Last week, David Kirp wrote an article for the New York Times called, “The Secret to Fixing Bad Schools,” which aimed to reveal the key to a first-rate education in broken schools. He shows this by exploring the progression of a small public school in Union City, NJ, and how they went from a place where “the schools were once so wretched that state officials almost seized control of them” to a place where 75% of the kids are going off to college after graduation, and many to top universities. He listed several steps that led to this advancement -- starting in pre-kindergarden, transforming teaching methods, making the shift from a test-taking mindset to more of a thinking mindset, and the list goes further than that. It seems Kirp’s article is aimed towards people higher up in the schooling system, such as superintendents and principles, though I plan on getting my message out to teachers in lower and elementary schools.
I took an immediate liking to this article because I recognize the need for change in schools, but I think this change is especially necessary for younger kids. Kirp is without a doubt accurate in his assertions, though to create better schools, the best way to do it is emphasizing on a couple key structural changes that can be goals rather than giving schools ten or fifteen changes that are massively difficult to implement.
The first step to better schools is honing a safer and more open-minded learning and social environment. Kids are spending nearly a third of their waking hours in school, so it should feel like a second home to them. In order to achieve this, the teachers in the school need to be more adamant on eliminating bullying and imposing a love of learning in kids. It’s about teaching to respect one another both inside and out of the classroom. We need to teach kids that laughing or scoffing at another kid’s question is damaging, and that kind of behavior can’t be tolerated. We need to completely eradicate words like “gay” and “retard” used in a derogatory sense from these kids’ vocabulary. Above all else, showing kids it’s safe and cool to be smart and to love going to school and learning new things is what’s going to change not only our schools, but ultimately our entire country.
The second step in this equation is maintaining creativity and divergent thinking in youth. Kirp touched on this a bit in his article when expressing the necessity for both cognitive and non-cognitive (thinking and feeling) lesson plans. This is absolutely true. In the long run, the purpose of school is to prepare kids for life in the real world, not a test. The first twelve years of education, therefore, shouldn’t be seen as nothing but a prerequisite to standardized tests, but rather a process we can use to explore the different strengths and weaknesses in every child’s brain. We can do this by implementing more creative exercises in the classroom and encouraging divergent thinking. Creativity is the use of the imagination or original ideas and divergent thinking includes conceiving multiple solutions or outcomes to a given problem. When you ask a kid what two plus two is, the only way to be correct is by saying it’s four. But then ask that same kid how to get the answer four by doing a math problem and there are innumerable possibilities that they could devise. It could be 2+2, 1+3, 1x4, -9239+9243, and so forth.
The point is, most of the kids in elementary and middle school now are just going through the motions of day-to-day life, just waiting for Friday to roll around again, especially those enrolled in broken schools. But this is the next generation we’re talking about; it’s not only their future we’re changing but also our own. Kirp says there’s a lot that needs to be done, and there is, but these steps are the first that need to be taken.
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