Ideas For Democracy:  Goal #23

Public education policies and standards, the most important task of society: handing knowledge and culture to the citizens of the future. 

 

Citizens who want real democracy will actively support this policy and vote for trustworthy candidates who actively support this policy.

 

IFD - policy:  We need to acknowledge that our best creative educational skills are obstructed by a property tax system that is archaic and inappropriate.  The only reason that public schools are paid for by local property taxes is because when the United States first opened public schools (the early 1800s) the only tax that was legally possible was a tax paid by voters, and that group was limited to adult males who owned real property.  Much later, in 1916, the income tax was invented.  About fifty years later, the largest and most skilled armed force in the history of the world was paid for by that income tax.  Therefore, it is reasonable to make the observation that if you want to finance an ambitious and important project, the income tax is the way to go.  But for reasons of habit, conformity, and perhaps stupidity, we keep insisting that a public school is a local enterprise (It is most definitely not local!) and therefore must be paid for locally.  We need to get off that dead horse and onto a new champion.  

 

Who benefits from public education:

It never was true and is not true now that public funding of education is a program that benefits primarily the parents of children of school age.  This is a profoundly invalid and profoundly destructive conception.  It is blatantly obvious to any thinking person that the purpose of a public education system is to preserve and promote the fund of knowledge and technology that has been accumulated and protected by our civilization.  It is certain that the effect of a public education system is to provide the benefits of civilization, all of them, to every member of our society.  We all benefit from public education when we seek medical care or repair of a machine and when we buy a house.  None of these things can be provided by forest dwellers who roast rabbit over a campfire.  Art, science, music, including pictures in a magazine or on a screen, the ability to transplant a heart, or repair a heart, or a hip or a knee, or stop cancer, or the music on the radio, or sent through any other device, or made by your friends and neighbors, or heard at a concert, or played back from a disc, all this comes to us because children are educated.  That all of the benefits of civilization, protected and transferred from parents to children, is somehow of benefit only to the parents of young children is an extremely destructive distortion of an obvious reality.  That obvious reality is the reality that education is the most essential and most creative activity of the human species.  By the act of education of our children, however we deem to accomplish that task, we are passing forward and preserving our culture and civilization.  Other than eating and drinking and sleeping, this is the first task we must perform in order to survive, to live.  There is no task more important, and we should act accordingly.  We should continuously examine our ways of educating and continuously regard it as the supremely important task that it is.  By education we create.  We create citizens; we create adults; we create the future.  Nothing is more important to the human enterprise.  To the extent that we fail to accomplish the task of education, or exert a deficient effort to educate, we have not failed a group of individuals, we have failed the universe.

 

Shared responsibility, shared funding, communal commitment:

