Experienced educators should drive reform
When it comes to education, our focus has become skewed. We have lost sight of what children truly need to develop into healthy, happy, productive adults.
The education policy debate, increasingly fueled by corporate interests and profit motives, has strayed from evidence-based practices. With the current national fixation on standardized tests, which come at a high cost to schools, our focus has been diverted from best practices to a competitive gaming of the system. This threatens to create a tiered educational system that serves some children well and leaves many others behind. We should refocus our efforts on research-based solutions and find ways to implement healthy practices across the system so that every child in Nashville has access to an excellent education.
While we must measure progress, our students need more than tests. They need physical activity and unstructured, supervised play. Recess time in many schools has been eliminated or greatly decreased to make way for more instructional time and test prep. However, according to the American Academy of Pediatrics, recess is a crucial component of healthy development that offers cognitive/academic, social/emotional and physical benefits. Here, research verifies common sense: Physical activity actually improves behavior and boosts academic performance.
All students should have access to a rich, broad curriculum. For-profit testing companies are impacting not only recess, but also school curriculum. Too often, the arts and enrichment activities are curtailed in an effort to improve standardized test scores, which provide only limited information for educators. Students need exposure to music, art and nature. New research indicates that music can even help close the achievement gap, and school gardens offer excellent opportunities for children to spend time outside while learning hands-on lessons about core subjects, healthy eating and the environment.
As a community, we must ensure that every child comes to school ready to learn. Research confirms that poverty, not poor teachers, is at the root of sagging school performance. Indeed, the single biggest factor impacting school performance is the socioeconomic status of the student’s family. Nashville has seen a 42 percent increase in poverty in the past 10 years, and our child poverty and hunger rates remain alarmingly high throughout the U.S. Too many of our students lack basic necessities, and many suffer what experts have termed “toxic stress” caused by chronic poverty. Our efforts to address this problem must extend outside of school walls to provide “wrap-around services” that address social, emotional and physical needs of children through community partnerships and volunteers.
Finally, we must avoid educational fads, because they don’t work. City leaders have embraced the latest one, choosing to abandon our low-income schools to private companies, instead of committing to the hard community work of supporting and improving our existing schools. Vouchers and charter schools seem a cheap, easy fix, but ultimately threaten to drain funding and engaged families from our school system, further crippling community schools whose doors remain open to every child. Vouchers simply do not work, and on average, charter schools perform no better than traditional schools. Furthermore, it is utterly meaningless to compare charter school performance with that of traditional schools because charter schools are self-selective, often operate with extra per pupil funding, and reserve the right to release students who are not a good “fit” for their model.
Other evidence-based, scalable school reforms include:
• excellent teacher recruitment, development, retention, and pay;
• socioeconomic diversity in schools;
• increased parental engagement;
• early intervention programs such as high quality pre-K, particularly for low-income children; and
• increased school funding. Let’s focus on these reforms, maintain local control of schools, and allow educators — not hedge funders — to have a voice in the direction of education policy.
Amy Frogge represents District 9 on the Metro Board of Public Education.