The wisdom of two education giants

[Forkboy]

I DO NOT KNOW what Theodore Sizer or Gerald Bracey would have said about the proposal to raise the legal school dropout age in Massachusetts from 16 to 18. What is assured is that these two luminaries of education, who both passed away last week, would have said a lot worth listening to.

The state panel said the right things about the crisis of 10,000 students dropping out each year. It acknowledged that raising the compulsory age will “only retain a handful of students’’ unless the state offers “programs and services that address the underlying reasons that students drop out of school.’’
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Bracey, who was 69, probably would have complemented Sizer’s passion for classroom intimacy with a call to stop teaching to the test. The longtime policy critic and former analyst for the National Education Association said of President Bush’s No Child Left Behind, “If 2000 was the year that testing went crazy, 2001 was the year it went stark raving mad . . . What say we take a moment to consider a few of the personal qualities that standardized tests do not measure: creativity, critical thinking, resilience, motivation, persistence, humor, reliability, enthusiasm, civic-mindedness, self-awareness, self-discipline, empathy, leadership, and compassion.’’
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It should serve as a warning to Massachusetts if it really does raise the legal dropout age. Sizer told The Boston Globe in 1996, it should be no surprise that students drop out of “big, standardized, mechanized’’ schools. The surprise will be when we stop delivering such schools to the students.

http://www.boston.com/bostonglobe/editorial_opinion/oped/articles/2009/10/27/the_wisdom_of_two_education_giants/