Conference Digest

The Crisis in Public Education in the USA

Opening

Welcome to our conference on the crisis in public education. There could hardly be a more important subject to discuss, and we couldn't have a better leader for our deliberations than Paul Houston. Paul, an ILF Fellow, is the Executive Director of the American Association of School Administrators, the organization that represents all of the fourteen thousand superintendents of schools in the US. With a doctorate in education, he has grown through the ranks, been a superintendent himself, and now sits in one of the most powerful seats in American education. As he makes clear in his opening comment, public education is experiencing threats to its very existence, and he is calling upon the resources of this group for the wisdom necessary to cope with these threats.

Paul Houston

The American public school, called by our forefathers the Common School, was created to promote the concept of "civic virtue" for our democracy. It has been viewed by many as the engine of our democracy. It is responsible for educating over 90% of our population. Yet, it has increasingly come under fire. The famous "Nation at Risk" report on the condition of public education concluded that the failure of our schools represented a threat to our country. Some critics would dismantle the system in favor of more parental choice. Even a program that is supposed to raise the bar, such as the administration's "No Child Left Behind" program, might well spell the end of the system, because it is designed to raise, to a dramatic degree, the number of "failing" schools in America--schools that do not meet the standards of the bill. Yet, in the dark alleys of our national conscience, we realize that those schools that are in the most peril, and those children in the most peril, are where we pack lots of low-income kids into schools without adequate resources.

All this leads to the question of whither our public schools? What would our ILF Fellows like to see happen? Can we sustain our democracy and our common values without a common enterprise of education? If we can, how? If not, what would you suggest that those of us tilling in the vineyards do to restore faith in the system or to fight the social terrorists who would blow it up? Those are the questions I hope we will address in this education forum.

Paul, as head of the education professionals you are no doubt painfully aware of many effective approaches that cannot be fully implemented because of factors in our society that present resistance or barriers of one sort or another. From your perspective, which are the most inhibiting of educational progress? Lay control? Compulsory education? Political pandering? Racial prejudice? Parental pressures? Religious influence? Lack of money? (Even I can make a pretty long list--maybe it's just the length of the list that is so overwhelmingly preventative of progress.)

You have started a pretty good list. Let me break it into two categories. Getting Kids Ready for School and Getting Schools ready for kids. The first deals with all those factors that work together outside of school to inhibit a child's ability to function. We have lost our sense of community and family in many cases so the web of support that needs to be woven around children is missing. This is most obvious in communities where there are high levels of poverty. We know that the bulk of the children we are currently "leaving behind" live and attend school in these areas. Despite prominent press to the contrary, the schools, as institutions, have not failed our society. What they have failed to do is to keep pace with the deteriorating conditions around our children and the escalating demands made upon the institutions. Where we have clearly failed, however, is to move all our children into that place where they can access the American Dream. I believe schools need to find ways of being more effective reaching out to the community to create stronger links and better support for children. The question then, is "how can schools be more effective at helping get kids ready for school and what is society's responsibility here?" It seems to me if we are truly serious about "leaving no child behind" that there are serious social implications for America, which many of us are reluctant to acknowledge or to shoulder. Thus we have seen criticism and fingers pointed at schools for their failure to overcome issues that are born and bred in the community at large.

What the schools cannot pass on to the greater society is our failure to get schools ready for kids. We have created a fairly rigid, lock-step system of learning that tends to be a "one size fits all" model and which fails to take into account the differences in learners, learning styles, and motivation. We need to find better ways of engaging students in the learning process and in finding meaning in their work. The best assessment of learning would be to go into classrooms and see which way the kids were leaning--if they are leaning forward, you're in business. If they are sitting back on their haunches, we have a learning problem. This leads to a second question, "how can we begin to make our schools places kids want to be--where they are really excited about learning and what they can do with the learning they are receiving?"

It's really helpful for see this distinction. You rightly contextualize the problem as residing not only in the educational establishment, but also in the community. Not many of us think about it that way.

Education and Community                 Top

With respect to the proper role for superintendents, as superintendents of education, not just schools, maybe some pilot projects could be organized to address directly the issue the way in which the loss of community affects the quality of the education in that community. Maybe an educational program could focus on how community erodes, what the consequences are, and what can be done to preserve and restore community. My impression is that few people understand how that process works, and what it takes to build community, partly because the forces that create the loss always seem like progress--new shopping centers, Wal-Marts, etc.

As we discussed in an earlier ILF conference, the loss of community means an increase in all the indices of despair. Paul reminds us that it also cripples educational programs.

I lived for several years in Bolinas, a small town in Northern California that really knew how to keep and build community. It takes a lot, but it is possible. Perhaps community leaders, maybe even community members, could be reached with such an educational program. Until Paul mentioned it, I never thought of putting the resources of the school system to that effort.

