Why Fixing an Outmoded System Won’t Work

Education reform is (finally) getting its day in the sun, but the parameters in which the debate is framed are scary for two big reasons: (1) There are fundamental differences between today and the time when America was a leader in public education; and (2) The current labor market demands completely different ways of learning and engaging with the workplace than what the current system is designed to provide.

As we saw in the housing crisis and America’s ballooning credit card debt, our education system is proof positive that you cannot have everything and pay nothing. Part of the persistence of this delusion, as I see it, is that there was a time that we could sustain a superior system for peanuts. Like many things in our history, this amazingly sweet deal was sustained by indentured servitude. If we look at the 50s and 60s, when our education system was at its apex, labor was cheap, abundant and qualified. Why? The teachers that sustained our system were women, by and large.

If we think back to the 50s and 60s, we didn’t have a lot of female politicians, scientists, CEOs, lawyers, or professionals. We did have women who were finally getting higher education, but upon doing so, they had severely limited professional options. Furthermore, the paradigm of the American family as one in which the woman took care of the home placed limitations on the kinds of careers women could pursue. One of the most prestigious, family-friendly career options for a newly educated woman (and indeed one of the very few options available) was the classroom. The cream of the crop, lacking other options, were entering classrooms and providing high-quality education to America’s students. Because their options were so limited and their working seemed superfluous to many, they were easily exploited and undercompensated. In this way, we could sustain an impressive education system on the cheap, fueled on cheap, qualified, female labor.

Obviously, this could not last and women have broken glass ceilings in most professions and can take their talents where compensation is higher and personal goals can be realized. Our schools no longer have a monopsony on these highly qualified women, and the system never adapted to a competitive labor market. These qualified women started to leave, and in a profound way. We could either pay more to retain qualified teachers and raise the prestige of the profession, or we could try to sustain the status quo by paying low wages. Having chose the latter, this increasingly in-demand workforce also made its choice and began to leave. This is not to say that great teachers did not remain (nor to say that there are no great male teachers), but simply to highlight that those great teachers who remained would do so increasingly as an act of philanthropy and personal dedication.

As we lost cheap labor inputs to our education system, the system was asked to offer more services to children with greater needs. After the landmark Brown v. Board of Education decision and the federally supported integration of schools starting with the Little Rock Nine, a system that had been geared toward a thriving post-WWII, and predominately white population suddenly had to accommodate students from different backgrounds. These are children that until the Civil Rights Act of 1964 were not even the equals of their white peers and who were the product of centuries of systemic racism stemming from an era in which African Americans were not people, but property. After centuries of being ignored, marginalized and left out of the education and labor market, the mainstream education system had to provide all the more services to more students at the same time as it experienced an exodus of the cheap, qualified inputs that had catapulted it to success.

Worst of all, much of this occurred at a time when the country’s economic success (and ability to invest in education) was changing into the stagflation of the 70s, as agriculture in the US collapsed, and as huge urban migrations occurred from the south to the north and from farms to cities while the US’s inner cities were left to rot.

The system was pretty obviously destined to collapse or stagnate, and that is what we are seeing today. But the rising cost of labor inputs and new demand with diverse needs was not the only challenge that the school system would face. The raison d’etre of the school system was also changing. As the British education thinker Sir Ken Robinson has noted, public education systems were the product of an industrializing world. They functioned as a part of that context too, with most systems acting like a factory in which you essentially built a child on an assembly line of dumping facts into their heads and dropped them into the labor market. It was very much a system that fed a manufacturing country well, but the US was no longer as competitive at manufacturing.

As the US was transitioning into an economy of ideas and services, the system was not particularly exceptional at generating an entrepreneurial class of independent agents that could function as free agents. Not only were the types of jobs changing, but job stability and how workers approached the labor market was also evolving. We are now entering an era in which a career with a stable pension at the end of a pipeline is a pipedream, even as we tell our children that education is a pathway to a stable career. A Bureau of Labor Statistics longitudinal study of workers entering the workforce in 1979 found that they had changed jobs on average 11 times between the ages of 18 and 42.

