Featured presenter at annual League of Women Voters meeting
By Lea Kahn, Staff Writer
Times have changed.
In the “good old days,” teachers sorted out which students would go to college and which would go to work after high school, said Willa Spicer, the state’s deputy commissioner of education.
It didn’t even matter if a student dropped out of high school, because there were plenty of jobs that paid enough money to support a family, she told the Lawrence League of Women Voters at its annual meeting June 3.
”All of us are the result of that sorting out,” she said. “A high school dropout could make it just fine. You could work your way up (in the company) and become a supervisor. We all knew those people.”
But since the federal No Child Left Behind Act of 2001 became law, the public schools are required to educate all children equally, a “major difference in the way we run schools,” said Ms. Spicer, who holds the No. 2 post in the state Department of Education.
Ms. Spicer recalled a story from her own childhood, in which her mother pointedly told her that “math does not run in our family.” She said she knew math was not her strong point, and so learned what she needed to know and did what she was told.
”I would ask questions about math, because math made no sense to me,” she said. “It was just answering the questions. ‘You get on a train’ — it doesn’t matter where it’s going — ‘and it’s about what time another train going the other way will pass you.’”
”Who will need that information?” she said. “It never dawned on me that the information was supposed to be used. That was fine for me. I knew just enough (math) to get through school. But my world is gone. If we continue to turn out students like me, the United States won’t survive.”
Now, it is important for students to understand the concepts, Ms. Spicer said. The old-time production jobs are evaporating at the same rate as professional jobs are growing in the global economy, she said. To earn high wages, one must have a high level of skills, she added.
Ms. Spicer said the emphasis has moved from testing students to ensuring they are learning. Teachers were taught how to teach and if a student did not learn, it was the student’s fault — not the teacher’s fault, she said. The new approach has made teaching much more difficult, she added.
Students are still given standardized tests, she said. Those tests are administered in grades 3-8 then again in grade 11. The tests are being revised to follow the curriculum taught to the students, she added. For example, all high school students must take algebra I, algebra II, geometry, English, chemistry and biology.
”The government is saying that every child must learn,” Ms. Spicer said. “With students who are easy to teach, we are doing wonders, but there is the unspoken problem of disaffected high school students who don’t want to be there. Teaching is far harder. (And) when a student does not test well, we will have to say, ‘How can we change our (approach to) teaching?’…The future of the students and society matters.”