My name is Bob Murphy. I recently retired from full time employment near the close of my fourth decade in public education as a teacher and an advocate. For the last eleven years, I have been employed by the Connecticut Education Association most recently as Director of Policy and Professional Practice. CEA has asked me to assist in starting up this blog, which I am happy to do. The time is right for this conversation.
I confess that at many points in the last forty years I thought that I had seen it all. And each time I was soon proven wrong. Wave after wave of school reform struck my career, many of which I helped shape, most of which dissipated with neglible long term impact.

This is not the case with the so-called standards and accountability movement - a movement catalyzed by the issuance of a report in 1983 called “A Nation at Risk” - a report characterized by explosive rhetoric indicting the performance of the nation’s educational system, but accompanied by little in terms of factual substantiation. With the addition of the federal law known as No Child left Behind in 2002, virtually every public school classroom is impacted and this movement, birthed by the rhetorical bombast of A Nation at Risk, has gathered energy equivalent to that of a tsunami with all its potential for destruction.

Too many of America’s classrooms are becoming joyless places whose central function is to elevate test scores by relentlessly developing only those skills which serve that end. Too many of America’s teachers are uncomfortable in their new role as the oxygen is systematically sucked out of their classrooms. Before the last molecule of creativity is redacted from our curricula and pedagogy is entirely devoid of the room for uncertainty which nurtures a love of learning, can we at least talk about this? Eliott Eisener in his commentary says that “Achievement has trumped learning.”

It does not require a great leap of imagination or profound insight to recognize that the values and visions that have driven education during the first quarter of the 20th century are reappearing with a vengeance today. We look for “best methods” as if they were independent of context; we do more testing than any nation on earth; we seek curriculum uniformity so parents can compare their schools with other schools, as if test scores were good proxies for the quality of education. We would like nothing more than to get teaching down to a science even though the conception of science being employed has little to do with what science is about. What we are now doing is creating an industrial culture in our schools, one whose values are brittle and whose conception of what’s important narrow. We flirt with payment by results, we pay practically no attention to the idea that engagement in school can and should provide intrinsic satisfactions, and we exacerbate the importance of extrinsic rewards by creating policies that encourage children to become point collectors. Achievement has triumphed over inquiry. I think our children deserve more.

Elliot Eisner
John Dewey Lecture for 2002
Stamford University

Right now in Connecticut we are engaged in a public conversation facilitated by the State Board of Education which could lead to a radical restructuring of our high schools with standardized (state-designed) end of course exams in key subjects as a centerpiece. In addition to the already dramatic increase in testing in reading and math required by the federal law, this year we are required to test in science as well. A very recent study by the Center on Education Policy cited in an earlier post examines the so-called narrowing of the curriculum that is too often a by product of high stakes testing.

In short there is much to talk about and we hope that you will join the conversation.