Meet: Ernest Boyer--Back to basics

NEA Today, Dec 1995 by Merina, Anita

"I get most depressed when I hear experts talking to each other," says Ernest Boyer, president of the Carnegie Foundation for the Advancement of Teaching.

"I get most renewed when I go into classrooms and hear children and teachers talking to one another. "

Boyer has been a major player in the education policy arena for the past 25 years. His most recent book is The Basic School.

He spoke recently with NEA Today staff writer Anita Menira at his office on the Princeton University campus.

"The truth is," you write, "we know what works" in education.

Yes we do. We know that when class sizes are kept small and teaching schedules and student groupings are kept open this empowers teachers and promotes learning.

We know that a comprehensive curriculum relates to children's lives, is integrated thematically, promotes literacy, and teaches consensus values such as honesty, responsibility, and self-discipline.

We know that effective schools build an entire community around learning. This means including parents as partners and teachers and staff as leaders and integrating community services into the school setting.

We know all of this by looking at what good schools are already doing. There isn't any dazzling new experiment to try. We just need to support the outstanding practices that exist out there, and there are many.

Why does your newest book, The Basic School, focus on elementary schools?

So much of the reform movement focused on the outcomes of education, the upper grades, and national standards that I felt we were paying little attention to the foundations of learning. But investment in these early years will pay off most effectively.

After all, if we don't develop a public love of children and see the first 10 years of their lives as a precious time to teach them skills and enhance their quality of life, then we should worry about our own future.

Why call your book The Basic School?

I use the word "basic" because the book focuses on the first years of formal learning, emphasizes the importance of the neighborhood school, deals with language and curriculum, and identifies programs and practices already at work in schools.

In The Basic School, you push for "a curriculum with coherence." What do you mean by that?

There's great confusion in schools about what to teach. I want schools to organize curriculum around three goals: content, integration, and the relationship to students' lives. It's troubling to see students enter school asking "Why?" and by the third grade switching to "What's on the test?"

Why is school restructuring so hard at the high school level?

School renewal isn't impossible in the upper grades--just far more difficult. In the higher grades, children are less active, parents are less engaged, the schedule tends to be inflexible, and the curriculum more rigidly defined.

We also put curriculum into boxes where teachers must shift their attention from students to subjects, and where assessment tends to focus on knowledge of facts built around a discipline. As a consequence, the areas of learning are less integrated.

What remedy would you prescribe?

One thing I'd suggest is to break down the "super schools" of thousands of students into smaller, more manageable units. Super schools are more factories than schools, and he idea of intervention and reform becomes less and less productive the larger the school.

Every student needs to be part of a smaller school "family" where the student is always connected to a mentor/teacher. This breaks down the anonymity and makes learning far more meaningful. How can quality education take place in a building where students feel anonymous?

Are you worried about the future of school renewal in the event of massive federal budget cuts?

Absolutely. It's appalling that we've reduced funding at a time when the problems have never been more acute. You see broken test tubes in labs, kids sharing textbooks, and school buildings that are more than 50 years old.

We talk about urban renewal and yet children spend years in buildings that would have been bulldozed by any corporation I know. And then we expect children to walk into these crumbling buildings and be greeted with "Welcome to the world of learning"?

What appalls me even more is that rather than help correct this inequity, politicians would rather just label it a failed system and offer an alternative.

I wonder if all these "leaders" think about what such negative language does to children. They tell them to get out of bed each morning and march into a failed system, yet offer few solutions.

What if we were to say that about banking? Tell people its a failed system, but, by the way, don't forget to put your money in it Monday morning. How can a 16-year-old get up each morning with that knowledge? It builds a cynicism that's unfair and demoralizing and just not true.

Those who favor vouchers often say they're backed by parents,

According to many polls, parental confidence in local public schools remains high. I also find it ironic that the same people who discount these polls then turn around and say, "Let's give school choice to parents." You can't have it both ways. You can't say parents aren't intelligent enough to know what's good yet they are intelligent enough to find what's better.