Del Hanson - The Screwed-Up Marathon Race

Strange things happen when you mix and match sports. Imagine combining soccer and basketball. I can hear it now. “There’s a header into the corner. A player hit’s the floor. There’s a red card on Le Bron. The forward lines up a shot between defenders. There’s the kick. The basketball soars toward the hoop, and Gooooooooooaaaaaaaaaaaal!” Weird.

Or, equally bizarre, what if the International Olympic Committee, in order to inject change for change’s sake, decided to alter the traditional marathon race to a series of all-out sprints. A competitive sports mile is 1760 yards, or four trips around a 440 yard track. Twenty-six miles is 45,760 yards. A distance runner is trained to pace him or herself, speeding up, slowing down, taking into consideration the lay of the land and the condition of the course, for the entire journey. There is a great deal of strategy to go along with amazing conditioning in a marathon race. It has been the ultimate test of endurance since the ill-fated Greek messenger delivered his note and dropped dead. So what if the IOC suddenly decided to make the marathon race a series of 457 100 yard dashes instead? Well, it doesn’t take a sports genius to realize that the result would be disaster, both for the sport and for the competitors.

Education is a marathon. It is also a grueling twenty-six mile race, sometimes slow, sometimes fast, and a true test of endurance, both mental and physical. It is run on a thirteen year track, replete with hills and valleys and uneven surfaces. Since Congress passed the No Child Left Behind legislation in 2002, “expert” consultants have tried to turn education into a series of all-out sprints, pasted and spliced together to stretch over the course. Start. Stop. Gather data. Start. Stop. Gather more data. Compare disjoint and unrelated sets of numbers and draw conclusions. Punish. Sprint. Twist and bend competitors to meet, not their needs, but the needs of the consulting companies. Most importantly, announce to the world that the competitors are failures. Repeatedly.

I talk to teachers a lot. I work with the Golden Apple Foundation in selecting the top teachers in the state. In determining the finalists, we talk to parents, students, colleagues of the applicant, principals, and the teacher, herself. We make on-site visits to elementary, middle, and high schools from Raton to Lordsburg and from Eunice to Shiprock. By visiting actual schools and talking to actual teachers, one can gauge the pulse of education in ways that a cursory review of statistical information cannot, and probably even more reliably than listening to talk radio or reading an editorial or talking to a neighbor (said in ironic jest). Try as we may, we are attempting to turn education into a series of stop and go sprints. It doesn’t work that way.

Almost every situation in education has its analogue in the classroom. It is education, after all. When one embarks on a school year teaching little second graders, squirrelly seventh graders, or know-it-all sophomores, one does so knowing you make progress by iteration. It is by inches, not by quantum lurches. It accumulates. It is agonizingly slow, but over time, a reluctant learner will “get” factoring. Eventually, the light bulb will appear above heads in class and the five paragraph essay will finally make sense. Over several days and drawing upon material covered previously, students can understand special relativity in physics, but it isn’t an all-out sprint for 30 intensive minutes. A student learns to read after hours of incredible patience on the part of a dedicated first grade teacher teaching the bright child with a learning disability that affects spatial relationships on the printed page.

Students don’t learn at the same rate. Parents move their families from school to school, often to stay one step ahead of the creditors or, in the case of single parent families, in search of affordable housing. Classes are often packed with 24 or 25 second graders, with up to half having IEPs, or Individual Education Plans mandated by special education law. Lessons are scripted. There is little time or opportunity for an elementary teacher to adapt lessons to her particular clientele or needs. It’s not a quick sprint to the finish line.

Still, self-appointed “experts” urge standardization and “fidelity” to programs that crush students into the same round peg. We are attempting to make education a series of frantic dashes instead of recognizing it for the marathon that it is. Education was a marathon in “good old” days and it’s a marathon now. High stakes testing based on 100 yard dashes doesn’t work. Who has the courage and authority to stop the insanity? I suspect no one.

Del Hanson - The Screwed-Up Marathon Race