This is part two of an attempt to
get beyond traditional perspectives of present “corporate reform” and public
education’s somnambulant drift of several decades.
The post is brief, with
assertions about present reform, and its roots, without filling in the
voluminous material that is out there supporting the points. So it is a table of contents – and
maybe a wakeup call where issues have not been probed – for subsequent posts to
explore each issue, both causes of our systems’ lethargy and countervailing
reform miscues, along with possible remediation.
Top Lines
Did ya see it comin’? Most of our nation, including our
school bureaucracies, was too distracted or myopic to see “corporate reform”
coming, though it was initiated with little cloaking, and by a major swath of
our private sector’s largest entities nearly 35 years ago. If there is a public school
administration or related BOE, still in denial that their brand is under
attack, the human resources in question should be immediate candidates for
change.
The reasons? The incentive for alleged reform was
the private sector belief that our public K-12 establishment, aggravated by its
teachers’ unions, was flat out failing to create needed learning. An ideological subtext, the full extent
of those beliefs unclear, is that our public schools should be privatized. Where embedded in the reform agenda, it
is likely based on the belief that our “liberal” public system was growing
Democrat voters, or that historically systems were attempting social
engineering, or installing liberal/silly excesses.
Bizarre. Over the last six years of a
hypocritical White House, the same belief, but fueled by a different drive –
the conception that discrimination in learning achieved among children was not
primarily attributable to socioeconomic and cultural inequalities, but because
schools weren’t trying hard enough.
Probably some truth in both sets of assertions, but from that point
reform tumbled down Alice’s “rabbit hole.”
The culprits? Some cabal of the powerful, spanning
the Federal government, The Business Roundtable, testing company leadership,
the NGA’s predominantly right wing state consortium, with a politically warped ALEC
to write state legislation, and educational components seeking repatriation of
traditional education beliefs of last century. This improbable amalgam managed to hang together to create
NCLB, subsequently joined by RttT and enough billions – along with the
intrusive individual funding by Bill Gates – to bribe state governments to
implement present testing and school grading, and advance the “common core”
designed to breed more standardized testing.
Responsible pretesting? There was no rational K-12 education
inquiry by our best and brightest, no transparent mission debates or
specification, no testing of the testing, or research to verify that the
tactics would improve genuine learning and student downstream performance,
before dropping the testing and VAM mandates on our public systems. Recent testing results suggest that the composite reform mission has already failed, if one uses the movement's own criteria. Surely this, along with a track record of cheating and teaching to the tests, has now prompted a pause in more testing, more state grades, and injected the wisdom to reassess the model of "corporate reform" before ramming ahead? You wish; same level of responsibility that preceded NCLB, and virtually every other present reform gambit.
One size fits all? A monumental assumption, that our
public schools are homogeneous, perhaps because superficially and physically
they seem alike, is false. Because
of increasing heterogeneity of cultures and politics of our places, and because
of local control, public systems are diverse, and can range from excellent to
horrid. Notably, the corporate
drivers of this alleged reform, to a fault, operate philosophically in their
own markets based on market segmentation and differential strategies and tactics,
now becoming even more particularized as traditional marketing has been
transformed by digital communication to even individualization to a
consumer. There has been no
credible research, including the U.S. Department of Education’s NCER survey boilerplate,
offering a clue about the real status of our public systems.
QC versus QA sanity? Even more retro and hypocrisy, the
corporate sector decades ago moved from traditional notions of quality control
based on end product inspection to quality assurance that installed quality at
the beginning of the product chain.
The notions of inspection of K-12 performance via testing the finished
product, that teachers were the controlling factor, that multiple choice
questions about factoids constitute learning assessment, and that beating on
children was necessary and sufficient motivation for learning, all scale
somewhere between stupidity and insanity.
Source of default? The nation’s schools of education
continue to matriculate students who may be professionally and benevolently
motivated, but tolerant of lame education rubrics as learning, and veer away
from subject matter depth and excellence.
Consequently, those schools overall continue to turn out teachers
unprepared to deal with, or even with grasp of contemporary knowledge and its
trajectory, are turning out alleged administrators unprepared to manage any
complexity, and are pandering pedagogy based on learning models made obsolete
by neural research of the last couple of decades. In turn, our colleges and universities, too paranoid to
reform those schools, likely in the belief that it might start a larger reform
movement of higher education (way overdue), have given those schools and
faculties a get-out-of-jail-free card.
