Public Education Today: Approaching the Educational Shifts

Feb 27, 2008 - 17:09 PM PST

Public Education Today: How Should We Approach the Educational Shifts?

I’ve done a little bit of ranting about public education in the different forums, so I figure that I should set down what’s going on in my mind in a more formed fashion.

Today, public education is focused on results, not experience. In fact, there is very little
consideration given to the student experience. At the same time, we “shoot for the middle, and push everyone through” allowing for far too many of our college freshmen to require remedial courses, that don’t count towards graduation. As a result, of those that do enter college, more and more are dropping out because their remedial course load is too daunting. We are also losing far too many students to disenfranchisement – they just don’t like learning because it’s boring. Well, who ever said education had to be boring? Didn’t Dewey start pushing experiential education in the previous century?

I believe that we need to reintegrate the experience of education back into our focus. To do this we have several tasks:

1. MONEY! Education should be the last thing to lose funding in a budget crunch, not the first. If we continue to funnel our cash into our education system, we will be sure to have a strong workforce in the future. Why do you think that Germany and Japan are so far ahead of us? For years following WWII (actually, until very recently), they had no military so they spent all their money on the economy and education. Also, if we had more money, we could higher more teachers, reduce class sizes, make sure our text books and resources were up to date, all the time, provide more field trips (so much more is learned on them than from text books), and feed our students better. What is with feeding people nutritionally devoid food and then expecting them to work effectively?

2. Limit Busing. Please don’t shoot my head off for saying it, but we need to bring back a strong walk zone policy, especially for non-magnet schools. Busing has broken up our neighborhoods, driven the middle-class money to the suburbs, diverted funds from the classroom to busing, and created health hazards with the massive amounts of bus exhaust.

3. Here are some things that will change if we can bring back the walk zone:
a. Community focus! Our schools will start to become extensions of our communities again. Schools will be able to draw on communities for support. This means that if the school needs some extra money or PTA meets, parents can actually get to the PTA meeting.
b. Students can do more work at school. When many students go home, they are confronted with so many distractions. It becomes nearly impossible to sit down and just do homework in a timely fashion. I'm writing this paper instead of doing my homework!
c. The middle class might come back into the cities. If we bring the middle class back into the cities, then we have a better chance for class interaction, helping to remove more of those barriers.
d. Global Warming anyone? Why do we need to spew more green house gasses into the air and spend more money on oil when we don’t need to?

4. Trade union and local business support. The unions and businesses would not only include internship and work opportunities for students, but would also provide support and development of school classes. If the businesses and unions help influence the curricula, then would know that the students they higher for internships and for jobs right out of high school would have the skills they need. Jobs and internships would help keep students off of the streets, which would mean a reduction in the youth crime rate and students better prepared for the workforce.

5. Parental Education. We need to teach our parents what it means to provide their children with a supportive learning environment. The one common denominator among all students who win the NMHSQT (the scholarships from the PSATs) is that they sit down and have dinner with their families at the dinner table nearly every night.

6. Police Department involvement. Why do we simply react to crimes retroactively? Why cant we show students what really happens when crimes are committed so that they start to think about the consequences of their actions? I'm not just referring to shootings, either. I'm also talking about stealing or anything that causes anyone more legal trouble than its worth.

7. Curricula Coordination. We have too great a disparity between the needs to graduate high school and the skills needed for college.

8. We need to totally shift the way junior and senior year in high school work. Instead of keeping them in the high school building, we should send them to take college courses. This way we can reduce the number of AP courses needed and expose students to life in college so that it isn’t nearly as much of a shock when they get there. We’d also be able to get rid of a lot of the “senioritis” because the students wouldn’t see their time in school as a waste anymore because they’re already done with their major tasks. My current working model is this: Juniors can take one to two AP courses so that they can begin to adjust to the demands of a college work load. Then senior year, they take one AP course and one college course so that they can continue to adjust. The numbers are totally flexible and dependant on the student. Some students may not even choose to take their work load that far, and that is fine.