Your example of Bolinas may have a clue to the ingredients of community building. Am I correct that some of its characteristics are:

Small in numbers.

Most inhabitants with a modest to low income but no real poverty.

Inhabitants who have been there for some time.

Mostly with shared cultural norms -- English speaking, similar levels of education.

Don, Bolinas is a special case - a mixed group of people in all social strata, even demented homeless, but no tourists, and a relatively stable population, well over the average in intelligence and education. And the children love to go to school. I mention it only because it is a community that takes its community feeling very seriously, with constant and sometimes hostile vigilance on the intrusions that could reduce that feeling. And it knows what those intrusive factors are.

I know Bolinas quite well. Isn't this the location where that old movie thriller, THE BIRDS, was filmed? Your description of it is precise and accurate. But isn't it a description that is at odds with virtually every other small community in the U.S, today? e.g.: "relatively stable population, well over the average in intelligence and education. And the children love to go to school."

Don, you're close, but not there. "The Birds" was filmed at Bodega, not all that far up the coast from Bolinas. The two are often confused. But you're right about Bolinas being different. Part of the difference, however, is the posture it has taken over the last thirty years to preserve its community. I mention the school because it illustrates for me the point that Paul was making about how a community can make a child ready for school (without even realizing it) and how a school can help make a community.

We're talking about small communities, and they do feel so much more manageable, but it seems entirely possible for the superintendent here in San Diego, the sixth largest city in America, to mount a program for community leaders, that could then cascade down to many community members, addressing the factors that promote or erode community, and that in turn make education possible or impossible. They do offer an extensive adult education program, but as far as I know, nothing along those lines.

I think you are absolutely right. We can build community anywhere, with the right leadership. It is clearly harder in large, diverse, and complex places. But again, it can be broken into smaller communities. Every principal needs to be a community builder and many of them exist in the sub-community areas that meet the definition that you are discussing.

Accountability                 Top

You may have seen Bob Herbert's column in the December 16 NY Times, and in any case you may be familiar with the KIPP Academies. These seem, from the article, to be creating the very results we want from our schools--private and public. Is it preposterous to hope that if we were to take public education seriously - I'm sure many teachers do, but what many parents seem to want from education isn't education, it's job training or various kinds of indoctrination--that we could actually create a public education system that would provide education?

Of course this question and comment may be gravely overstated, but I have too many sad experiences over my 32 years in the education business to have much hope.

I would think that the current accountability binge the US is on must be one of the most distressing problems education faces. Evaluation, assessment, testing--we just can't seem to get enough of putting our students through those ordeals. Carl Rogers, the first WBSI Fellow, was one of the strongest early voices that suggested evaluation in education was as misplaced there as it is in psychotherapy. Now there is lots of evidence that it is counter-productive. But against all professional pedagogical judgment, school boards, parents, and politicians keep insisting.

I think that instead of just fighting the whole idea of evaluation in education, which will get us nowhere, we should focus on making the distinction between education and training. Training is designed to make people alike--learning a skill, such as speaking Spanish. Education, however, is designed to make people different from each other, by wedding their particular life experience with the great ideas of literature, history, science and the arts, so that each emerges a unique individual. It is seldom in our interest as a society for everyone to learn the same things. But when it is, we can train students, and then evaluation would be appropriate. But when we are talking about education rather than training, evaluation by comparison to a group is completely irrelevant.

In response to the question about the "Constellation" I think you are very on target. Education professionals need to rethink their roles of moving from superintendents of schools to being superintendents of education or learning. They have to move away from a focus on the internal issues of the system and look much more broadly at the community and create stronger ties to the community. And they must go further. If it "takes a village to raise a child" then the question becomes "what does it take to raise a village?" The sad fact of our current society is that we have fewer and fewer villages. I think schools must act as a village builder. They exist at the psychological and geographical center of many of our communities and they need to find ways to reach out to the broader world.

Your thoughts about the lack of creativity cause me to think and worry. Could that bring on an unanticipated bounty of creativity or just a mild case of vertigo? I do worry a great deal about our current mania for "assessment" which is really about standardized tests, which tends to narrow the curriculum and the way kids think. It leads me to worry that your observation about a lack of creativity will be played out in much larger ways in the future because I see schools moving further and further from honoring that behavior.

I am reminded of China where there are few birds in the wild. After investigating a bit, I was told that during the days of Chairman Mao, he noticed people were spending time watching the birds. He felt that was distracting them from their work so he ordered the nesting areas destroyed so people could concentrate on their work. That is a perfect metaphor for the high stakes testing movement of today. We are taking away those things from children that allow their imaginations to soar so they can concentrate on their work. It is pure training and not much education.

