Let's Have Some Education Reform

It is past time for education reform.

The privatization crowd hasn't made a lot of noise about the "status quo" in a while, because currently much of the status quo is what they forced on education. The new status quo is loaded with bad, toxic ideas; some are now old enough that the Duncan and DFER crowd waste our time opining about the days when their bad ideas were shiny and new and not dusty and disproven.

American education has never been perfect, has (like the country) been on a long journey to try to live up to its own ideals-- and the journey doesn't always lead directly forward. So what reforms do we need right now to move education forward?

End Test-centric Schooling

It is time to end the tyranny of the Big Standardized Test, which warps and distorts the shape of education. We do test prep drill instead of full, deep, rich studies. We judge every school expenditure, every education program, every idea by one question-- will this raise scores on a mediocre multiple-choice math and reading test given once per year. 

We have convinced a generation of teachers and students that the only real job of schools is to get students to score well on the Big Standardized Test. What a cramped, meager vision of education. 

If we absolutely can't quit the test, then at the very barest minimum, we have to remove every last stake from it. That includes never again using it as a proxy for "student achievement," which is probably impossible because education journalists and education researchers are so addicted to that sloppy shorthand. 

How will we know how students are doing? That's a tough question, but my real answer is we don't know all that much now, because the sliver of data produced by the BS Test is tiny and certainly disproportionate to the amount of damage that focusing on the test does to education. Start by asking the big questions, like "what is education for" and then start trying to figure out how to measure that instead of asking "What can we measure and reduce to simple data, and how can we convince ourselves that that's what's really important."

Regulate Choice

Choicers have insisted every step of the way that charters and vouchers should operate free from government oversight and regulation because the magical free market will take care of it. We are far enough into the experiment that this assurance is bunk. Furthermore, children only get one shot at school-- it is unacceptable to have to tell a student "Sorry. Turns out we didn't know what we were doing and your last few years of school were a waste." Choicers are going to say, "But bad public schools do that, too" and maybe they do, but you don't accept it there, so why accept it for choice schools.

And that goes double for voucher schools. If you want to get voucher money, your doors will be open to all students, you won't discriminate, and you will meet the basic educational standards of the state. If you want to be free of government oversight and regulation, then don't take vouchers and remain a fully independent private school.

And education savings accounts should also have oversight. The kind of guardrails that Arizona voters wanted in order to prevent the kind of fraud and abuse that Arizaon's program typified. 

Taxpayers deserve accountability and transparency for how their education dollars are spent, not assurances that magical free market forces will make everything okay. 

Worried about parental choice? It is not necessary to unleash an unregulated free market to give them choice, and it is absolutely necessary to have oversight and regulation to protect the interests of the rest of society. Spoiler alert: parents are not by any stretch of the imagination the only stakeholders in education.

End Teacher Micro-management

The technoreformsters of the modern era have dreamed of a world in which classrooms are teacher-proof and teaching requires only slightly more qualifications than a fast food fry cook. The result is continued micro-management of teachers and a deprofessionalized profession. Teachers should work with support and guidance in a system that is built on trust. 

Do not try to legislate curriculum and instruction. Do not decide that whatever program a senator just heard on a podcast should be turned into a legislative mandate. By all means, advocate for better and better curriculum and instruction, but do it by making the case to teachers as if they were, in fact, education professionals, and don't just try to force them to follow the flavor of the month.

Let teachers teach. Yes, hold them accountable to professional standards. But let them do their damned jobs. Give them the tools and support they need. Make the profession attractive again with decent levels of pay and autonomy linked to power and responsibility. 

And in connection with this--

Fix the teacher pipeline

Look, the teacher training pipeline has never been great, but these days its even worse. It has always suffered from college professors whose familiarity with K-12 classrooms runs from limited to non-existent. Now add to that education departments that are teaching future teachers that their job is mainly test prep. 

