Aaron Pallas, an ed school professor at Teachers College, appears to be unwilling to acknowledge that our public schools are failing to effectively educate huge numbers of our kids, or that there’s much we can do about it. He struggles to debunk existing examples of demonstrable success perhaps fearing that we might otherwise ask why do we keep doing so poorly when we have proof that we can do so much better.
To that end, last week Pallas penned a piece in this column challenging my assertion in a Washington Post op ed that our “schools can get much better results with th[e] same kids than they’re now generally getting.” Employing a locution that I never used, and that cannot fairly be inferred from what I said, he tries to portray my view as placing “the emphasis on what schools can extract from kids.” (His italics.)
No, Professor Pallas, I don’t think knowledge resides in kids and, like iron ore, all we need to do is carefully extract it. What I do think is that our schools, and especially our teachers, need to do a much better job of educating our kids – that is, teaching them the skills and knowledge they will need to be successful in the 21st century. As I put it in my piece, “teachers matter, big time.”