Blast from the Past: September 1990 on Letting Teachers Teach

2025 Introduction & Reflection 
Author: Beth Carlson, NBCT. MCELA Executive Board Member, English Teacher and Department Head at Kennebunk High School, [email protected] 

​How big are your classes?  I’m fortunate in my district to (mostly) have high school classes under 18 students, sometimes well under, but I have scored the AP Lang test and heard teachers from other states talk about the challenge of writing classes with 30-40 students. I can’t even imagine that from either the teacher’s or student’s viewpoint. While my district does level classes as honors and college prep, when I taught middle school in the 80s and very early 90s, I had numbers between 13 and 15 and heterogeneous grouping.  Given that experience, I have to agree with Anne Dodd.  In fact, I remember those years through a very rosy lens.  This may be because small classes create better individual learning, but I also often wonder if it’s because it was in the time before smartphones. One thing I’m sure of, however, is that I can more easily police the technology in a small class.

Blast from the Past, September 1990
By Peter W. Cox 
     Although we have a public outcry that education should be reformed, the public is content to let someone else figure out how to do the job. Ideas about how to actually implement reform remain scarce. 
    There are some noteworthy guidelines, including Maine's own "Common Core of Learning," which says students must be taught to reason and adapt rather than to memorize and recite. In the past, schools produced a repeatedly small proportion of decision makers and a large mass of workers basically literate in English, compliant, and able to perform repetitive tasks effectively and in isolation - “factory-model schools for an industrial economy” the Common Core introduction states. It also states that schools must now produce "literate workers with good problem solving skills" who can "adapt quickly to changed circumstances." 
    The Common Core presents an enviable list of goals, including competence in a second language. Few will argue with this ideal. But how is any of it, even something as simple as increased emphasis on writing - for everyone, not just for the college bound - to be implemented? With this question in mind, I participated briefly in a recent conference of both elementary and high school English teachers. I didn’t come back with any solutions but I did come back with a different perspective. 
    The vast majority of the teachers at the conference opposed the current assessment tests. Some teachers think the assessment tests drive the curriculum too much, but in this meeting others talked about how the tests can lower the self-esteem of an entire school because the socio-economic profile of the student body is a more certain indicator of performance than teaching or individual intelligence. In other words, Cape Elizabeth will always score better than Presque Isle. 
    Several teachers said that they are mandated, through curriculum, to teach so many specific things that they cannot thoroughly teach the basics. One teacher spoke of her isolation in the classroom, where she works alone with her students every day. She suggested that two teachers share a classroom, so they could observe and interact with one another. Others said that they were lucky because they could attend the conference and discuss problems with peers. They said that in some school districts, teachers found it extremely difficult to get the time off to break their isolation by attending such conferences. 
    But the most thought provoking statement came from Anne Dodd, a former public school teacher and administrator, and now a college teacher. She said that if all of the mandated programs were removed, if all of the people other than teachers who now populate a school were removed, there would be enough money for each teacher to have no more than ten students. In such small groups, fast learners and slow learners could sit side by side and the teacher could interact with them all. 
    Mandated programs have become the pork barrel of education, having been instituted in more prosperous times and now representing special constituencies. Getting rid of them would be an herculean task. We have art teachers; we have programs for the "gifted;" we have psychologists to test students and thell the teacher what they already know; we have special "resource rooms" in which to segregate problem students for part of the day. 
    Dodd's modest proposal was [to] get rid of these types of programs so that all you have left is the  teachers, a few administrators, and some building custodians. Then you wouldn't need to put slow learners in a special stigmatized program because classes would be small enough for the teacher to teach them along with the others. 
    What a radical concept! Too radical ever to be implemented, but perhaps not too radical to be discussed. And its discussion would entail recognition of the most basic educational reform - let the teachers teach, even encourage them to teach. Give them the ability to interact individually with their studies and don't hamstring them with the performance demands of an antiquated system from which educational reform is trying to break free. 
    If the teacher's job is to develop in students the ability to think logically and to solve problems, let the teacher do that; however, he or she can do it best with individual students. It's an interesting point on which to start talking.