It has become a cliché’ to say that public education is in need of reform. For decade’s educators, parents and students alike have called for change in how we educate our children. The world in which we all live is changing constantly with new developments in technology, breaking down of cultural boundaries, and the electronic information age well and truly in place. What is it about our public education system that needs to be reformed? Is our current system of education responsible for dysfunctional elements of our society? Or is the problem that we have become liberal to the extreme in our society and that the issue is more one of children’s rights than one of education?
Our current public education system finds its roots in the dawn of the industrial age. There was a need to educate a workforce to help run the industrial machine that would eventually become the predominant way the world would live. The public education system started out as a huge industrial training program with very fixed objectives. Priority number one was to build a workforce that could operate, maintain and sustain the new direction human beings had begun to take. This training program had specific skill sets that were taught in very specific ways, with the results being specifically measurable. It was largely successful in its objectives, as witnessed by the fact that we still are sustaining the beginnings of the industrial age today.
A closer inspection of our public education system in its current state is needed, problems need to be identified, and alternatives to this system need to be explored. With all the technology, knowledge, and creativity available today, the ability to create an educational model that can turn the current model of educational apathy around is actually possible.
The word education is derived from the Latin educare, which means to ‘draw out’. It is ironic that if there were a term for our current education curriculum it would be along the lines of ‘push down’. In talking of the public education system we need to look back briefly to how it evolved, beyond even the industrial age. In his book, Education and Ecstasy, George B Leonard (who spent twelve years studying American schools, universities, and adult institutes) takes us back to ancient China and Rome for a historical perspective:
Historian Arnold Toynbee traces the disintegration of the Chinese Empire under the Ts’in and Han Dynasties as well as that of the Roman Empire, in part, to their attempts to extend formal education from the privileged minority to a wider circle. One reason was that the former privileged minority’s traditional system of education was impoverished in the process of being disseminated. It degenerated into a formal education in book learning divorced from a spontaneous apprenticeship for life…. In fact, the art of playing with words were substituted for the art of living. (11)
Leonard goes on to give other examples in different cultures where successful education was an integral part of everyday living, not something removed and taught separately.
It is this fragmentation that lies at the heart of the current problems in our education system today. John Dewey, philosopher and education reformer, recognized that education is a process of living and not a preparation for future living. He believed that education is the fundamental method of social progress and reform. For our children to grow up as useful and successful individuals in our society, they need to be a part of it throughout their entire education. This fragmentation, or specialization, also has a positive function in education though.
When studying a piece of writing for example, it is useful to break it down into it various parts to study writing style, grammar, character development, and the author’s motivation for writing it. This process is useful in analyzing the writing, but it is not writing. The author created this piece by bringing together all of the above into one integrated item, therein lies the value and skill. It is as if our education system, as in this metaphor, has not found a way to put all the pieces together into one piece of writing.
Today education is prized highly for its ability to find well paid employment and to elevate one’s status in the world. True education is a process that once begun never ends, it is a part of living and growing that cannot truly be fulfilled in a specialized scenario, education is about becoming fully not partially human. In his book Dumbing Us Down that gives a scathing commentary on US public education, teacher John Taylor Gatto gives his own interpretation on specialization:
“Aristotle saw, a long time ago, that fully participating in a complex range of human affairs
was the only way to become fully human; in that he differed from Plato. What is gained from consulting a specialist and surrendering all judgment is often more than outweighed by a permanent loss of one’s own volition.” (47-48)
Our current methods of schooling have little to do with education and more to do with teaching our young people to conform to the economy and the social order. Gatto goes on the make the comparison between networks and communities, relating both to education. Networks are places such as hospitals, large corporations, armies, colleges, and government agencies. They serve a function that is specific and direct and personal associations between people are limited. These associations may be flouted as important, but in fact they are mostly superficial and less significant than the business at hand. Communities on the other hand rely on the personal, emotional, and skillful associations between people. Our current education system is a network in both nature and practice, its operation closer to that of a factory business than that of a community. Education can only be effective if the necessary components of human relationship, as in a community, are fully integrated with the academic part of the curriculum.
A report published in the Education Week, a monthly online education magazine, talks about how states seriously lag behind in educational innovation. The report, “Leaders and Laggards”, assigns grades to states based on seven indicators of innovation: school management, finance, hiring and evaluation of teachers, removal of ineffective teachers, data, pipeline to postsecondary education, and technology. The major flaws in our current education system are as follows: rigid education bureaucracies impeding quality schooling, state finance systems are opaque, inefficient, and undermine innovation, the teacher pipeline fails to provide a diverse pool of high quality educators, teacher evaluations are not based on performance, major barriers exist to the removal of poor performing teachers, schools provide to little access to college level coursework, and states lack a culture of education advocacy. This report was to be presented in Washington to the US Secretary of Education to formulate the current administrations new education policy.
