A Hot Beach Debate for Edu-Nerds Like Me

Jay Matthews:

Those of us who spend our days mesmerized by discussions of summer learning loss, looping and longitudinal analysis need a summer break, just like everybody else. We are readers, so on vacation we are likely to have a book in our hands, or if we are very old, a newspaper. For me, bestselling thrillers are too predictable and mysteries too complex. I need something different, something weird, something fresh that taps into my essential nerdiness, and I have found it. "Education Hell: Rhetoric vs. Reality," by Gerald W. Bracey.

The first few chapters are familiar, if you, like me, are a fan of the irascible Bracey and his assaults on the conventionally wise among our education leaders. But in chapter 10 he does something totally unexpected. He resurrects The Eight-Year Study, a 70-year-old corpse, and makes me want to talk about it, even with that guy sprawled out on the next beach towel.

The Eight-Year Study was published in 1942, three years before I was born. That is, to me, a virtue. So few people have heard of it they cannot have any knee-jerk reactions. It was a very large experiment. More than 30 high schools in the 1930s were encouraged to try non-traditional approaches to teaching, like combining Engish and social studies and science into one course, to see how the students who studied that way did when compared to students who did not attend the schools in the study. More than 300 colleges agreed to abandon their traditional admissions procedures in accepting students from the experimental schools.

Posted by Jim Zellmer at July 5, 2009 3:11 AM
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