Have you heard about an important concept – the thirteen year itch? It seems like we never give a concept enough play time. We tend to judge anything tried in schools a success or a failure quickly; particularly if it does not match our own perception of right ways to teach. Many reforms or ideas are tried for around three or so years before educators as well as parents starts pinpointing what does not work. Very rarely do we hear from people about what is working. This tends to bias the conversation. Sadly most ideas or reforms are too quickly judged.
To ensure that the pendulum does not swing too quickly, we need to determine what would be a realistic time allocation to judge the effectiveness of a program. As an example, people who start charter schools feel that they are under the gun as soon as they start. Many times people declare a new charter school a failure or in trouble too quickly. People expect that in year one things will be rosy. Unfortunately, it is not that simple and often students don’t do well in the first few years. Generally, students in many charter schools are coming from disadvantaged backgrounds and are far behind their more advantaged peers. Dean Deborah Stipekbelieves that there needs to be a period of about 3-5 years before you can see any results from intervention. Not all students respond to new situations at the same rate. Not only do the students in these schools need to learn how to learn before they can show you how much they can learn, the teaches need to figure out what will work with their population of students. Dean Robert Sternberg has shown that students cannot be fairly tested unless they have relative familiarity with the process and can build upon some amount of prior knowledge. Once they master the process and become familiar with what is expected from them it is much easier to produce results.
On one level, giving a program the right amount of time is important, yet at the same time, no one wants to experiment with their children. Would it be fair to introduce interventions at the pre-kindergarten level to really determine the effect? Furthermore, we would then have to follow them for 13 years(i.e. time span of K-12 schooling). Only then could we say that something works or does not work. Right? We cannot wait for thirteen years to find out something didn’t work because you cannot go back and retry. As a parent we want to make sure that educators are not experimenting with “my child” but doing things that will be most effective.
My own explanation for the 13 year itch centers around the fact that we forget that children learn differently. It is extremely important, when creating new programs in education, to remember that everyone has their own learning style, their own rate of learning, their own passions, and their own needs; what one student may consider failure, another sees as success. Why is it that we cannot target individualized as well as customized learning within the constraints or requirements that we have outlined for K-12 standards based education?