One of the primary challenges in ensuring a quality education is how to fund our public schools. In Vermont the burden for paying for our schools falls on the property owners of the state. Property taxes are generally assessed on household income. A significant portion of the assessed tax is used to fund the local public school(s). Taking into account a dwindling and aging population, the burden to pay for public education is falling on an increasingly smaller portion of the population. Property taxes as a result will need to rise to keep track of current costs, meanwhile the actual cost of quality education is increasing and we are not able to fund the necessary quality education we need. One possible solution is to remove the education slice of the property tax and fund our education on an additional sales tax. This spreads the burden over a larger portion of the population and in an era when fewer people are buying houses gives a reliable consistent source of income for our schools.
The “Leaders and Laggards” report offers recommendations of how to remedy the current problems. These recommendations fall into five categories:
Better accountability: holding individuals and organizations responsible for performance, reforming teacher pay and rewarding teachers whose performance improves student achievement.
More flexibility: develop student based funding policies and other more flexible approaches to school funding, reinvent education management, empower schools and principals.
Greater capacity: research and develop promising instructional practices and school models, support innovative schools and programs through capacity building organizations, provide teachers with focused professional development on key topics such as use of data and technology.
An end to school monopolies: support charter schools and other forms of public school choice, broaden the pool of potential teachers and support alternative certification programs.
Stronger reform environment: support state efforts to create common academic standards linked to rigorous assessments, support state reform organizations, encourage entrepreneurial organizations such as Teach for America and Wireless Generation.
The recommendations made in the report go a long way to helping fix a broken down machine, but what is really needed is a fundamental paradigm shift in how we design our education curriculum’s and how our education system is managed at a national and state level. What is required is a set of governing principles and values that guide the educational institution to reach its potential. This set of principles must allow individual schools the freedom and flexibility to design the curriculum as they see fit. Currently the federal government both administers education and has the responsibility of deciding its direction. This kind of control over such an important field is counterproductive. This measure of control is appropriate for matters that have direct short term consequences to the nation. It seems ironic that an industry such as the financial industry has little or no regularity controls placed upon it, yet the consequences to the nation in 2008- 2009 have been colossal. Education on the other hand has very direct and strict control imposed upon it by an institution ill qualified to do so. The long term consequences of such regulation are dire. Four major areas that need to be considered are, educational vision, funding, curriculum, and teacher training.
It is important for government to be represented in the field of education but not to control its destiny. Federal government should be responsible for collecting feedback from a diverse group of those in the educational field. It should facilitate the represented groups to come up with a set of guiding principles for public schools to follow. This vision should be distributed to the individual states where a further process can add or subtract to the vision as necessary.
While federal funding is necessary for public schools to function it should not be determined by political agendas. Distribution of funding should be left to the discretion of the individual states, with the addition of an ‘innovative funding’ department added to the states education board.
Standards by which schools receive the appropriate funding will be decided by the state and not the federal government, and individual schools should be vocal in deciding these criteria.
The responsibility of setting the school’s curriculum is up to each school. This may be made simpler by setting a state precedent with individual schools adopting a blueprint with an incentive to alter its curriculum as deemed necessary. The teachers who teach the individual subjects are responsible to decide what should be taught in their class curriculums. This should be decided in conjunction with their peers so that each school has a consistent educational theme.
The curriculum should be reviewed annually for any changes that need to be made to it and any necessary changes made for the following school year.
Arguably the most important of the changes necessary is the need for an excellent teacher training program, after all without excellent teachers to educate our young people no change will occur. Again the extent of the teacher training should be linked to the state’s educational vision. There should be clear and concise goals for the state to follow when training our educator’s, this will be the only way to create consistency in the quality of our educators and our educational programs.
It remains surprising that given all of humanities collective genius and creativity that has created amazing technological advances, incredible works of art, and a global community never previously seen in history that we lack the ability to create a successful public education system. Author John Gatto states it plain and simple: “It’s time to stop. This system doesn’t work, and it’s one of the causes of our world coming apart. No amount of tinkering will make the school machine work to produce educated people; education and schooling are, as we all have experienced, mutually exclusive terms.” (91)
As a culture we possess all of the ingredients to create a public education system that works, what we lack is the will to do it. Aside from the present catastrophe’s that may await us with global warming, international terrorism, and financial meltdown, to which education has much to offer, it is a fundamental human necessity that we need to learn and grow as individuals and as a community. The wheels of change move slowly in political circles and we cannot wait for national leadership to lead us out of the desert. This change must start at grass roots level with the teachers and move upward and outward from there. When we realize the importance of the kind of education that we truly need and are led by those who are capable of delivering it, it will become a reality.
