Not Just Test Scores: A New W
Eastern leads the way in changing the culture of the nation’s education system
hen Nelson Maylone was the principal of Mason Elementary School in Grosse Pointe, Mich., in the 1990s, there was a year when every one of the school’s 90 fourth graders passed the math portion of
the Michigan Educational Assessment Program (MEAP) test. “Even in Grosse Pointe [an affl uent Detroit suburb], that’s quite a
trick,” says Maylone, EMU professor of educational psychology. He got a congratulatory phone call from the superintendent. T e next year, “only” 97% of the fourth graders passed. T e headline in a local newspaper announced, “MEAP Scores up in All Schools but Mason.” Now he was get ing phone calls from concerned parents, wanting to know what he was going to do about “the math situation.” “I said there is no ‘situation,’ ” he recalls. “Two or three students didn’t pass; we know who they are, and we’re working with them.”
T e story illustrates both what’s wrong with the way most by Jeff Mortimer
Americans perceive the effi cacy of the K-12 educational system, and one of the many things that’s right with Eastern Michigan’s approach to educating future teachers and administrators. In the case of the former, the media tend to focus, not
surprisingly, on whatever grabs at ention. And that at ention- grabber is oſt en standardized test scores, which, like so many other stories about education, can be technically accurate and still paint an inaccurate picture. In the case of the lat er, Maylone and most of his faculty
colleagues have spent plenty of time in the trenches, and are as well-versed in practice as they are in theory. It’s a perspective that enables them to impart to their students both the ideals that
14 Eastern | WINTER 2011
Illustration by Stacy Innerst
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