Opinion: Paradigm shift on the horizon? If so, bring it on

In his landmark 1962 book, “The Structure of Scientific Revolutions,” Thomas Kuhn wrote of a phenomenon that occurs in fields of study, especially sciences, when the whole apple cart gets upset. He called it a paradigm shift and described it as a time when one or more major assumptions in a field are overturned for new ones that better explain reality or produce better results. Thus, astronomy underwent a paradigm shift when the heliocentric (sun-centered) theory replaced the older geocentric (earth-centered) one. Suddenly, the earth was no longer the center of the universe, at least in terms of who revolves around whom, and all sorts of things had to change. The change was necessary, however, in order for the science to advance. Similar paradigm shifts occur or have occurred in all mature sciences and, though this goes beyond Kuhn, they also occur in most fields of study.

Perhaps even in education? If you work in education long enough, it is not typically paradigm shifts you worry about. Rather, it is the constant changes in how things are taught, what is taught, what technology is used, etc. that can be so plaguing, they occasionally induce bouts of motion sickness. We even have a name for it. We call it the pendulum effect. You can find examples of the pendulum in any curricular area but allow me to offer a clear cut case of one in reading. When I was in elementary school, we learned to read through intensive phonics instruction. We learned the sounds each letter made and then applied them first to small words and then increasingly to more complex ones. This worked quite well but not for every student. A few didn’t learn well this way. So, by the time I first entered school administration, many schools had moved to “whole language,” which de-emphasized phonics in favor of memorizing whole words and “learning naturally.” This proved to be an unmitigated disaster and led to what are sometimes called the reading wars. Lots of students learned to read poorly or not at all under this new method. Over time, whole language was abandoned and we moved back to intensive phonics. And so the pendulum swings back and forth, back and forth, back and forth until you’re not getting sleepy, just nauseous.

Spend enough time in education and you start to get pretty cynical about this in fact. Starry-eyed novices to the profession see a problem and advocate a new way to teach something. Veterans take up the triumphal cry, “we’ve tried that and it didn’t work,” and cynicism soon stalks the halls.

But, truthfully, such arguments over pedagogy aren’t really paradigms or paradigm shifts, at least not for education as a whole. In fact, what I find really quite exciting today is that we may actually be in the midst of a true paradigm shift. Michelle Rhee, the superintendent of the Washington, D.C., schools, some argue the worst district in the entire country, instigates a huge reformist agenda in which scores of teachers and principals are fired for low student achievement in their schools. The D.C. mayor who supported her in these moves loses his recent election, with the schools as a major issue, and there are strong signs the fellow who will replace him will oust Rhee. (Her removal would set the D.C. schools backs not years, but decades.)

Meanwhile, on the marble side of town, President Obama and Secretary Duncan continue their intensive focus on student choice, closing consistently ineffective schools, and evaluating teachers, principals and others based upon student achievement data. They are seemingly using the NCLB system developed under President Bush to produce data and change the way teachers and administrators are employed both in the short- and long-run. The national education unions, which provided enormous support to the Obama presidential campaign, now find many of their most critical positions under attack by the by the Obama administration. A republican president who stomped all over the federal system by pushing national education requirements on the states is followed by a Democratic president who attempts to eviscerate the sacred cows of some of his biggest supporters.

Then the media jump in with a new film, “Waiting for Superman,” and major articles in Time magazine and others on not just the problems with education in America, but also heaping platefuls of what must be done to solve them (including my favorite, an extended school year) with fingers pointed at those who stand in the way. (Most of these problems, by the way, are not problems experienced by the vast majority of schools in South Dakota, but they most definitely are in many other parts of the country.)

Put all this together and it doesn’t look like a pendulum swinging so much as one knocked off its hook, like a mechanism that is going to need to be reset, recalibrated and maybe retooled altogether. In other words, it looks, just possibly, like a paradigm shift.

The Chinese (or possibly the English who reputed it to the Chinese) have an interesting saying about such things: “May you live in interesting times.” But it’s not a way of wishing someone well. It is, in fact, a curse.

I may not agree with all of the reforms being offered these days and I may especially disagree with the ways in which some are being instigated. That aside, if we are indeed on the cusp of a paradigm shift in education, I have but one response: bring it on.

Tags: joe graves, opinion