Education Week - October 1, 2014 - 24

COMMENTARY
By Mia Hood
ed
"B
NOT
e
n
facts
,
e
ure,
F
NOT
ew voices have been more influential
in recent education debates
than that of Microsoft co-founder
and mega-philanthropist Bill
Gates. At a gathering of teachers
last March in Washington, Gates
repeated his endorsement of the
Common Core State Standards,
arguing that having academic standards in the
United States will promote classroom innovation
and help students compete globally. Using the
analogy of the nonstandard electrical outlet, he
explained, "If you had 50 different plug types,
appliances wouldn't be available and would be
very expensive." A universal plug type, he said,
encourages product competition and variety, and
cost parity.
We have a tendency to revere the counsel of
successful business leaders on public-policy
issues, as if the know-how to turn a profit in a
particular industry at a specific time gives them
superhuman insight and the ability to handle
K-12 Schools Need More Steve Jobs and Less Bill Gates
By David Bernstein
any challenge that comes their way. Business
leaders, however, can't agree among themselves
about what works best when it comes to commerce,
let alone public policy, which is one reason
there's a new business book released every week
contradicting the last one published.
In contemplating the future of education, we'd
do well to countenance the voice of a man with
an equally impressive business pedigree, that
of Gates' sometimes friend, sometimes nemesis,
and fellow college dropout: the late Steve Jobs.
Gates' views on education and the economy
clearly grew out of his experience at Microsoft,
whose successful standardization of the PC's
operating system-Windows-could, like the
uniform electrical outlet, also make the case for
standardization in education. Gates' business
model is that of a large company that dominated
an industry, similar to the dominance of such
entrepreneurial titans of the past as John D.
Rockefeller and Andrew Carnegie. These men
also influenced the development of the modern
education system, patterned after the factory
itself.
Isn't Reading About More Than 'Evidence'?
"
ut what does the evidence
say?"
It was an unusually
hot spring day
on the Lower East
Side of Manhattan,
and I was visiting
a class of 8th graders
who had organized themselves into book
clubs. The club meetings that day overflowed
into the hallway outside the classroom. The
air conditioning didn't. I sat with a club that
was discussing Jerry Spinelli's Stargirl.
As a teacher-educator, I had come to the
school a week earlier to reconnect with a real
classroom full of real kids, learning from a
really great teacher. I had commandeered
the teacher's desk, sifted through stacks of
her students' work, and imposed on her for
her wisdom and resources. When she asked
me to take some observation notes during
the book club meetings, I gladly obliged.
The club members sat against the walls on
either side of the hallway, legs stretched out,
notebooks splayed over their laps. They were
fanning themselves with their cracked-open
copies of the novel and discussing a pivotal
scene between the characters Leo and Stargirl
when one member asked, "But what
does the evidence say?" They all stopped
fanning and dutifully flipped through pages
tiled over with sticky notes to find the scene
under discussion-to determine "what the
evidence" said.
The teacher in me instinctively recorded
the student's question in the "+" column on
the observation form. Without prompting
and under only my loose supervision, she
had asked her peers to anchor their discussion
in Spinelli's words, to scrutinize the
text, and to hold themselves accountable
to it.
And I might have written just that in the
When
students read
in this way,
they don't
recognize all
that text does
and can do
besides
serving as
evidence."
notes column on the form, except that the
question started looking odd to me. What
does the evidence say? Would this question
have sounded normal to my ear three years
ago, when I last taught? Back then, my students
and I discussed, perhaps, pulling evidence
from text to support interpretations.
But this equation of text and evidence-this
interchangeability of the terms-struck me
as a new phenomenon.
Anyone teaching or learning in K-12
classrooms must accept the primacy of textual
evidence. The "Reading: Literature"
section of the Common Core State Standards
for English/language arts directs
students to "cite specific textual evidence
when writing or speaking to support conclusions
drawn from the text." I don't dispute
the letter or the spirit of this, but it seems
like our focus on evidence has altered the
way we see text. We've come to see text as
evidence, and only evidence.
After that first moment of strangeness,
similar moments began to fall like rain.
My colleague, a former science teacher,
asked me to explain how reading teachers
use "think-alouds" (a teacher's narration of
her thinking about a text) to impart comprehension
strategies. He asked if their
purpose is to present the evidence that
supports the teacher's claims about a text.
For a moment, I was tempted to accept this
explanation, but I realized that, if I did, I'd
be assuming that our thoughts arrive in our
minds as claims, and words arrive on the
page as evidence. I clarified that the purpose
of a think-aloud is to show what the
text makes us think as we read it and how,
through this thinking, we make sense of its
meanings.
A few weeks later, another colleague and
I were designing a reading curriculum. She
suggested this daily objective: "Students
will categorize evidence from a nonfiction
text by subtopic."
How strange to think of the information
we gather from a nonfiction text as "evidence."
Evidence of what? I thought. I suggested
we keep her objective, but replace
"evidence" with the word "information."
I suspect that this confusion of terms is
unintentional. But if our ways of speaking
about text have seeped into our students'
ways of thinking about it, if they've come
to think that text's raison d'etre is to serve
as evidence, their experience of reading has
been fundamentally changed.
Imagine reading along in a novel, already
anticipating the question you'll be required
to answer, the thesis statement you'll eventually
develop, or the comment you'll make
in discussion and be required to "back up"
with evidence. This is reading the way
squirrels put away nuts for the long winter
ahead. This is reading to stock evidence, to
prepare for the question, the assignment,
the discussion.
The trouble is that when students read in
this way, they don't recognize all that text
does and can do besides serving as evidence.
The first standard doesn't acknowledge the
way text elicits thinking and draws out new
ideas, curiosities, frustrations, causes, and
sometimes even pursuits.
Text does this to me all the time. In a reIn
this decidedly 20th-century outlook, big
companies were the engines of economic growth
and required large, skilled workforces to power
them. The purpose of education then was (and,
I believe, still is) to prepare young Americans to
receive the mantle from business leaders of corporate
entities, such as Microsoft today, to carry
them into the future.
But a different philosophy emerges from the
story of Steve Jobs.
While he never publicly argued a particular
view on education policy, Jobs made clear in his
biography by Walter Isaacson that school was
never a good fit for him. "[Schools] came close to
really beating any curiosity out of me," he told
Isaacson. Jobs possessed a very different sensibility
for business and human nature, which has
played out in the competition between Apple and
Microsoft.
In his 2005 now-famous Stanford University
commencement address, Jobs noted that after
dropping out of Reed College, no longer having to
take "the normal classes," he decided to take one
on calligraphy. "Much of what I stumbled into
24 | EDUCATION WEEK | October 1, 2014 | www.edweek.org/go/commentary
http://www.edweek.org/go/commentary
Education Week - October 1, 2014

Table of Contents for the Digital Edition of Education Week - October 1, 2014