The education system is predicated on learning concrete facts or reading books for meaning or doing math. This is somewhat quaint in the era of the computer in which these functions are easily automated. Recent reform has focused more on multiple choice testing which only reaffirms this antiquated notion of knowing facts being of much use. The product is that you are learning things that the internet can recall more quickly, more reliably, and with a larger degree of corroboration. If you are learning things that are easily automated, chances are you are preparing yourself for a job that can and will be done more cheaply by a machine. In an information economy with rapidly evolving technology, the education system needs to create creative thinkers, something that the system and the tests that will “reform” it cannot do if they continue to be predicated on the importance of facts over critical thinking, problem solving, interpersonal skills, entrepreneurship, and processes. This is aggravated all the more when you consider that most schools, lacking budgets, have stripped away the few classes that teach things that are not mechanizable or exportable: the arts, languages, vocational skills, home economics, shop, design, architecture, etc. They have also cut back on after-school or extracurricular programming that might promote these key skills for the new labor market. You want the proof of this? Look at America’s most successful entrepreneurs and count the amount of college dropouts or “ineffective” students. They kept going where most people give up and that is why they were great, but our system failed them and it fails kids who lack that kind of ironclad determination (and often privilege) all the more.

Relatedly, the American education system has not evolved all that much from the quaint, local model. This is dangerous in a globalized world in which jobs are increasingly mobile. All the same, the amount of American’s who have no foreign language skills, no exposure to foreign cultures, and no ability to locate their state capital, let alone another country on a map is frankly alarming. As I noted in previous blog posts, learning a language requires thinking critically, being creative, learning process over discreet facts and interacting. To master a foreign language is to be an entrepreneur, not to mention to be competitive and able to communicate in an increasingly interconnected world. A failure to produce global citizens and excuse it with increasingly unsupported American exceptionalism is nothing more than fanciful delusion that we have not been able to afford for at least three wasted decades. If we don’t turn this ship around quickly and recognize that our mastery of the skills of global citizens is the only way to maintain that American exceptionalism.

A Framework for Moving Forward

Now, I am clearly noting that our system is inadequate and that our reform is even inadequate but haven’t given a lot of solutions. So, I think it is worth beginning to figure out how we might move forward. The solutions are a conversation and they will need to differ depending on the locality (I firmly believe that federal government efforts to improve the education system have largely floundered with the one exception of school integration). In this spirit, I will instead attempt to develop a framework for thinking about solutions, as there will be funding, cultural, and political constraints that need to be addressed in developing the specific solutions.

Teachers

1. Make the hiring process more competitive, including how we recruit, compensate, train and offer advancement opportunities and creative license in the classroom. The current system takes the best teachers from the front lines in many instances.

2. Increase focus on training teachers and providing on-going, relevant professional development opportunities.

3. Redefine the role of unions (not eliminate) to ensure that teachers are held accountable in a fair manner, but also that they are able to exercise the creativity they should be inspiring from students. Unions cannot continue to serve the least common denominator among teachers before students or more committed teachers with a proven track record of excellence. There needs to be a balance between protecting teachers from stifling administrators or dismissal because of their salary level (firing the most experienced) while ensuring that there is a process for offering competitive salaries, compelling teachers to be innovative in instruction, and addressing ineffective teachers in a fair manner that is not viewed as impossible. No profession, especially one so critical for our future, should be immune from probation or dismissal.

4. Provide teachers ongoing training to ensure that they understand the evolving needs of the labor market and society and are able to design lessons to develop those skills in their students.

5. Ensure adequate planning periods and time for parental/community engagement, as the kinds of lessons that prepare kids for higher levels of thought and interpersonal interaction are more highly demanding than the kinds of lessons that merely convey facts.

Administration and Boards of Education

1. Ensure that instruction begins early enough to meet developmental cut-offs, moving towards stronger early education and earlier introduction of skills with time horizons like foreign language.

2. Protect equality of opportunity for all students: that a “public” education system tends to systematically fail the poor and minorities and that schools in certain districts are inherently worse than those in other districts, shows that we are failing as a society. Jobs aren’t relegated to a locality, so why should school funding be relegated to the tax base of a district? Labor mobility is and will increasingly be key to a functioning market, so why shouldn’t students be mobile to ensure that schools are more balanced in the kinds of challenges they face?

3. Rethink how schools are funded, as the benefits to society of an educated and employable graduate go far beyond parents (if you are an employer, a coworker, the consumer of any good or service, you are benefiting from a functioning system. Additionally, lower crime, disease, and dependency rates reduce your tax burden in other ways. Sorry resentful single people, but you have a stake in public education).

4. Use master teachers in the most challenging circumstances, putting new teachers in less challenging environments. Education experts tend to agree that you put anyone in front of a classroom and they will not become good for about 2 years and excellent for about five years. Programs like Teach for America are a bandaid that tries to once again sustain a failed system of cheap, qualified teachers and that perversely puts people at the most selfish point of their life with the least experience in the most challenging environments (I say selfish here in the sense that at age 20-30 you SHOULD be trying to figure out your place in the world, defining your identity, finding a family and friend group, etc., and it is hard to balance that and teaching in a high-pressure environment).

