Bridging the Academe/K-12 Divide

I think that anyone in education who has worked towards a master’s degree has met the sort. They’re nice enough, in their tweed jackets and sensible shoes, many of the things they say make sense on a visceral level, and their doctorates lend a sense of credibility to what they do. Then, one day, the realization comes to you. It might be as sudden as the flap of a hummingbird’s wings, or it might suddenly make itself obvious like an expected landmark on the horizon, but it’s an undeniable truth, and it’s earth shattering.

I speak, of course, of professors who don’t know what they’re talking about.

I’ve been blessed in my Leadership program to have had quality instructors, but I had some real lulus during my masters program. One had an academics understanding of teaching, but hadn’t actually taught in the classroom in better than 20 years; another crowed about how she went and read at her grandson’s elementary school for an hour a week. These were your strict Vigotzkians who believed that all knowledge could be discovered eventually through play, that all classes would follow the rules if only they wrote them for themselves, and that phonics was a plot by the same people who hate Head Start to take all of the joie de vivre out of education. These were the same folks who are telling my student teachers that an acceptable lesson plan is about 5 pages long when I’m telling them you should be able to write it on a note card.

These people are idiots.

I bring it up because of an excellent commentary in the February 28th Chronicle of Higher Education (Creating a Third Culture), penned by Robert Weisbuch of Drew University, where he talks about the “gorge” that divides the theory of the academe from the practice of the schools. I think that it’s an important topic, because if we were able to harness the brainpower of the colleges to give all of us in K-12 those things we actually need (Kindergarten readiness tests! Quick and easy phonics screens! A DIBELS for math!) the whole system would benefit.

It’s a thoughtful article that would benefit anyone interested in education policy. I've also written some other posts about the research-to-practice gap that you can find here.