athlete

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    Utah State Board of Education member Natalie Cline is once again facing public scrutiny for her…

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