The sensible way to pay for public education is a system that shares the common responsibility of the federal, state and local government.  First, it does make sense for local municipal services and facilities to be paid for locally.  Roads, lighting, water supply and sewer are all local benefits for local residents.  It is logical and fair to pay for these services through a property tax, because they are of most direct benefit to those who reside within the municipality.  It would also make sense for the school buildings to be paid for and owned by the municipality.  The public schools are public facilities used for public meetings and other community events.  However, unacceptable differences in the quality of education arise from having the local government be responsible for teacher compensation and training, and for the educational materials, equipment and supplies, as well as school transportation which is a major expense.  I propose a national system with state sub-systems responsible for teacher certification and compensation, including medical benefits and retirement programs if benefit programs are not otherwise available.  The local government can still hire and fire teachers, but we need to develop national standards and practices that help those who enjoy nurturing a child's natural curiosity.  One has to love children in order to be a good teacher, but it takes more than love.  The teacher needs to be comfortable enough and free enough to do their best work.  Elaborate systems of supervisory control do not necessarily improve teacher performance or teacher success, because teaching is still both art and science.  It is not reasonable to expect that if a man or woman has a rich fund of knowledge and communicates well with adults that they will know how to engage and encourage a child's efforts to learn.  Successful teachers will tell any others in the community that teaching means setting the stage for a child to learn something new in a way that is enjoyable for them.  The first and last goal of any serious school is that the student enjoys learning and knows where to go to find the information they want.  All public school programs should be based on the principle that if a child wants to learn something there is nothing we can do to stop them.  The teaching profession is demeaned and insulted by elaborate and ineffective inventions intended to measure teacher success.  These worthless inventions are often a contrived and pretentious oppression because they do not measure what needs to be measured.  Holding the teacher alone responsible for what a child learns is an insult to the child and blatant enabling of the irresponsibility of the parents and community.  We need to agree that we are all father and mother to every child and we are all responsible for what children learn and how they learn.  A genuine commitment to education must include attention to and regulation of the forces permitted in our culture that make entertainment the higher purpose of society and militate against both the value of study and the pleasure of learning.  We are directly responsible for damaging the healthy development of learning skills in our own children by placing them in the care of electronic entertainment machines to serve as babysitters, trainers and mentors in place of real, warm and competent humans.  We must examine the proposition that if we use machines to be teachers, trainers and "supervisors," our children will probably learn to be more comfortable with machines than with other people.  Listen to what teachers discover in their students' experiences and learned behaviors, and you will be appalled or terrified.  We first create a social and economic environment where children are trained to be materialistic, self-centered and perpetually entertained.  Many parents raise their children as though they are expected to be incapable of any operation more complex than pushing a button until age eighteen, and the next day they will be a self-sufficient functioning adult.  In this context, our parents and citizens expect teachers to overcome the strong strain of anti-intellectualism in our society, and the persistent messages to children that they don't need to do anything that is not entertaining and easy.  The most important conflict here is not just that this expectation is unfair, but it is a very impractical course of action for the community.  Why do we invest billions in  training our children for a kind of exceptional narcissistic irresponsibility and then expect teachers to turn that around by way of charisma and inspiration?  The success of the classroom is ruined when the teacher has to devote 80% of their time to motivating the child to work.  Healthy children with their natural born curiosity intact do not need extreme measures to make them interested in learning.  Show them something new to them, or show them how to do something that they have not done before --- we call that competence -- and they will be delighted.  But our children are directed by many parents, overtly or subversively, to disrespect teachers and to mistrust school because it is "the government."  We have created a system that deprives the teacher of the freedom to teach because they have to spend all of their time and energy on politics -- the politics of the parents and the politics of the students.  The students receive signals that it is a sign of sophistication and coolness to hold teachers in contempt because "they are lazy and parasitic and they are to blame for my failure to learn."  This is the assassination of learning.  It is right, healthy and essential to hold a child responsible for their own learning from the moment they speak their first word.  An effective system of education would do that. 

 

Who is the teacher?

From time to time, those responsible for the education of children, and those who study the art and science of education, do grapple with this question.  The core question that arises is always more or less the same:  Should the "teacher" be the one who does the teaching, or should others in the community also be assigned the task of teaching?  It is argued that the school, the classroom with the teacher, is the location where learning takes place.  But we know that even in the most traditional school model, there are classrooms that do not look like the usual classroom with desks and seats and pictures on the wall and books on shelves -- now computers that include all forms of information.   There is a laboratory classroom for teaching science.  It may include stone sinks with safety plumbing fixtures and equipment to enable the use of acids and alkalis and burners and experimental apparatus.  There may be a wood shop and metal shop.  There may be a class for home economics that looks like a kitchen.  Clearly, one gets the message here.  If we want our children to learn how to function in a workplace and in their own homes, they need to practice their skills -- the applications of their knowledge --  in a setting that is realistic, a setting that is like the real world and not a classroom.  This is why teachers arrange field trips to both the natural world and museums and if possible a factory or a bank.  We need to have our children begin to experience learning in the real world.  We need to invite others in the community to help the teacher teach.  It is neither fair nor practical to expect an individual to master all of the knowledge that exists in an academic field or in a particular category of technical skill.  The community has to be invited in to help educate children, help perform the most important of all of society's tasks:  handing forward what we know.  With this principle in mind, all those responsible for public education, the states, the federal government, our communities and parents, all should give serious consideration to the concept that everyone can be a teacher.  We can apply that principle systematically.  We can create procedures, protocols, rules and plans for how the public school will solicit and obtain the assistance of the community in this task of education.  We can create rules and procedures for how and when employees and managers are allowed to leave their workplace for a period (usually only hours, but perhaps more) for "public education service." 

 

Who decides what to teach?  And what to learn?