5. Limit interference in schools to ensuring equality of opportunities, protecting children from transgressions (which should not include unique teaching methods), ensuring adequate supplies/funding, increasing community involvement, and raising the profile of educators.

6. Develop guidance counseling programs that focus on helping students to set, plan for, and realize goals and should help kids to understand the trade-offs of future decisions students may be making without realizing their full consequences.

Parental and Community Involvement

1. Develop more flexible and suitable means of reaching a diverse body of parents and finding ways to engage them in the school community, regardless of socioeconomic status or ethnic background.

2. Create stronger bridges between the labor market, social organizations, and schools to ensure that graduates are well suited for the market, including increased use of internships, volunteer positions, and interaction with innovators, social organizations, and employers.

3. Find alternative ways to provide assistance to struggling children and finding ways to match those who can provide voluntary assistance with those who need it.

4. Implement government regulations to ensure that more parents are compelled to participate in their child’s education unless they are absolutely prevented by health reasons. This needs to be met by flexible policies for involving parents who are poorer and may be working, but my mom worked sometimes 14-hour shifts for 2 weeks at a time and managed to be sufficiently active in my education. I envision policies similar to those that make work flexible on election day, wherein workplaces must allow flexibility on parent-teacher conference days to parents so they can be involved.

Infrastructure and Classroom Materials

1. Determine the role of the traditional textbook and seriously reevaluate whether it really serves the goals of a successful education system. Similar to standardized tests, the role of the textbook industry needs to be vigorously questioned. That the bulk of textbooks come from one company or state is problematic.

2. Provide more flexible and dynamic class space that facilitates improvisation, creativity, and most importantly, interaction.

3. Ensure that students have access to specialized supplies like art supplies, musical instruments, lab equipment, technology, home economics, shop space and materials, etc. to develop hard skills and production. I believe we cannot survive without reviving manufacturing or developing solid production and life skills that will diversify our idea economy into one that also produces actual outputs.

4. Secure school facilities and the principal routes by which children arrive.

5. Make school environment conducive for a child to be prepared to learn.

6. Offer healthy school feeding programs to ensure that all kids are prepared to learn.

Testing and Measuring Success

1. Transition the measurement of success away from a model in which a student’s ability to regurgitate facts in isolation is the definition of success towards measuring interpersonal skills, problem solving, creative approaches, and leadership.

2. Expand the “ideal” outcome of schooling beyond graduation or college enrollment. College is not necessary or desirable for everyone or for every profession. By making it the idealized goal, we are setting kids up for failure, sucking them into a world of debt, and isolating their learning from real-life experience and productive contribution to society longer than perhaps necessary.

3. Design testing to reinforce and apply learning (which is not new from a pedagogical perspective). It will require as much thinking to design, update, and score these tests as it does to take them (right now tests are often graded by machines, so that should tell you about how we are training the students taking them).

4. Decouple mandated testing from self-perpetuating businesses and lobbies.

Curriculum

1. Make classes that teach concrete skills such as drafting, design, shop, and home economics more widely available and required so that students have experience carrying out projects.

2. Teach global citizenship, particularly interacting with diverse cultures and communicating in foreign languages.

3. Assign coursework that solidifies problem solving, creativity and understanding of processes that can be widely applied. Move away from worksheets and output-oriented assignments.

4. Transition from individual work to interpersonal work (I am an only child that hates group work, but it is the only way to effectively learn how to work in a team, which in turn is the only way to effectively carry out tasks that require multiple personalities and expertise).

5. Reevaluate whether lessons that teach things that are readily available on the internet are worth learning.

6. Define the appropriate role of technology in instruction and how much responsibility schools have for making students competent users of new technology.

7. Look at what the labor market requires in terms of hard skills, personal attributes, and factual knowledge and develop those skills in class.

8. Move away from wasting scarce class time non-interactive lessons (book reading, individual writing exercises, long individual tests) toward more interactive lessons that take advantage of the value-add that a classroom setting provides (social skills, interaction, teamwork, communication, specialization of tasks, etc.).

Speak out!

This is certainly not a comprehensive look at the problems our system has faced, why it is no longer working, or what is needed to fix it. That said, I would love to hear about problems you think have contributed to the collapse of our system and potential solutions that you think I’ve missed or inadequately addressed.