If you missed it, last week’s guest article by Rona Wilensky was a devastating assessment of our education system’s current malaise. In a nutshell, Rona said that all we lack is a critical mass of good teachers, support to help make all teachers better, time to provide that support, and money to make that time available.
In other words, Rona says that without a major shift in priorities, we’re pretty much stuck with what we’ve got. Some breakaway schools will be the exceptions that prove the rule, but any systemic improvement is beyond our reach unless we show through actions rather than words that this, to use the current buzz-phrase, is the “civil rights issue of our generation.”
How might such a shift in priorities manifest itself? Let’s dream for a minute.
Funding education through property taxes is an inherently inequitable system, that increasingly looks unsustainable as well. But any other form of taxation – sales tax, income tax, VAT, etc., is more susceptible to annual fluctuations and isn’t a reliable replacement.
I’ll leave this issue to those more expert in such matters than I. But new and probably different sources of reliable revenue are an essential condition for systemic improvement.
Money alone isn’t the answer, as I have often pointed out (at times tactlessly) in this space. As the additional revenue pours in, schools of education must be overhauled. Wouldn’t it be great if schools of education were as selective and effective as medical and law schools?
Teaching has to become a profession that is seen as a viable career choice for capable, driven young people. Not only must it pay more, but the working conditions have to be attractive to the self-motivated and creative. Higher-needs schools need extra money to offer significant bonuses to attract the best teachers.
Due process for teachers should still exist, but in a much-streamlined fashion.
Teaching might seem more attractive to some as a long-term occupation if a clear career path existed that allowed veteran teachers to remain close to the classroom. Master teachers and coaches (per Rona’s suggestion) could rise from the ranks of teachers, and be more highly compensated.
In exchange for extra pay, educators would have to be willing to work year-round, with four or five weeks of vacation, like everyone else. Built into the year would be time for extensive professional growth opportunities.
Neighborhood schools would become a thing of the past; an antiquated concept. After all, this isn’t the 1950s. Most schools aren’t filled with the offspring of Ward and June Cleaver. All families should have to choose a school, instead of defaulting into one. Enrollment preference should go to families who would help bring a good socio-economic balance to any given school.
In this new reality, charters and more traditionally structured public schools would still exist. But an observer would be hard pressed to identify which was which.
How likely is any of this? Not very. There may be glimmerings of consensus about the end we hope to achieve – but only glimmerings. On means we are oceans apart.
Read Rona’s piece again. Then ponder our current effort to win Race to the Top dollars, and ask yourself if any of what we are talking about in our work groups will spark enough change.
If you see much hope, good for you. Please send me some of your happy pills.
Popularity: 4% [?]
Alan – I’m with you on pretty much everything but the neighborhood schools issue. I think we’d do well to focus on how to make them work because I believe we will see a massive return to neighborhood schools in the next 5 to 10 years. I base that claim on what I see as the actual “civil rights issue of our generation,” the radical inequity between those now living and those not yet born, a gap that soon will make measured testing differences appear vanishingly small.
Due to the crushing burden of debt from the personal to the transnational levels, my grandchildren, and probably even my daughter, will be saddled with the responsibility of dealing with the irresponsibility of the past 60 years.
And that’s not the half of it. The list of my concerns will be flatly denied by some. However, it’s clear to me that the climate is changing; ecosystems are collapsing all over the world; the global production of oil (and many other non-renewable resources) has or will soon peak, a geophysical fact that the demand destruction resulting from the recession has made easy to forget; our food system functions in an incredibly precarious state of total dependence on cheap fossil fuel.
It has been said that the next 20 years will be nothing like the past 20 years. I am increasingly of the opinion that this is putting it so mildly as to be misleading. No amount of gap closing will address these issues.
And what does that have to do with neighborhood schools? I think the unsustainable nature of driving all over town to get children to school will become evident in pretty short order. It has nothing to do with any idealized notion of the 1950s. It follows from the fact that we cannot continue living beyond current solar income by exploiting banked sunlight from ages past (aka fossil fuels).
And since readers may have formed the idea that I’m a doomer, I will say that recognizing our current trajectory is headed for a cliff is very different from assuming that we’ll plunge over it. I see lots of room for maneuvering and schools are exactly the places we need to begin the urgent work of addressing the real civil rights issue of our time. If we don’t, the kids in our schools now are the ones who will be left holding the bag.
And a note from my personal experience with reform – I’m feeling very frustrated with the tension between the discourse of “radical change” and the reality of “do what we say” (which is presumably informed by “research”). I experience this directly in DPS but it plays out at the national level too. A month or two ago a statement came out of DoE stating support for innovation that has been proven. What does that even mean?
How on earth did life’s rich pageant ever unfold without universities and think tanks to make sure we’re doing it right!?
Alan,
No happy pills from me! Rona is, as usual, right on the mark, and your pessimism is, as usual, well earned. Don’t put too much faith in the effects of overhauling schools of ed. Their curricula are driven by state licensing requirements which are tied to outdated and reductive state standards, which are tied to blah, blah, blah. Worse yet, they’re embedded in colleges and universities, which also need a good overhaul, but won’t be overhauled because their curricula and their incentives are tied to blah, which is tied to blah, which is tied to the American Dream, which is unchangeable lest the whole Ponzi scheme collapse. Anyway, many of the people in teacher ed schools know what should be done; their dilemma, which keeps a number of them awake at night, is that they also know that sending new teachers into some school districts is like sending lambs to slaughter. The problem us reformers have never been able to crack is that the system is profoundly overdetermined and all the salient variables necessary for real change are interdependent. We keep pursuing one silver bullet solution at a time and getting disappointed when it doesn’t pan out. A career in education reform is more satisfying if you can be happy with saving a few lives here and a few lives there. Many of us in my generation of school reformers set out to change the system and got bummed out about our failure to accomplish much at that level. We were naive about systems and cultures, as are radical reformers today. In our retirement, we’re salvaging some dignity by appreciating our little victories…
If I might add, all this talk kind of begs the question (at least for me), “How did this system come to exist?” It certainly does not seem by design; rather, it grew bit by bit over decades and decades with no one to blame and no one particular ideology or theoretical stance to expose. But the point about medical schools makes me wonder…
Medical schools graduate doctors and doctors save people from harm, disease and, at least for a time, death. Teachers save people from…um, what, er, um…what was the question again? What exactly do people get from teachers or the educational system? I dare say, they get a lot and most would agree but it’s nowhere near as real as being saved from infection or cancer.
Get my drift? We don’t really know the value of an education. With medicine we get healed or we don’t and if we suffer disability, well, at least we understand it’s life-changing parameters. We don’t really know what would have happened had we gone to that other high school or had been to the manor born and dropped into Yale. I doubt Rona’s or Rex’s vision for education will ever happen unless an education is valued as much as life itself. We educators tend to place that kind of value on our craft but we can’t seem to get others to see things that way.