9. Redefine curriculum goals. Why do we need to cover everything in American History at the expense of learning what it means to really delve into history in detail? Why don’t we study the American Civil War for a year so that we can learn the skills needed to dissect history and really figure out what’s going on. We will also be able to look not only at the facts but the experiences by looking period literature. After all, literature is just the writer’s expression of his experiences in the history that is developing all around him.

10. Remove curriculum boundaries for those students who learn best without them. Some people learn calculus and physics better when they are taught together. Others don’t. We should give students the option of how they want to approach their education, or place them according to how they learn (see #11) so that they can get the most out of the experience. I still ask, why do we teach history and English as separate subjects? Literature is just a person’s experience of the history that evolves all around him or her!

11. Redefine the way we structure our classrooms and curriculum! This one is big on my list, and I’m leaving it till last for effect. When it comes to high school, I don’t think that we need all these different high schools in so many different areas. Why don’t we run our high schools on a college like campus? Let me explain what this would let us do, but first we need to take a step back so that I can explain.
Our current education model runs on the idea that all students learn the same way, as if everyone thinks the same way. Currently this model is changing with the idea of differentiated education; however, it isn’t there yet. There is a battery of tests given to all Special Education students that are part of the “core evaluation”. From this quantitative and qualitative evaluation, we are able to better understand a student’s learning style, way of thinking, and way of interacting with material. With this new understanding we can restructure our classes, in particular our high school ones, because the same small social circle is not nearly as important in high school as it is in middle and especially elementary school. (Let me note that while the evaluation of student learning styles will be useful for elementary and middle school teachers, we should not separate students by learning style, but rather try to ensure differentiated classrooms because the social experience is so important and students at a young age should be exposed to all different types of people.)
If we run our high schools on college-esque campuses, we will be able to structure our core curriculum classes so that students with the same learning style are able to be in the same class. At the same time, we can structure non-core classes so that they mandate differentiated teaching. Together, these will bring several benefits.
First, we will be able to let our students pursue the core-material (math, English, history, chemistry, bio, physics, any I missed?) as quickly and effectively as possible, so that they don’t have to worry about navigating the different ways in which people work around it. Second, we will be able to structure non-core subjects (i.e. wood working, philosophy, economics) in differentiated classrooms where the experience of learning the material is as important as the material itself. The difference between the non-core and core classes is that the non-core classes will have the ability to let the students put more focus on the experience within the classroom, without worrying about how the non-core subjects effect their grades or college acceptances. (I should note that non-core subject grades will be based more on the student-teacher-material-peer relationship than master of the material and that core subject grades will be based more on subject mastery.)
So, for example, in the non-core classes, students who don’t do well in groups will be able to put energy into figuring out how to work well on a group project and deal with complex group dynamics without the pressure of the grades. Take me for example. When I sit down in a classroom to do group work, I say, “Ok, so what do we need to do?” because I know that we have about 30 minutes to complete the task and trying to coordinate lots of different people to work on it at home is more trouble than its worth. However, there are students who prefer to take some time and talk about how the day went before they get into the work, even though we only have 30 minutes. The non-core classes would give students opportunities to deal with these types of differences and learn how to work with each other in positive, constructive ways.
Also, with the student learning style evaluations, we will be able to teach students about how they learn so that they can build tools to succeed in systems that don’t operate the way that is best for them. For example, student with ADHD need tools to work in a regular classroom, but what if a non-ADHD person ends up in an ADHD oriented environment that runs in a method totally foreign to the non-ADHD person?

Once we’ve been able to restructure our education system, we will be able to tailor each class so that it enfranchises more students, instead of disenfranchises them. We will be able to create a community of learners that wants to take part in the learning process and supports each other in that process. We will also be better able to equip our students for the future, ensuring that they are able to take what the generation in power has done and improve on it in ways that are mindful of the effects that any change will have on into the future.