Additionally, higher education has continued a century of simply
ignoring public K-12, a syndrome that for a likely different set of motivations
applies equally to most public K-12 dwellers.
The worst? Our local BOE are categorical failures,
generally lacking the intellect and objectivity to provide local public school
direction, for the simple reasons that our states have resisted for decades
upgrading the requirements for that board service and specific preparation, and
many incompetent to unethical superintendents work overtime to co-opt board
members. BOE oversight of our
public schools is currently a joke, undermining the legitimate philosophy of
sustaining local control of schools.
Teachers good, change bad? There are good to great teachers, bad
teachers (one estimate is that a quarter of our present public K-12 teachers should be replaced), and there are teachers motivated primarily by a job that while
demanding in some dimensions avoids the performance requirements and risks of
many private sector occupations. Selection
and supervision are therefore critical givens as in any complex organization,
while school administrations as a class are central to the historical failures
of public education. There are also
still deeply embedded in our public schools local teachers’ unions with the
principal interest of hanging onto that gig by simply continually and
irresponsibly pushing for higher salaries and benefits. Teacher development among our public
systems, that stresses depth of knowledge of what is taught versus bureaucratic trivia, is almost non-existent, contrasting with the private sector drive to
develop employee line and managerial skills.
Learning relics? A large swath of the materials that
form the basis for what happens in current K-12 public classrooms is the
product of textbooks heavily lobbied to states and systems, sometimes
determined politically and ideologically at the state level, controlled by
their publishers, and regularly authored by some of our most mediocre
academics. Add the now stilted and
even less appetizing lesson plans imposed on teachers to facilitate test
scores. The absence of legitimate
curricula in our public schools is the long-standing dark underbelly of public
education, for decades invisible to the public and parents, deliberately masked
by our systems. Unfortunately the
“common core” by virtue of its origins is both flawed and incomplete even as minimal
national curricula K-12; with no provisions for credible updating it will also
be obsolete from knowledge now doubling virtually annually.
Classroom options?
Allegedly the nation will lose up to a million teachers over the rest of
this decade. There are millions of
retirees and underemployed, with more and better degrees, and greater
experience, than a great many public 7-12 teachers. Most are blocked from being employed in and upgrading that
educational venue – even as volunteers and no cost to our systems – by the
profession’s protectionism, coupled with the same myopia and outright
discrimination in certification by most teacher-derived state education
bureaucracies.
Our education piñata? Lastly, a pronouncement that should be
carved in stone, there is at this point no silver bullet to reform the nation’s
public schools – repeat that once every hour of every day that Arne Duncan’s
demagoguery, our testing oligarchy, and Bill Gates’ billions are permitted to
drive reform of our schools – and there is no “standard” public school. Our public systems need to be detailed
at least once by in-depth research and census, characterized by their specific
needs for change, with strategies and tactics devised accordingly. The issue is, that for far too many
with their fingers presently in the reform pie, the notion of a multivariate
and systems world-view simply doesn’t compute, either because of sheer
ignorance, or other agendas that view restricts or violates.
Bottom Lines
Public K-12 reform is a synonym
for complexity. View it against: A contrasting bundle of simplistic, convoluted
and cross-canceling reform tactics; populations of actors operating out of
different hymn books; lacking coherent definitions of our schools’ missions;
what constitutes genuine and sustainable learning; how that learning must be
delivered for effect; along with popular ignorance of how the present mess will
impact the next generation. One
proposition is that the one-size-fits-all stupidity of present reform, coupled
with the political baggage reform is toting, means there won’t be change
paralleling the nation’s timely need for new models of job creation and
competitive restoration.
Next post, in the spirit of TOTB,
will propose some unconventional alternative, disruptive strategies: For spanning the 9-12 versus 13-16 gulf;
changing public K-12 from local control to a national model – but not under
political control – based on the
concept of the Federal Reserve System; for essentially eliminating the grade
bands 7-16 and restructuring of its learning resources, human and supporting; for
potentially eliminating all grade bands, substituting a technology-supported
system of individualized K- or 1-12 learning; changing the constituencies who
can qualify to selectively staff our learning systems; and probing how a
national need for creativity and invention can be supplied by reigniting that quest in our public systems?
Simultaneously, the question must
be addressed, are there less disruptive models for achieving enhancement of some
genuine learning, based on trashing present reform dysfunction? With what required
changes in and consequences for present political and leadership roles
governing schools, with what changes in present human resources, and with what
school organization changes?
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