I've talked about better approaches to teacher training many times. They programs should emphasize content knowledge, a big pedagogical toolbox, and lots of support in the early stages. 

Really fix the administrator pipeline

Show me a school with problems, and I will show you a school with a bad administrator. Administrative jobs are the least attractive in education-- all the responsibility and little power. So maybe they just attract a lot of the wrong people. But we don't talk about this issue nearly enough. 

Fix the research pipeline

So much education is junk-- or indistinguishable from junk. And working teachers don't have the time to sort through the mountain of stuff. I sure wish there was a way for meaningful, useful research to get to classroom teachers. 

Funding

Can we bring an end to the American desire to fund education on the cheap? A tough haul, but still a reform that is needed. Fund so that districts can compete for top teachers. Fund so that districts can lower class sizes and provide more supports for teachers and students. Fund so that outdated facilities can be brought up to speed. Fund so that some students aren't attending what everyone knows is the poor, run down school. 

Talk about what education is for

This is not a question we will ever answer definitively for all of the country. But our failure to talk about it all has allowed Certain Folks to plug in their own answer, which appears to be roughly "To generate a stream of data that will allow corporate overlords to better command and select meat widgets to generate profits." This is not a great answer, but we've never discussed it. Nor did we ever discuss "The purpose of school is to generate good scores on the BS Test," so we were just stuck with it.

One of the challenges of the classroom is that you face a hundred different expectations, most unspoken. We should have the conversation and not be afraid that it's a question that can't be settled, because the conversation really matters, and people who want education to suck for Lessers because "those people will just be digging ditches anyway" should have to say so out loud.

Rebuild the social commitment

Part of the conversation we haven't had and part of the effect of the free market choice movement has been to quietly torpedo the societal commitment to educating all children. We need to strengthen that commitment.

It's not a new issue. We can go all the way back to the days after Brown v. Board when a whole lot of folks complained, "What do you mean I have to pay taxes so Black kids can go to school??!!" Part of the free market education project as envisioned by Milton Friedman has always been taking education as a commitment for which society, through government, takes responsibility and turning it into a commodity for which individuals take responsibility. The underlying message of school choice is "If you want an education for your kid, that's a You problem." Vouchers, dressed up as choice and freedom, are a pint-sized payoff to soften the blow (given enough years, I predict they would slowly shrink away entirely).

This is wrong at least two ways. First, it's a shitty, selfish stance, a declaration that I should never be in any way inconvenienced for the benefit of my fellow human. It's an odious ideology. Second, it's impractically short-sighted. Do you really imagine that you will suffer no ill effects if large sectors of society are under-educated? History says you are a dope. In fact, as Adam Laats points out in Mr Lancaster's System, part of the origin of our system is a societal concern about too many unschooled youths running about. 

This is one of the cheapest asks on my list. It just takes some people in leadership positions to talk about how we are all of us stakeholders in education and we all benefit from a well-educated citizenry. It just takes some leaders to talk about how we have a collective responsibility to make it possible for every child to unlock their potential to the benefit of not only them, but all of us. Lord, how long has it been since we had leaders talking like that? Instead we get noise about how education will fix inequity (so nobody else in government needs to work on the problem) and education will help individuals make more money and/or be more useful to future employers or talk about how schools must serve parents because the students are their parents' chattel. 

Screw all of that. We all pay for education because we all benefit from education. Because the most fundamental feature of a nation is that we take care of the other people in that nation. Because no nation ever ran into trouble because of too much education. Education is the work of helping young humans find and embrace their best and truest selves even as they achieve greater understanding of what it means to be fully human in the world. I want to hear leaders talk like that, and then I want them to craft education policy like they believe it.

Is this an exhaustive list?

Probably not. Feel free to add to it in the comments.

I’ve been starting and restarting this post for a couple of years now, because I believe we need education reform-- as long as we understand that “ed reform” doesn’t mean what it meant ten or twenty years ago. Something just possessed me to finally finish it off today. And I hope the message gets out there.