ParisTampaBlog

Andrew, it’s just not going to happen. (I’m writing this in response to Andrew Coulson’s piece in the WSJ today, Escalante Stood and Delivered. It’s Our Turn.) Andrew, “Our Turn” is just never going to be. Only a tiny few will ever respond in their turn, if at all, to Escalante’s example.

Instead, what works, say Jaime Escalante’s calculus class as Coulson describes it, is going to remain isolated from other educators, even as it was at the time from those sharing the same school building with him.

What works is going to remain enclosed in its own niche until whatever original life force that brought it into being dies out, taking along with it into oblivion even the memory, as in this example, the memory of Jaime Escalante’s calculus class.

Coulson understands this, but he (I too) would like to believe otherwise, to say it ain’t so, that the system, and not just a part here and there, can be changed.

If it can’t perhaps it’s because public education is too much like a piece of the country’s infrastructure, and infrastructure, without experiencing a war or other destructive juggernaut, cannot be changed except piece by piece over lifetimes.

New bridges don’t make the old ones disappear. In fact, most of us for most of our lives go on using and crossing the old ones.

And new schools don’t do away with old schools, always in the majority, and in spite of the endless reforms that come along most kids continue to still spend their school time in the old schools.

Plus ça change, plus c’est la même chose. Didn’t you know this, Andrew?

And successful schools, be they KIPP or Achieve, or any number of selective and high performing public schools, have never much influenced, let alone done away with the majority of our public schools, still unsuccessful, still uninspired and, helas, still uninspiring.

But you knew all that, Andrew, when you wrote today in the Wall Street Journal about Jaime Escalante, didn’t you? I wonder why we don’t tire of saying the same thing over and over again?

You note that Bill Clinton in 1993 didn’t hesitate to say it (yet once again): “People in this room who have devoted their lives to education, are constantly plagued by the fact that nearly every problem has been solved by somebody somewhere, and yet we can’t seem to replicate it everywhere else.”

And of course it’s true as you say while writing about Jaime Escalante who recently passed away, “America not only needs more teachers like Jaime Escalante, it needs an education system that recognizes them and helps them to reach a mass audience.”

But again I cite the bridge comparison —there’s just too much concrete out there to move. It can’t be done. And this must be the reason, there’s just too much, what, “dead wood,” inertia in the present system for us to move it.

This is the reason why (tell Bill Clinton) we’re not able to bring to scale the things that do work, such as Escalante’s successfully teaching calculus to poorly prepared and thoroughly disadvantage kids at Garfield High School in East Los Angeles in the 1980s.

The reason why we haven’t been able to reach by this example the kids in the hundreds of failing school systems throughout the country.

This is especially troubling when we have before us one example after another of successful technological innovations, Facebook, the iPod, the iPhone, and now perhaps the iPad, and many others, all bringing successful innovations up to scale almost effortlessly and in the process reaching, if not bettering the lives of, hundreds of millions.

This entry was posted on April 2, 2010 at 1:56 pm and is filed under Education. You can subscribe via RSS 2.0 feed to this post's comments. You can comment below, or link to this permanent URL from your own site.