Change in Command for the Commander in Chief

First of all Mr Rotherham really does not state anything other than conventional understanding. His post does nothing to answer the question on how the “inauguration might impact education in America”.

Out education system is on the verge of collapse. In fact if it weren’t for the dedication and hard work of teachers the system would have collapsed long ago.

There are several reasons that have lead us to the predicament we are in. One of those reasons is in a very real way the education system in this country has failed to change and adapt over time. We in essence educate students the exact same was as we educated them 100 years ago.

Imagine if Coke still did business they way it did business 100 years ago. It wouldn’t be that hard to imagine because it would be out of business. Yet this is how we operate our schools.

We intrinsically understand that business must evolve and adapt to the changing environment. Yet for some reason we don’t think the same thing about education. Many have the opinion that “if it was good enough for me then it’s good enough for kids today”. Or “this is the way things were run when I was a kid and I turned out all right”. While that may be true it does not mean that it will continue to be true. The world is quickly changing. For example, many kids today are raised by a single parent. Who is rarely at home. This fact alone changes the rules.

I see seven fundamental challenges and problems with the current system. 1. The breakdown of the family unit. Schools are tasked with an ever growing responsibility of educating children in areas that were once the duty of parents. Likewise schools are being required to make up for the fact that a single parent simply does not have the capacity to spend the needed time with a child to help them learn to read and write before they start school and to supplement the learning that is taking place once they start school. 2. Schools teach students to memorize information rather than learn information. I think Alfie Kohn says this best in his book The Schools Our Children Deserve, “Knowing is a process not a product and when we get that backward – when teachers or parents lead student to believe their task is to produce right answers – those students are less inclined to talk with one another, to try out possibilities, to play with ideas. They may get answers because they have memorized facts or formulas but with no understanding of why or under what conditions it’s true” Memorizing facts are easy. Understanding them is not. 3. Schools graduate students who have little to no understanding of the basic economic principles of our economy. It is a shame that a majority of students today graduate with out even a basic understanding of economic principles. They do not understand investing, the miracle of compounding interest, or how wealth is created. Students simply lack understanding of basic monetary principles. Love it or hate it money is a major part of our everyday life. If you do not understand how money works how can you make money work for you? 4. Students are graduating with little to no understanding of America’s history or knowledge of the great western thinkers. While the good old days are never as good as we romanticize them to be schools in the early days of our country did one thing right. They required their students to study and understand the writings of Cicero, Socrates, Plato, Locke, and other great philosophers. The studying of these great thinkers helped our founding leaders create the system of government that literally changed the world. The less and less our populace understands the foundations upon which our society is built the more and more fragile that foundation becomes. 5. The education system is living a lie. As Charles Murray points out in his book Real Education, the education system “still lives by the code that every child can be anything they want to be. Nobody actually still believes this but the education system still operates like it is true…We have idealized images of the potential children bring to the classroom and of our ability to help students manifest that potential. Even though the cold hard truth is student abilities vary…When was the last time you ever saw a report stating that one of the reasons some students did not excel academically was because of low intellectual ability.” 6. We are running factories not schools. We will never be able to properly educate our children if we are shuffling them through factory style schools. The ability to make a difference in a student’s life comes in those quiet moments with a teacher you trust. It is almost impossible to create such a trusting culture in a school of 3,000. Deborah Meier in her book The Power of Their Ideas makes a compelling case that our schools should be no more that 400 students. Creating small schools will do more for improving our education than almost anything else 7. Schools need the control. Deborah Meier said it best “Small, democratically run schools are both quintessentially American and hard for Americans to swallow. They appeal to our spirit of independence, but not to our impatient desire for guaranteed fixes and standardized products.” One of the major issues facing schools is a top down hierarchy. Schools need to be allowed to educate their kids the way they feel best. They need to have flexibility to run the school in the manner that they know will have the biggest impact on their particular culture of students. The more the government tells schools how to do things the more they strangle the schools. “It is not the details that should be legislated but rather, grand things, especially ends.” Doing this will unleash a tidal wave a creativity.

Even though there are challenges facing our public education system there are wonderful things happening in small pockets around the country. The responsibility of our politicians, leaders, and even our children is to leverage what is happening in these innovate schools to move our system of education from a 19th to a 21st century system.