My friend, colleague, and tweep, Jenn Roach (
@JennGRoach), presented me with an answer to a question I threw into a Twitter chat this weekend. We were both participating in #sunchat which is kind of a melee of ideas, opinions, platitudes, facts, links, and the occasional fit of weekend educator silliness. Well, somewhere in the noise, I asked about differentiation and standardization, and she wowed me with a reply that would not fit into the 140-character mold made gospel by the folks at Twitter. Instead, she wrote a post titled "Differentiation VS Standardization" on her blog titled
Literacy, Leadership, and Life. She then tweeted the link to me, and asked for my input.
Well, like Mrs. Roach, I could not fit my reply into a 140-character box. In fact, I couldn't fit my reply into the 4,096-character comment box that Blogger allows at the end of a blog post. So I had to come here. Maybe go read Mrs. Roach's post, then come back here to read my reply. I don't know whether we'll agree to go our own ways on this or keep it up for a bit, but either way, I know that I love being challenged by so worthy a colleague. Here, then, is my reply:
I'm not sure whether the weekend has left me in any state to wax
philosophic about two of the biggest issues facing educators today, but I’ll
have a go.
Let’s start with standardization. As an RtI Coordinator, I
deal with many of the most marginalized students in our population. As a Pre-AP
teacher, I deal with another group of marginalized kids. These two ends of the
spectrum are among those most detrimentally impacted by the notion that there
is some one-size-fits-all standard that will prepare every child for the rigors
of this world.
I have dyslexic kids, for example, who fire on all eight
cylinders intellectually provided they don’t need to visually process written
text. Unfortunately, reading written text is a big part of the standard to
which legislators and ivory tower theorists would hold our children. Under a
standardized system, these children are often lost. We just lost Michael
Faraday, Jack Horner, Ansel Adams, David Boies, Nelson Rockefeller, F. Scott
Fitzgerald, Sir Richard Branson, Steven Spielberg, and a host of others.
I have kids with autism spectrum disorder which can extend
their processing time to more than twice that of their peers. If the standard
includes completing an assessment within a four-hour window (as it does here in
Texas), these kids are lost. We just lost Mozart, Temple Grandin, and Vincent D’Onofrio
among others.
Add to these troubling considerations the fact that, while
approximately 8.6% of American schoolchildren live with some type of learning
disability, approximately 32% of incarcerated youth live with learning
disabilities. So what is our standardization really preparing these kids for?
For college and career? Not for the kids in this margin of the population.
Then I consider the kids who sit in my Pre-AP class and are
tagged as gifted and talented. That means, according to the process by which we
make these designations in the system, I have a child who is operating
intellectually at two or more standard deviations above the norm, and he’s
cooling his heels in a Pre-AP class in which he’s already figured out most of
what I need to present to his peers before I’ve begun to present it. Where will
this child’s fire to excel be born if I don’t differentiate, if I standardize
my teaching? I can tell you this: by virtue of only being in my Pre-AP class and not in the IHP group or at our
gifted magnet campus or somewhere even more suited for him, this child’s fire
for learning in an academic setting has already begun to die. So we lose the
other margin of our population by placing our standards down at a level these
children have already surpassed.
I’ll tell you what. I don’t like standardization. It’s mass
production mentality, and it doesn’t work when the product being produced is a
human mind. They just come in too many shapes and sizes to all fit on one
conveyor belt.
I have a child who could probably progress to a great art
school. He could probably learn from a master cartoonist and make his way in
the world one day if such a mentorship were available to him. But his parents have
already been told that that will likely never happen. If he does every work
hard enough to ever be accepted into a post-secondary institution, he will be
steered toward process operations or some other skilled labor field. He is in
our life skills class. That is the standard for him and his classmates. Never
mind that right now, today, he’s one of the most gifted cartoonists I’ve ever
met. That will be allowed to languish and die, as he trudges forward through
the standards our system grants him. Where is the 2e – twice-exceptional – designation
for this child? Why can’t his strengths be recognized and developed while his
limitations are built up through interventions appropriate to his needs? Why
does he need to take and pass the same test that will open the doors to a
future lawyer or surgeon? Where does his path lay?
And this brings us to differentiation. I would rather see
our entire system – every classroom, every teacher, every course, every assignment,
every standard of mastery – differentiated based upon the needs of every child than
see one tablespoon of talent go wasted and undeveloped. I would rather not
think of gifted junkies sitting around between shifts delivering pizzas
self-medicating in order to turn down the volume in their own heads. I would
rather not know that there are three times the number of learning disabled kids
in jail than there should be, statistically speaking, but they didn’t get what
they needed in school and didn’t see another way to go.
Differentiation means knowing your kids. That’s not bad, and
there can never be too much of that. Differentiation means teaching them the
way they need to learn. That’s also not a bad thing and not a thing we can do
too often. Differentiation means recognizing the differences in your students’
strengths and allowing them to demonstrate their mastery of content according
to those strengths. How can that be bad?
If I’m pie-eyed, let me know. But I, for one, will take a
differentiated education paradigm over a standardized one any day of the week.
