We are about to start another school year and we will begin to hear complaints about excessive classroom sizes, crumbling buildings, ill equipped classrooms, poor graduation rates, poor performances against other countries, and of course pleas for more money to solve all those problems.
The truth is that this money will be spent to mostly line the pockets of political contributors, pay excessive salaries to administrators, lots of studies to see why our school system is failing, and a host of other non-educational related things. Very little of it will find it’s way into the classroom and the salaries of those dedicated teachers on the front lines. Let’s face it, the education system in this country (and most of the world) is broken, and throwing money at it will only compound the problem.
The problem is twofold. First it has become a very profitable way to feed off the public trough. While it might be very difficult to pass a bond issue to improve an intersection or build a government office building, school bond issues usually pass quite easily. Additionally, legislators are always loth to block school related legislation so even ill conceived funding bills pass easily.
Most school systems have more administrative staff than teachers, and a large proportion of those get paid far more than the teachers who actually do the heavy lifting. Additionally since these administrators have little actual work to do they spend their time dreaming up ways to impede and restrict the teachers from doing their job effectively. A prime example of this is the “standardized test”. Which is used to “evaluate teacher’s performance”. While I agree that some method of evaluating teachers effectiveness is useful, the way that those tests are set up forces teachers to teach students how to pass those tests, rather than useful real skills. In short we have far too many chiefs and not enough indians.
The second part of the problem is that the curriculum and the teaching methods are the same that they have been for the past several hundred years. The world has changed mightily in the past century and a huge amount in the past 20 years. If we conclude that the purpose of school is to prepare children to be employable, and good members of society, we have to realize that both of those things are completely different than they were even 20 years ago. For example, there is little need for cursive writing and long division skills. Most people write on keyboards and have calculators to do math. While I don’t advocate dropping writing and math from schools, they need to be deemphasized in favor of more useful skills such as keyboarding, computer operation, and skills related to analysis of problems so as to be able to use the tools we have available rather than being to calculate complex math in our head or on paper.
Another thing that has seems to have gotten lost, is the ability to write coherently. Since that is something that is difficult to check on a multiple choice standardized test and is time consuming for overworked teachers to grade, It has received a bit of a deemphasis in today’s classroom. The written word has become even more important in today’s world, where most communication is via text (no longer handwritten but text nevertheless). Clear, concise, communication is more important than ever. Being able to write and of course read and understand the written word is more important than ever. Yet we have a crisis where 3rd graders can’t read or write reasonably well, and the administrators want to advance them anyhow because it’d look bad on their record if they had too many failures to advance. Which is worse, holding a child back or making them take a summer remedial reading class, or setting them up for failure down the road?
While “No Child Left Behind” sounded good, the result has too many times been “slow everyone to the lowest common denominator”. Which pushes the bright students into boredom and teaches the average students that they don’t have to work hard to meet expectations. In short it has dragged the whole system and a couple of generations of our children down. It’s high time to adopt an “Everyone to the Best of Their Abilities” mantra. With computerized courses being able to allow students to go at their own pace in learning, and the ability of each student to have his own iPad type device, every student should be able to progress at their own pace. Teachers, freed from route teaching, can spend their time on individual instruction and encouragement. Progress can be easily measured without standardized tests, and will free the students and teachers from the stress and wasted classroom time preparing and taking these largely meaningless tests. Most importantly, individual progress can be assessed, and remedies applied frequently, rather than at testing time, when it’s likely too late.
A serious flaw in the system is that it is run by academicians. They got their higher education from people who became teachers immediately after graduation after getting their education from people who became teachers immediately after graduation and so on. Seldom has there been someone in the chain with real world experience in industry or business. Given the rapid pace of change in the world we need teachers that teach our children the skills that are useful to make them productive in the real world. Let’s involve outsiders in textbook writing, and curriculum planning, and invite in guest teachers from time to time. Lots more hands on learning would be a good idea too.
