If only we could...

I hear it every time I work in a school. I heard it every day during my internship, and I hear it every day as a substitute teacher. If only we could change this, or reform that, or do away with this other thing... we could turn education around for this country. But often, I get the impression that these wishes are more often based on knee-jerk reactions to unpopular administrative decisions than on actual, supportable plans for true change. Granted, not always... but often. And of course, I don't mean to imply that teachers do not have a well-deserved right to complain about the administration. In fact, I believe it may be a law somewhere that as a teacher, you must complain about some facet of how your school is run at least once a month in order to maintain your bona fides.

The point I am trying to make is that more often than not, the complaints are centered around what we are doing wrong, rather than how we can do it right.

"Well okay then, Smartacus," I hear you say. "Let's hear your great ideas."

If we are going to do this, we must accept that we are entering into a hypothetical realm where we have the authority and power to declare a thing is so, and it is so. Then I can explore this question: If I could completely do away with current current constraints on schooling, how would I re-imagine public secondary schooling to be effective for the year 2025?

Regardless of unpopular policies and administrative decisions about leave, pay, or budget cuts, I can sum up my "what if" in one sentence: I would change the focus of schooling.

My father, who happens to have a Doctorate in education, said to me during a recent conversation that the goal of schooling is not and should not be about teaching. It is and should be about learning. I agree wholeheartedly - but it seems that unfortunately, we as a nation have lost sight of this somehow.

It starts with standardized testing. The emphasis on standardized achievement testing as a benchmark for student advancement has caused far more damage to secondary education than it has cured. This can be seen all over the nation, as otherwise successful schools and otherwise effective teachers are fired because of poor test scores. My God, it has even led to a spate of high-level cheating... not by students, but by TEACHERS! An Associate Press report in 2003 revealed that teachers had "read off answers during a test, sent students back to correct wrong answers, photocopied secure tests for use in class, inflated scores, and peeked at questions then drilled those topics in class before the test." Why? In order to meet testing standards and keep their jobs. Freakonomics authors Steven Levitt and Stephen Dubner followed up on this report and by analyzing data from schools across the country, confirmed that this pattern was (and to some extent, may still be) epidemic.

Seriously, folks. If the pressure to perform is so strenuous that people are willing to commit ethical breaches that would lose them their jobs if discovered, ironically only to keep from losing their jobs... then the pressure is way too high.

Perhaps the reason for this is one of perception. As my father pointed out in his doctoral dissertation, "standards are conceived by most educators as static constructs - as imposed requirements." (See footnote below) Teachers see standards as most anyone would... as something they are required to meet. The problem with that is that the way standards are used today creates an environment of high-stakes, win or lose testing. And high-stakes testing - the kind that may hold a teacher's or a whole school's future in the balance - is not a good educational tool. It leads to a focus on test-preparation and imparting information, rather than actual learning and imparting knowledge. Thus my assertion that if I could institute a drastic re-imagining of secondary education for the future to shift the focus of schooling from teaching to learning, it is here where I would start.

Don't get me wrong... standardized tests can have a valuable place in education. But they should be used as a pre-assessment rather than as a prognostic measure. We should use them to see where a student is, and where he needs to focus, rather than a measure of what he has absorbed. Because frankly, for that last purpose, they don't work. The way we use them now, they only measure what a student has been able to cram, not what he has actually retained.

Standardized testing is not the only place we can realize this shift. In the George Lucas Foundation's Edutopia website, the video "10 Big Ideas for Better Classrooms: Striving to Improve Public Education" showcases a double handful of ideas that have been already put into action by several schools across the country. If you don't want to watch the 18 minute video, I can sum it up for you here. These ideas are all about shifting education from the theoretical to the practical... from the abstract to the authentic. Projects instead of tests, real-world applications instead of hypotheticals.