I would say that the majority of the superintendents know that the emphasis on high stakes testing and some of the other "political pedagogical solutions" are bogus and dangerous. While some have taken a very strong stance against high stakes testing while supporting a broad program of assessment, many individuals in the profession have embraced it as a change effort. They feel that by grabbing hold of the testing mantra, they can get their organizations to move in new and better directions. This can be called the "Failsafe" approach to leadership - we'll bomb some of our kids into the stone age to save the rest. I find the morality of that one questionable.

Another aspect of this has to do with how people think you motivate others. I don't subscribe to the "bludgeon people to greatness" assumption that is built into external threats, but there are those who feel that without this, you are setting low expectations. The President and Secretary have talked about the "soft bigotry of low expectations" - meaning, I presume that if you don't set very high expectations, especially for those at the bottom of the stack, that is a form of bigotry. They are probably correct. However, I just wrote an article pointing out the hard bigotry of high expectations without adequate resources. Having worked in Princeton, which had most of the resources necessary to deliver an excellent education and Tucson, which did not, I fully agree that we should want for the children of Tucson the same as we want for the children of Princeton. But merely demanding it (through a high stakes test) without offering the support to get the children there seems to me to be the height of hypocrisy.

Cultural Diversity and Minorities                Top

Our educational crisis fits into Dickens’ famous first sentence: It was the best of times and the worst of times. Education today in the U.S. has never been better for a few, and never worse for the majority.

We all have seen (or at least heard of) the troubles with inner city education. I assume that most of the ILF participants in this discussion have experienced both personally and with their children and grandchildren, some of the world's best education ever. Of course the best experience is now mostly in private schools, but there are I am sure many exceptions.

I would agree with the assessment that it isn't public and private so much as it is poor and not so poor. I would take a bit of exception that it is the worst of times for the majority. I think it has always been bad for a number of children. The history of public education is that we were asked to "sort" people for an economy that needed different levels of workers. As the economy has evolved and as our sense of "human rights" (for want of a better term) has developed, we have grown increasingly uncomfortable with this sorting and we want all to achieve at higher levels. The system we have created is not well suited for that and therefore we have a "crisis." I believe schools are, indeed, overall better than they used to be. Inner city schools aren't. They are probably much worse as they are now serving a very different clientele than they used to. In the early 1950's only about half the children finished school. Today, it is over 80% A larger portion of our population is going to school longer. They simply are getting all the skills they need in this high-tech, information rich environment.

The unfortunate truth about our schools is that we have continued to tolerate tremendous inequity in resources between schools, school districts and states and that accounts for the vast part of the difference in achievement. I am not certain the country will ever come to grips with this.

I think we should be starting this discussion by framing our bias.

My bias is that the inner-city schools (on average) are worse today, and that it takes a far above average child to get a good education in them. One obstacle they face are forces that "dumb" them down, and the product is graduating high-school seniors who perform below those of a generation or two ago.

This doesn't necessarily mean graduates "know" less, because there have been so many advances in technical areas that didn't exist years ago, but because what is needed to be useful in today's activities (artistic as well as business or the professions) is so much greater.

There is also less common culture (in literature, myths, behavior, and even language) to share. For some, this wide variety of different beliefs, old stories, and behavioral norms is a plus, not a minus. But an argument can be made that a healthy society needs to share many of those clichés and at the same time be tolerant and interested in others. A corollary bias of mine is that there should be only one official language in a healthy community or nation AND at the same time a strong emphasis on being bilingual in at least one "foreign" language of choice.

One cause of the "weaknesses" that I perceive in our current public schools is in part the product of the high volume and ethnic origin of our immigrants. For reasons that I am sure are valid and that I don't totally understand, there is less incentive for "assimilation" than in the past. This does not lead me to favoring more restrictions on immigration or any other suggestions except to recognize what I see as inadequate welcoming of our current inflow of future citizens. Assigning no blame, I believe that this high rate of immigration has contributed on balance to poorer schooling for all students.

To help confirm what by now may have convinced you that I am a far-right conservative, I am also "agnostic" about affirmative action at the college level. It is now unfair in its targets -- mainly Blacks. Blacks as a race are no more in need of it than many other groups in poverty. What I am in favor of is affirmative action for slow starters in the earlier years of education where habits of learning are at their most open to change. Ideally, by high school, in my utopia, every child will have had equal quality of teaching and schooling and from then on competitive access to college and graduate school should be neutral (with scholarships available to help neutralize ability to pay).

OK, my tongue-in-cheek is not so far in that it is in danger of being bitten off -- but I could put up an argument for most of the above!

