2007-08 Distinguished Teaching Award Recipients

Randall Freisinger Humanities Associate Professor/ Professor Category	Robert Mark Business and Economics Lecturer/Professor of Practice/ Assistant Professor Category

Resistance to Paradigm Shift?

William A. Kennedy, Director

     Thomas Paine encouraged those who would become his fellow “founding fathers” to make a total break with England and its stultifying allegiance to an aristocracy that benefited the select few at the cost of the suffering of the many. Paine, who first coined the term “United States of America,” boldly suggested that these thirteen colonial outposts come together with intelligence and purpose and seize this unique opportunity to reshape their future by starting over again with a clean slate and a new conception of leadership and government. That clean slate rejected the idea that aristocrats were divinely selected and argued for a system where leadership would be determined by merit and not accident of birth. Paine’s plea for an American meritocracy, which echoed similar calls from founders like Thomas Jefferson, gave rise to the competitive worldview that has essentially set the tone for American business and education to this day.

      Rule by the most able requires identification of these whiz kids by a defined selection process. Educational systems that routinely sorted students into categories by behavioral compliance and test scores quickly sprung into being. Pscyhometrics provided the means by which sorting the brightest and best from the less able could be accomplished in a “scientific” manner. Errors in such sorting protocols mattered little for the succeeding waves of growth of the American economy fueled by wars and technological innovations provided a myriad of opportunities for those erroneously sorted into subordinate categories to make a good living. I grew up in a time when being an autoworker on the line meant that you would take home twice as much as what the average schoolteacher was paid.

      A closer, more critical look at the emerging American meritocracy reveals some dirty little secrets, like many lingering vestiges of the aristocratic systems we supposedly shed. As the sons, and later the daughters, of American workers were vying for spots in America’s colleges and universities by dutifully sitting for their “scientific” ACT and SAT tests, the children of the financially privileged were quietly being welcomed and educated in an extensive system of private preparatory boarding schools that had little or no interest in test scores. These kids of privilege weren’t herded into classes of thirty students of mixed background and wide ranging skill sets. They weren’t run through some set curriculum regardless of their interests or talents. No, these kids of privilege received individualized instruction in classes averaging seven or eight. They were individually coached and nurtured to understand the ways of the world and how things really work so that they could assume the reigns of control in industry and government.

      In an age when “No Child Left Behind” is the chronic mantra of federal and state educational pundits, the American educational K-16 system continues to behave as though sorting the “brightest and the best” from the rest is still the primary concern.

      Perhaps it’s time that we should admit at least to ourselves that we are not at all set up to reckon with the difference in preparation levels in our incoming students much less to reduce the achievement gap between minority and majority students. After 14 years of NCLB, high school graduation rates remain flat.

      What may be more disturbing is that many involved in higher education clearly think that such efforts to ensure the success of a broader swath of students don’t represent a productive use of our time and resources.
     

     And so we remain set up to sort out those who can effectvily memorize the salient elements from four or five subjects at a time over a fourteen week period, read and write quickly and accurately, and use numbers in novel and complex ways, from those who cannot or will not. We don’t care what you like. We don’t care how you learn. It’s our way or the highway.

     As the American economy changes, our habitual sorting systems appear to have increasing dire social and economic consequences for more and more students. The 75% of American students who will fail to complete a college degree will surely find it harder and harder to make a living, much less to achieve the American dream.

      Mark Twain wrote, “when I was a boy on the Mississippi River there was a proposition in a township there to discontinue public schools because they were too expensive. An old farmer spoke up and said if they stopped building the schools they would not save anything, because every time a school was closed a jail had to be built.”

      Perhaps it truly is time for a paradigm shift.