No simple ‘silver bullets’ for education

In a recent op-ed, Anchorage School Board member Dave Donley announced a simple education solution. Unfortunately, this is only to be expected from the silver-bullet crowd, who invariably see all problems as susceptible to simple solutions — ones that they, of course, have at the ready. Social promotion has been a concern for years, but it is not the source of the problem. The reason for social promotion is that we have a system largely based on age-based cohorts. And for most of a student’s school years, any removal from their age cohort is akin to branding the child as “defective."

Many educators have pointed out over the years that if schools moved to a skill-based system as opposed to an age-based system, artifacts like social promotion would disappear, especially as the granularity of the skill-based modules is increased. In fact, some of the more successful programs on view in schools today attempt to exploit just such options, like Walk to Read, where students are grouped across classrooms for reading instruction.

Certainly, there are challenges to any educational methodology. A typical criticism of skill-based cohort management is that this is simply “tracking,” and that tracking breeds elitism. Gross tracking could clearly lead in that direction, but effective course management and the distribution of children make it pretty clear that such results might only be seen for three out of a thousand children, all of whom would be entitled to Individual Education Plans (or their equivalent) as exceptional children.

But changing the cohort system is not just a different “silver bullet;" it is not a comprehensive solution. Not only do we need to change the cohort system to focus on instruction (instead of focusing on “management”) but we also need to implement early childhood and pre-kindergarten surveillance, assessment and service, as well as clinical intervention to address fundamental inadequacies in literacy and numeracy. It is not like we can hide our heads in the sand any more: We know that early deficiencies in reading will result in likely trauma, incarceration, etc. Spend the money now, or spend the money later.

Lastly, let me note that this is not likely a sudden inspiration on Mr. Donley’s part. With the election of the current governor, we will be seeing bills along the same lines introduced in the Legislature. I don’t want to fault Republican legislators for being concerned about education, but endorsing a corporate package unsupported by actual research is a recipe for disaster.

Marc Grober has been a member of the Alaska Bar since 1975, and has focused on education law in his legal practice.

The views expressed here are the writer’s and are not necessarily endorsed by the Anchorage Daily News, which welcomes a broad range of viewpoints. To submit a piece for consideration, email commentary(at)adn.com. Send submissions shorter than 200 words to letters@adn.com or click here to submit via any web browser. Read our full guidelines for letters and commentaries here.