When I studied education in graduate school, we discussed "instructional objectives" and how to write them so that the level of achievement of an instructional objective could be measured in a meaningful way.  An instructional objective is the same thing as a learning goal.  A key concept is to formulate learning goals as tangible results.  It is difficult to measure success if the instructional objective is to "know" or to "understand."  These intangible goals can only be measured by asking questions and recording answers.  But that is only words, talking or writing.  Real learning is demonstrated by some change in behavior, demonstration of a skill.  For example, a poor instructional objective is:  "Will know the history of the Revolutionary War."  A good instructional objective is:  "Will orally discuss events of the Revolutionary War describing both political issues and military battles in a manner that is understandable to an adolescent audience."  This is only one example, but it should be obvious that the first instructional objective offers only "will know" as the thing to be measured, but the second offers for evaluation the student's "oration skills, events, political issues, military battles, and articulation," much more that is measurable than "to know."  Social studies learning goals are among the most difficult to write and measure, both because they make us think of the intangibles of "understanding" and because we tend to think of social studies as highly subjective, the study of history and opinions.  Language skills are easier to measure and mathematics and science objectives are the easiest of all because the demonstration of achievement is highly specific and measurable as concrete behaviors. 

 

But what really is of primary interest to all in our enterprise of public education is who decides which instructional objectives --- (What should we teach?) --- are the ones we adopt and measure.  I believe that there is one best answer to this question:  everyone involved should be enabled to choose instructional objectives, the students, the teachers, the parents, the community, the state.  The student must begin by learning what their parents help them learn, the social skills training that begins with walking, talking and personal hygiene.  But as the child grows from infant to adult, they need to be given more and more self-directive authority, gradually, to choose what they shall learn.  The children are introduced to all of the academic fields and socially desirable skills from year to year, and that large and comprehensive set of "instructional objectives" is chosen by the parents, the community and the state, and by default also the teachers.  But it is very helpful for understanding the meaning of education to play the game of breaking down the instructional objectives into categories of interest.  By that I mean separate the instructional objectives that are really the learning goals of the parents, the learning goals of the community, and the learning goals of the state.  Further, the learning goals selected for the student by the teacher are probably the most valuable learning goals for the student, because the teacher, the competent and caring teacher, is like the most informed "parent" who knows the child's intellectual strengths and weaknesses, and aspirations.  Integrating all of these appropriate sources for legitimate learning goals would result in the best educational experience for each child.  Let's outline a system for sorting learning goals and look at an example.

 

How should learning be measured?  What should we measure?

Our public schools use measurements by local comparison, a practice inherited from the Middle Ages.  All grading is on a scale of five levels by letter or by number:  A, B, C, D, E (or F for Failure), or 100, 90, 80, 70, 60 (Failure).  What has really been measured is not the student's progress, and not the student's potential, and certainly not the student's intelligence or diligence.  What we really do when we give grades in the classroom setting is compare each of the students with the others in the class.  This practice is destructive in more than one way.  First, being a comparison of the children in the class, it evokes sibling rivalry, suggests that the students getting the higher grades are receiving more approval from the teacher and the school than the students getting the lower grades.  Second, it does not allow for each student to learn at their own pace.  Third, it is inherently misleading because the comparison is strictly "local."  The comparative scores of the students are compared only with the scores achieved by others in the class, but not by all the students in the school, not by all the students in the town, not by all the students in the state, not by all the students in the country, and not by all the students in the world.  Further, the comparison is not made with any other group of students who had more time to study and practice, or who had another learning resource, or who had another teacher, or who were subject to different stresses.  Basically, the most important factors of the conventional grading system are that all of the students in the class are engaged within a fixed time period in which to learn a specific instructional objective and how close to mastery of that objective has each student come in that fixed time interval.  The grades suggest to the students, and the parents, and the professionals, that some of the students are smarter than others.  BUT IN THE NAME OF THE HOLY GOD OF SCIENCE THAT SYSTEM PROVIDES NO SUCH EVIDENCE ABOUT THE SMARTNESS OF THE STUDENTS.   Different people learn at a different pace, or "velocity" and there is no evidence whatsoever that "speed learning" is better than slow learning.  There is no evidence that learning some things quickly is evidence that a student will possess the subtle but priceless qualities of creativity, curiosity, intellect, articulation, logic, convergent thinking, divergent thinking, independence of thought, powers of observation, obscured connections, knowledge transference, and on and on.  There is historical evidence that many of the giants of our intellectual history, including such giants as Albert Einstein and Abraham Lincoln, were slow learners as children.  Sometimes a child who is quiet and inattentive to lessons taught in a school turns out to be a great genius and their apparent "failure" in school was actually due to the fact that they were watching a much more interesting show in their own mind.

