Poor Elijah’s Almanack: Flogging, incense and project-based learning

Counting from the publication of “A Nation at Risk,” the American education crisis is in its fourth decade. Counting from the 1970s, the decade whose reforms actually caused the crisis that then prompted Risk, our public school debacle last year celebrated its 50th birthday.

Times of crisis often seem to call for desperate measures. Penitents flogged themselves and burned incense during the plague, but neither made anybody better.

The same can be said for horse wormers and intravenous chlorine bleach.

Education experts have often resorted to desperate measures, too. Ironically, schools were performing reasonably well before experts served up their menu of 1970s reforms. Fifty years spent desperately recycling the same failed reforms, from self-esteem to the latest new math, have only made things worse.

Projects feature prominently among reformers’ recipes. Experts theorize that letting students show what they know in formats other than writing better accommodates their individual “learning styles,” a persistent education fiction debunked everywhere from Scientific American to The Atlantic.

Experts also maintain that students welcome the opportunity to demonstrate what they’ve learned in ways that don’t involve tests. I explain this theory every year when I assign semester history projects to my eighth-graders. When they groan, I reassure them that they actually enjoy projects. They tell me the experts don’t know what they’re talking about, a realization that hasn’t yet dawned on most public officials, including many who run our schools.

I think history projects serve a valid purpose by giving students a chance to do independent research and present their findings clearly and cogently. While I’m explaining the Revolutionary Era, they choose a specialty, from period clothing to Benedict Arnold. Each project involves a three-page report and an exhibit, everything from illustrated timelines to models of Fort Ticonderoga. Neatness counts and pretty is nice, but their model of Fort Ticonderoga has to explain the particulars of what happened there and why it was important.

Contrary to what you might expect, most students tell me the exhibit is the part they hate more. In fact, their purported love of projects notwithstanding, some students still throw them together the night before they’re due.

I doubt you’re shocked.

As is often the case with education research, analyses of project-based instruction are typically anecdotal and inconclusive. Even the pro-projects authors of a recent study concede that the “existing international evidence” documenting project-based instruction’s “effectiveness,” including their own, is “relatively weak.”

Despite this “paucity of robust research” and at best mixed classroom results, reformers nonetheless remain enthusiastic about “project-based learning.” Having railed for decades against “fact cramming” and “assembly line” teaching methods, many fault my project assignment both because it lacks the “relevance” of a “real world problem” and because I also use tests to determine what my students have learned in class beyond their narrow, chosen topics. Experts urge me to “stop worrying so much about covering the material.” They prescribe “academic depth” over a broad understanding of scholastic subjects.

Decades of “not worrying” about covering “material” is one reason so many Americans don’t believe in science and why we’re so catastrophically ignorant of civics and our own history.

Besides, anybody who thinks American students’ major academic deficiency is they lack in-depth knowledge of random topics that pique their personal “student interest,” doesn’t have a clue about how little most students know about what once passed for common knowledge. It sounds creative to ask students to “write reflections” on “the American dream,” but before you can reflect on the American dream, you need to know something about America. We’re talking about students who don’t know who George Washington was, or who we fought in the Civil War, or that there was a Civil War, or that John Kennedy wasn’t president at the time.

It’s especially odd to hear experts tout project-based learning as the remedy for students on the verge of failing and dropping out. Does anybody really believe that most prospective dropouts are equipped to “address the ethical issues” involved in genetic engineering?

A coalition of education interest groups, including the National Education Association and the National School Boards Association, promotes “project-based learning.” Their “universal design for learning,” code-named UDL, permits students to “use alternate methods to show they’ve mastered a concept” if they have “difficulty with written language.” Except “creating a poster” isn’t the same as answering in a paragraph, unless you’re unconcerned about illiteracy. A “rap song about division” can’t comprehensively assess whether a fourth-grader can divide, especially if you let him rap in a group.

Advocates insist that team assessment is how the adult world works, which proves how unfamiliar they are with the adult world. My students work in a team. It’s called their class. I just don’t judge what each student has learned based on the answers the student next to him can give me.

UDL fans aren’t alone in seeing projects as the answer to disappointing assessment data. Maryland, for example, opted to allow students to graduate high school by completing an alternate “project” if they failed the state’s graduation exam twice, despite the state board’s acknowledgement that its state exams represented “a minimum standard” that already didn’t “ensure that students are ready for college or a job.” The revised regulations were prompted by fears that dropout rates would skyrocket once passing the state exams became required for all students.

Modern standardized assessment is an embarrassment of faulty data compounded by calamitous wastes of time and money. But that’s not the issue here. If it were, all the states and districts grappling with “data problems” could simply fix their exams. We’re also not talking about a few students who just don’t test well. We’re talking about battalions who can’t read, write or do algebra. For most, projects are simply camouflage for what they haven’t learned.

We don’t need more camouflage in public education.

We also don’t need more desperate measures. Burning incense didn’t help, but at least it didn’t cause the plague.

Too many education cures haven’t proved as harmless.

Peter Berger has taught English and history for 30 years. Poor Elijah would be pleased to answer letters addressed to him in care of the editor.