Roanoke Times
Copyright (c) 1995, Landmark Communications, Inc.
DATE: FRIDAY, April 12, 1991 TAG: 9104120663
SECTION: VIRGINIA PAGE: B1 EDITION: STATE
SOURCE: PAUL DELLINGER SOUTHWEST BUREAU
DATELINE: EMORY LENGTH: Medium
Joseph Spagnolo and Willard Daggett, the New York education official, spoke at Emory & Henry College's third annual Educational Forum. Although they were on tight schedules and neither heard the other's speech, they came remarkably close to saying the same things.
"We're going to make some changes in this process," said Spagnolo, state superintendent of public instruction. "The system is fundamentally flawed."
Likening efforts to restructure the educational system to adding or changing rooms for a house, he said, "What I want to do is take a bulldozer and take the house away and start all over again."
Spagnolo said school should start earlier in life, because children learn much in their earliest years that influences the rest of their lives.
Catch-up remedial programs are "stopgap measures," he said.
He hopes to change the system to offer a core of common learning objectives for youngsters up to age 16, at which time they would choose either college, realistic technical-education programs in cooperation with community colleges or apprenticeship programs to learn a skill.
He also would change grade levels to learning levels, do away with standardized tests - which he said do not fairly measure what has been learned - and find ways to keep from having to give any child a failing grade.
"If you want to know who's fault that is, look in the mirror," he said of teachers who give "F" grades. "We've got to figure out some way to make that child succeed. . . . We can't afford to throw any more people away."
Daggett said the 1980s had been a decade of educational reform, but today's graduates "are worse off than when we began. . . . We reformed our schools, maybe, but 10 years later graduates are farther behind."
That is because society has changed even more, he said, and because "you [teachers] are trapped in a system that's outdated . . . that has rear-view management as its approach to instruction."
Educational reform, he said, has been "about re-creating the schools of our youth" instead of improving the system. He said teachers should ask what adult roles they want to prepare their students for, and go from there.
"Your kids have got the same math as Grandpa," he said. "We are better in 1991 at doing what we were doing in 1980. . . . What we were doing in 1980 is not what we should be doing in 1991."
Both speakers said today's classrooms fail to offer enough learning that is relevant to what the students will be doing in their jobs or careers.
The brochures that come with new videocasette recorders show that their writers lack the ability to write a technical statement so the reader can understand it, Daggett said. Banks are laying off tellers and hiring foreign workers to maintain automatic teller machines because the tellers lack the foundation to learn such maintenance work.
by CNB