In responding to this, I find myself in a sort of general agreement to many of the issues raised. I think the issue of quality of urban schools centers on the lack of "social capital" that the students have available to them. Also responsible, in part, is the abandonment of the systems by those who could make a difference (here I am including politicians, the economic elite, and to a large extent, the middle class you could anchor the system) and the politically correct mafia who would choose correctness, over quality. I don't think that is a particularly conservative statement--just recognition of reality. I have been comforted in my travels around the world to see that there is a universal language in the world - English. It made me less worried about the battle around it here at home.

As to bilingual education, I have several minds. First, it is all about the quality of the program. I have seen programs that produce illiteracy in two languages, and other that build off the student's first language to help them master a second. It is a hard issue to generalize about because it tends to depend on how it is handled.

I liked your thoughts on the common myths and stories etc. I do think we have lost that and I am not sure how we move back towards it. I have to think the visual culture that the students are immersed in has something to do with that but I may be making excuses here.

In response to the position on "bilingual" education. I think you are only partially right. I have seen programs that do exactly what you state--stick with the first language and do poorly in transitioning. On the other hand, I have seen programs that truly use the first language to build towards the second. I am not arguing for or against "bilingual education" here. I am arguing that things are never as simple as they seem or as they are portrayed by the popular press or by politicians who have individual agendas.

Of course I agree that " building off a first language to help master a second" is education at its best. But I am sure you will agree that this is not what is happening in our bilingual education. It is teaching in the "foreign" language while postponing learning English -- thus in most cases wasting the best years (very young) to learn languages. I pick up this point because there is a movement with some momentum to teach only in English -- a movement, which I think, should be supported -- both for our nation and for the individual children hoping to make a home here.

Parents and Education                 Top

What you want is strong parental involvement in the education of their children. What you don't want is a more dictatorial approach. I once described it as the way we choose to fly. We try to pick the airline, the time of day, the cost, and certainly the destination. These all seem to be the kind of choices parents should be involved in making. However, when we board the plane, we turn right and take a seat. We don't turn left, enter the cockpit and start flying the plane. It is perhaps an overly simplistic metaphor to separate the role of professional from client, but it gets to the point that it is a shared responsibility with specifically different tasks involved.

I have always been struck how little help schools give parents. I think schools can be blamed for a lot of the problem. First, schools try to say they want parent involvement, but they don't want to really enter into a dialog with parents on what that would mean. It has also struck me as more than ironic that schools give kids classes on learning to drive, but not on learning to parent. Clearly, parenting will be the most difficult task they will ever undertake and we have to rely on folklore and observed experience (how our parents handled it) to guide us. If we had a wonderful experience with highly skilled parents, we might have a chance at being good parents. But we know that is not true for many of our children. Shouldn't schools be a part of the solution here?

One of the best things I did as a superintendent was create Parent Centers in the schools that were welcoming places for parents and where they could get some support in carrying out their roles. (We had classes on parents, etc.). It really is a partnership where we have excluded or ignored one of the partners.

Genetics in education                  Top

This discussion of education has been fascinating and very scary. I try putting the ideas that seem to be generally accepted here with some ideas that are said to be facts, some quite recently available from new research.

For example, Steven Pinker’s Blank Slate puts together the results of various inquiries to make a strong case that genetics determine much more than we have acknowledged. What "education" can do is actually more limited than we have thought. We can make some changes in our children by the environments we create for them–both in and after school, and at home, but we don’t change the basic nature of the child. If this is so, then what we are doing with education should acknowledge it. The other thesis that emerges is that individuals are different, and systems interacting with them must be sensitive to these differences. We all know about pills that are good for most people who take them, and fatal to others. One of the problems with public schools, it seems to me, is that they are not well arranged to recognize individual differences except by such clumsy means as Mr. Bush’s favorite tests. The differences these measure are on a narrow range of distinctions, and tend to obscure for teachers and others capabilities that happen not to fit the test norms.

Pinker’s ideas have changed my own thinking considerably. Now I do not expect politics to be as effective as I once thought. The basic impulses that guide voters (those rare creatures) simply aren’t as easily affected by reasonable argument as I hoped, and the influences on voters will be tuned to genetic aspects of the voters, no matter how they are generated.

Furthermore, as I think you know, my own experience with education in the later phases of my life came from The Fielding Institute, which aims primarily to enable working professionals with masters degrees to gain their doctorates. It follows the WBSI design – most of the exchanges with students take place on line, but there are periodic gatherings for face-to-face contact. In 13 years I sat on 104 doctoral committees – something no one could do at a standard university. In the course of that experience I really saw that students learned differently, had varying beliefs about their own educational means and skills, and created widely differentiated definitions of "doctorates" in their several fields. