The Commonwealth of Virginia’s SOL Innovation Committee has announced its interim recommendations. The very existence of a committee to improve the standardized test-heavy SOLs is a welcome innovation in its own right. Fortunately, however, the committee’s recommendations include actual innovations awaiting General Assembly approval. The General Assembly established the committee for that very reason and optimism, therefore, is justified.

Upwardly mobile hopes are further buoyed by the fifth of the committee’s five core beliefs:

“Improvements to Virginia’s assessment and accountability systems, including potential further reductions in state-mandated testing, provide the opportunity to promote innovative and creative teaching that enhances student learning but retains the benefits of accountability.”

Can we get an ‘Amen’?

You bet we can.

Accountability is important. Assessment is essential.

But even more important is…

…education.

E-d-u-c-a-t-i-o-n.

Without meaningful education taking place in the daily classroom exchanges between students and their teachers, assessments are not worth the paper they shouldn’t be written on, and accountability is bankrupt because the deposits are meaningless.

SOL innovations should be founded unashamedly upon that core belief.

Co-founded with the committee’s third core belief:

“Students need and deserve an education that capitalizes on their curiosity and natural desire to learn so that each student is prepared for responsible citizenship and success in the world beyond school.”

The SOLs, as currently gerrymandered toward rote memorization, starve curiosity down to the bones and dangle inedible carrots in the face of a natural desire to learn, the big stick poised rather noticeably above students, teachers and curriculums that dare to dream of giving intellectual curiosity a bit of free rein.

Too, often, in fact, they put blinders on teachers, their students and the curriculum.

Blinders may be good for racehorses. Blinders keep the horses strictly focused on what is dead-ahead, not allowing them to be distracted by anything off to either side, whether it be the crowd or other horses.

For horses used by police and those pulling carriages, the blinders are meant to keep the animals from being startled or spooked by anything.

Education, however, is not a horse race. And students and teachers are not horses.

Our educational system should be unconcerned about who crosses the finish line first and focused entirely on what each student brings with them across that finish line.

A complete and thorough education will mean the race has been won.

The SOLs, as presently constituted, do not allow teachers and students to follow their curiosity off the too-well beaten track. Such intellectual curiosity is considered a distraction, a detriment.

So it is with deep joy that one sees the committee’s core belief in promoting innovative and creative teaching.
Empower our teachers to empower their students.

No amount of small tweaks will come close to achieving all of the educational goodness that can be attained through allowing our teachers to teach and our students to learn, to become educated human beings.

We don’t want to produce generations of incurious non-intellectual drones who are content to buzz meaninglessly through the day, and their lives, filling someone else’s hive with honey.

Remember that the phrase describing someone as having “blinders” on, when it comes to people, is a criticism of their too-narrow focus and inability to see the bigger picture beyond the canvas and the frame into which they have been hung.

SOL innovation?

Giddy-up!

—JKW—