In terms of pure realism, this is a hard one for many schools to implement, mainly due to budgetary problems, but boy, if we had the money we truly needed (and deserved... seriously, how about we cut professional athletes' salaries by one percent and give that money to education? Shall we do the math? See below.), every school could realize this shift. And as one teacher very eloquently put it in the video, "I remember the projects I did in school. I don't remember the tests."

That's because when it came to that kind of hands-on, practical learning, he wasn't taught... he learned.

1. Walser, F.L. (1989). Similarities and differences in procedures for developing

and approving voluntary standards in selected organizations in education

and the private sectors .Unpublished doctoral dissertation, Brigham Young

University, Provo.

Note: The Math. So, according to AOL Jobs, the minimum pay for an NFL player in 2009 was $310,000. With 53 players per team, 32 teams in the league, that's 1,696 players... for a total minimum salary of $525,760,000. 1% of that is $5,257,600 a year. That's just from the NFL. What if we added in Major League Baseball and the NBA? The minimum 2009 salary for MLB (750 players) was $400,000 for a total salary of $300,000,000... 1% of which is a cool $3 million), and in the NBA (432 players), it was $457,588 for a total of $197,678,016... 1% of which is $1.98 million.

So all told, between the NFL, MLB, and the NBA, if all players were getting minimum salary (which we know is ludicrous... most players earn ten to twenty times the minimum), 1% of all their salaries combined would be on the order of ten million dollars. A drop in the bucket on a national scale for educational needs, but it would definitely be a small step in the direction of re-establishing a sense of priority in this country.

Ah, don't get me started on this one. This is an old, old argument.

The Role of Schooling - 2025 C.E.

We've already talked about the role of content knowledge in 2025, and how it is important for teachers to be able to not only provide a filter between the surfeit of information out there and the sponge-like minds of school children, but to show them how to construct and maintain such a filter for themselves. But what about schooling? By which I mean the process of education... the process of learning in a school environment?

To be frank, I think it will be much the same as it is today, albeit operating within a more technological paradigm. There are those that may feel that with the continual advancement of information-based technology that is readily available to the average student, that schools may become obsolete. Kids will be able to take total control over their own education and learn from any location with an internet connection. In such an environment, the very idea of schooling will be obsolete.

I do not think this scenario is realistic or even desirable. There is a great leap between a student empowering and taking responsibility for his education and taking total control over it. It is the same leap (metaphorically speaking) as exists between a would-be pilot seeking out qualified instruction and that same person leaping directly into the cockpit of a jumbo jet. In the first case, the student/pilot understands the need and desire for knowledge and information and takes steps to obtain it responsibly and accurately. In the latter, the student/pilot hopes to self-train - and although all the information may technically be out there for a motivated individual to find for himself, any attempts to immediately use that information without tempering it with actual knowledge and preparedness could (and very likely will be) doomed to tragedy.

This is not to say that it is impossible for students to grow, develop, and learn without a formal schooling process. Indeed, in the technological world of 2025, it may be easier to become a true autodidact than it was just a quarter-century ago. But the irony of the matter is this: the very thing that makes it potentially easier for students to "just do it" and seek out learning and education on their own - the sheer amount of readily available information that hovers at our fingertips - is the very thing that ultimately makes it more difficult to succeed in this endeavor. As I have said before, and undoubtedly will say again, without the ability to filter between good, reliable data and unsupported, questionable information (the wheat from the chaff, as it were), self-teaching is and always will be an uphill battle. For middle and high school age children, who for the most part have not yet developed the maturity and discipline needed for such a challenge, formal schooling will be necessary.

THIS is what I feel the true role of schooling will be in 2025. Teachers will continue to teach and impart their content knowledge to their students, but their main role will be to help students develop the skills and techniques they will require to take reasonable, responsible, and ultimately productive control over their own education and learning.

In many cases, this will be accomplished through non-traditional methods that the teachers of a prior generation may or may not recognize. Teaching will be more about making authentic connections between a student's world and the world "outside". Just how will this be done? Stay tuned.