Fixing our Failing Schools by James Farwell

Gov. Arnold Schwarzenegger recently signed legislation to make California eligible for President Obama's "Race to the Top" funding. The president's plan rewards states that have "innovative" educational programs with funding for schools.

James Farwell is a licensed educational psychologist from San Francisco.

California's bill places parents in the driver's seat in terms of where their child attends school, focuses on the creation of charter schools and gives parents greater say in the hiring and retention of school staff.

Herein lies one of the principal reasons why California's educational programs have gone from No. 1 in the nation to 48th in the past four decades. Those who are the furthest removed from the classroom are the ones who create laws that impact our children's learning. Think tanks, special interest groups and politicians are the ones who have created one failed program after another over the past 40 years.

"Scientific research" and "education experts" have served to justify the "new math" of the 1960s, the "relevant education" of the 1970s, the "whole language" approach to reading of the 1980s, and the experiments with "higher learning expectations for children," charter schools, "high stakes testing," and small schools since the 1990s.

Taking the "drill and kill" presentation of arithmetic processing out of schools and replacing it with a new language and talking about the underlying math principle that was being presented, served to plunge math scores through the floor. The impact of this approach is still felt in schools today.

In the name of "relevant education" our secondary students were not provided with certain critical courses like geography or European literature. Such courses supposedly had little meaning in the life of a teenager. The result was that our children were poorly prepared for college.

"Whole language" removed the teaching of phonological awareness and phonics from the process of reading. Reading scores tanked and still have not recovered.

The notion that children can learn more complicated materials earlier assumed that children were only brains and not whole people. This decision resulted in a larger portion of male students doing poorly in school, having difficulty qualifying for college and in having more difficulty earning grades once in college.

Charter schools perform no better than neighborhood schools. Small schools are more expensive to operate and have fewer course options open to students in middle and high school. And, "high stakes testing" equates teaching children how to take tests with being provided with a good quality education.

All too often, decisions have been made and laws have been created without any regard for how those decisions will impact a child's learning. The consequences for what is being decided have not been thought through. If professional educators had been taken seriously, none of these failed programs would have seen the light of day. Teamwork, where the educational community is consciously involved in the creation of policy, is essential if our schools are to thrive. Top-down decision making will fail every time.

And finally, our philosophy of education should be based on what we know works and not on the next available funding fad.

Principles for real reform

-- Educational policy needs to be made by those who actually work with children and know what works - not by members of think tanks, special interest groups or politicians.

-- Consider the impact and consequences that a decision will have on our children's ability to learn and on their general welfare.

-- Our educational philosophy needs to be based on proven educational practices - not on the latest funding fad.