 

Measure the pace of mastery in different fields, AND different origins of objectives:

What we really should do is bring this "normal curve" nonsense to a close and replace the entire system with "developmental grading."  This system goes by other names, such as "mastery" evaluation, et cetera.  Whatever one wishes to call it, what it accomplishes is to give us a meaningful measurement of how rapidly a student gets to the mastery level,

            A)  for a specified learning objective;

            B)  in a specified field of knowledge or skill;

            C)  when that learning objective has been selected by a known origin:

                        1)  Society; 2) Educators; 3) The Local School: 4) Parents;

                        5) the student themselves.

The results of such a grading system are priceless, to the parents, to prospective employers, to the student themselves.  First, this system tells us all that the student learns some subjects faster than others, a clear and scientific indicator of their aptitudes.  The student knows "I am good at math, not as good at history," and everyone else knows too, not because a teacher says so, but because scientific measurements say so.  Further, the time interval needed for mastery of different types of learning objectives within the same field provides additional information about what kinds of learning resources work best for the individual student.  Lastly, and vitally important, this system tells us all how the origin of the learning goal affects the time required for mastery of that goal.  This is very important information, and here is why:

 

When I was a child, I was a good student, got As and Bs, behaved well in school, was liked by my teachers and deemed relatively "bright."  I had some friends, boys, who were not so "bright," not so successful in school.  There was one --- let's call him "Billy."  Billy would usually have his baseball cards with him, a stack that looked like it would have cost him $25.00 if he bought it all at once.  Billy, the somewhat dull or average student knew the personal history of every player in that stack of cards.  He knew their batting averages and their home run records, when they had won a game and when they had been traded from one team to another.  He knew arcane facts, such as their home town and personal quirks.  He knew the chances of getting their card when you bought a pack of cards.  He knew how rare or common each player -- on the card -- was.  HOW did this dull student manage to learn so much about baseball players and baseball cards?  BECAUSE HE WANTED TO, THAT'S WHY.  And because of this observation I made long ago, and thousands of other similar examples I have encountered throughout my lifetime, I seriously and totally recommend that our system of public education should be based on the scientific principle that:  IF A CHILD WANTS TO LEARN SOMETHING THERE IS NOTHING WE CAN DO TO STOP THEM.  This is important information.  What this means is that we do not have to motivate an otherwise healthy child to learn.  We do not have to badger them with how important it is to learn or what to learn.  We don't have to cram knowledge through their eyes or ears of down through the top of their heads.  We don't have to worry them or tell them that they are losing a battle with their fellow students, with their playmates and friends, because they are not learning fast enough.  (Could that be preparation for not working fast enough?)  We don't have to set our whole society up for stress and conflict by constantly informing our children that some people are successes and some are failures.  Some are winners and some are losers.  The developmental grading system does not label children as successes and failures or as winners or losers.  It labels all students as learners who have mastered specifically identified learning objectives, and they have done so because they like to learn and they respect their parents and their teachers enough to work at learning goals selected for them but they also get a fair chance to choose some of their own learning objectives.  They are developing a strong and valuable sense of WHEN THEY ARE LEARNING WHAT THEY WANT TO LEARN AND WHEN THEY ARE LEARNING WHAT THEY NEED TO OR HAVE AGREED TO LEARN TO SATISFY A NEED OR DESIRE FROM OUTSIDE OF THEIR OWN INNER CURIOSITY DRIVES.  This is priceless information for the student themselves and for prospective employers.  AND THIS INFORMATION IS OBTAINED WITHOUT LABELLING CHILDREN AS SUCCESSES AND FAILURES.  And don't make the foolish mistake of thinking that the labelling hurts only one side of the spectrum.  Of course we discourage and demean students with the conventional normal curve system by giving them failing or average grades, but we are not doing the "brighter" students any favors by giving them the glowing "As" that suggests they are smarter than their friends and playmates.  They are not necessarily smarter than anybody.  They know how to prepare for a test.  Getting "As" prints a sign and expectations on them.  They are at risk to become anxious, lest they lose their admired and elevated status, and they are at risk for narcissism and class consciousness, thinking they are natural born leaders.  When the adults park an expectation of excellence and future leadership on the shoulders of a bright student, they are being self-serving as much as nurturing.  A bright student might want to live alone in a loft and write poetry, or paint pictures of flowers.  Teachers can succumb to their own egos thinking that they are shaping the future by choosing its creators.  Some of those chosen to lead by our educational institutions fail miserably the tests of authority and power.  It should be clear that a system of developmental grading is more scientific, and less destructive, than the comparison grading by the contrived "normal curve."