It's Time to Start the Slow School Movement

Abstract

food movement began as a protest against global proliferation of McDonald's restaurants. Mr. Holt calls for a similar backlash against today's hamburger approach toward education, which emphasizes uniformity, predictability, and measurability of processes and results. WHEN THE YOUNG Cole Porter left his elementary school in Indiana for a prep school on East Coast, his mother gave his age as 12, although he was in fact two years older. She had always encouraged his musical gifts and evidently decided that two more years at home, practicing piano and entertaining passengers on passing riverboats, was a better way of fostering his songwriting abilities.1 We should all be grateful for her foresight. In today's school climate, Kate Porter's deception appears both unlikely and unwise. pressure to proceed from one targeted standard to another as fast as possible, to absorb and demonstrate specified knowledge with conveyor-belt precision, is an irresistible fact of school life. Parents are encouraged to focus on achievement, not self- realization. A present-day Porter would soon be labeled a nerdy slow learner if he flunked math test and preferred keyboard to a baseball bat. It's curious that, in an age when right of adults to shape their own lifestyle is taken for granted, right of children to an education that will help them make something of themselves is more circumscribed than ever. This curriculum straitjacket is price exacted for believing that education is about assessed performance on specified content. march toward ruthless conformity began in 1970s, as Cold Warriors blamed schools for supposed deficiencies in American technology. It gained momentum in 1980s, when, as Arthur Levine has noted, generation born after World War II became young urban professionals, and the education of their children became baby boomers' and nation's preoccupation.2 1983 Reagan-era report A Nation at Risk set agenda for all that has followed. Influenced on one hand by idea that education is an atomistic, science-like activity, and on other by output-led simplicities of supply-side economics, schools in America have been in grip of some form of standards- based reform for nearly 20 years. current Administration of George W. Bush has pushed through idea of universal standards-based tests to be given each year in grades 3 through 8, a requirement that undermines independence of states and is widely thought to be unworkable. History may show, as is so often case, that this ultimate adornment to edifice of standards may mark very moment when its foundations begin to crumble. 33rd Phi Delta Kappa/Gallup poll shows a rising trend in favor of school-based assessment and of public schooling in general.3 results of state testing in English and mathematics, far from offering new insights, merely confirm that chief determinants of performance are parental income and level of school resources -- in short, affluence of neighborhood. Conservative columnist George Will puts it more brutally: The crucial predictor of a school's performance is of children's families.4 But this is not a law of nature: it reflects tendencies of tests to reflect culturally embedded concepts of student quality and of school funding systems to offer least to those who need most. To excel in high-stakes tests, even schools in sleek suburbs are prepared to distort their curriculum, as Billie Stanton observes in a revealing report on effects of standards-led reform in Colorado: Even parents in an affluent Boulder neighborhood . . . are questioning whether private school may not be preferable, since watching their fourth-graders return home dazed and drained from being drilled again and again in how to write a 'power paragraph. …

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