User:Mikefulkerson

Academic Inertia: The property of an institution or individual in the field of education to continue teaching the familiar over the innovative.

I see Academic Inertia in particular when an individual or institution resists change by dismissing the need, claiming bureaucracy renders them helpless to affect change, sighting union contract work hours, beginning a response with their years in the field, and or stubbornly defending the status quo despite all evidence to do other wise. As a parent, I can’t help feeling a growing panic about my daughter’s preparedness for the future. She is a third grader this year but still reading at an emergent level. I am to blame for trusting the school to do enough for her to progress at grade level. She is “at risk” in a sense because her mother, my wife, had fought breast cancer almost 6 years before passing away this summer. Moving to our Del Cerro neighborhood and to a school with an API of 10 was supposed to be a kind of insurance for her future. Well it has been because of the community of parents but not because of the school.

I have had the notion of Academic Inertia in my mind since I was earning my teaching credential from San Diego State 6 or so years ago. The example of Academic Inertia here at my daughter’s school is so strong that I know it is a real phenomenon in need of a name. But as this name implies there is blamelessness to it because this inertia sweeps people along with it. It’s quite likely that this lag I see in my daughter’s school’s modernity is a natural occurrence in our elementary education delivery system. It’s kind of a confusing problem like Global Warming but I think I have identified some factors that play a part in creating Academic Inertia. Innovation is risk, and I haven’t seen any tenured teachers in elementary schools that embraced risk (I get around as a substitute teacher). Instead I see that Teacher Culture is very suspicious of people who do their jobs differently. In fact standing out is not the key to success in the teacher work environments I’ve experienced. You might agree that conformity is also natural to all groups of people. Don’t we all feel more comfortable surrounded by like minded individuals? But there are many examples of school that have been successful because of innovation. I have seen schools that really work to create a shared vision of innovation in their teaching techniques for the sake of turning around test scores. But what about innovating with out low test scores?

Thinking as a parent, I can see that multiple sources of information are telling me that preparing my child for the skills of the future a necessity for creating opportunities for her. Is this where the squeeze is? Are parents like me trying to rock the boat based on fear of the unknown and media hype? Or am I right to see an unresponsive school as a detriment to my daughter’s future. On the other hand with out that external and unequivocal test results, who or what has the power to affect the direction of a resistant institution or individual? I not speaking rhetorically, I really would like some examples if you know of any.

We may all be aware of this building pressure (which may be felt more in some social classes more than others) as to the heightened competitiveness and high stakes of our parental choices. I am not unsympathetic to the general plight of teachers. It seems to me the rules of the game have been changed for everybody. For good or bad the aging baby boomers of the educational world are like melting icecaps of Academic Inertia. Either way we are going to noticed when they are gone but will that be to late for their students to learn the skills they will need in a world entirely unlike what it once was?

As the inertia analogy goes: a body remains at rest or in uniform motion in the same straight line unless acted upon by some external force. I’ll call that external force “P” for parent.