Letters from Linden
by JACK LINDEN
NBC has devoted this week to education in the United States, bringing in experts as well as the general public to talk about the issue. One conclusion that can be drawn, in my opinion, is that we have let public education alone for too long. Yes, we have dealt with it in bits and pieces. But nothing has been done that lasts long or meaningfully.
There was the No Child Left Behind program developed under the Bush administration and now the Race to the Top under the Obama administration. Those are only the most recent. But I can think of no president in my lifetime that hasn’t had some program concerning education. They have come and gone and education has gone back to the way it was. The 21st century reforms, however, have put a new wrinkle in the paradigm. School and teacher effectiveness now are based on testing. Ask any teacher and they will tell you that testing is getting in the way of education.
What’s the problem? First, too much of the reform in education has come from the outside and top down. How many of the decision makers have been in the classroom in the past 15 or 20 years? How many of the reform advocates have actually been in a classroom of young people? I know ... very few.
Secondly, most of the advocates of reform are speaking only to the school. There is the evaluation of students by incessant testing. There is no mention that most of the reform measures imply that education is only the responsibility of the people in the school house. What role does the community have in the education of children? Is the community involved with education or only in the extra-curricular programs? Compare the attendance at your local high school football program with attendance at the same high school on back to school night.
A third element I see in this process is the acceptance of the idea that education is the most important part of any community. If the community does not see its school system as the most important use of its tax dollars, there will be no long lasting reform. No longer can the citizens merely pay taxes and then talk about reform in the schools in any meaningful way. There must be involvement, from talking to the youth on the street to being in the school as a participant. That involvement will be in the capacity of both a learner and teacher. Just throwing money at the problem will not solve it.
Reform must start with a discussion of what we mean by “education.” Are we training or are we educating? If we are training to take a test or for a job, why are we spending the money? One needs to look only at the length of the school year to understand that our education programs are still based on jobs. We used to start after Labor Day or mid-September and release mid-May and certainly no later than Memorial Day. Why? Kids were needed on the farms to plant and harvest. We threw in bells so that the students would get used to punctuality for the assembly line in manufacturing. We had the Carnegie Unit of 55 minutes because somebody decided that was how long it took to do science.
We need to educate for lifelong learning. That means we have to teach reading, not just in the classroom, but in the home. Perhaps reading should not be just for pleasure but how to read a technical journal. There needs to be time for thinking and creating without a machine. There is more to life than math and science.
If we are going to reform education, it doesn’t start with the classroom; it begins with us. The sooner we recognize that, the sooner we will have true reform.
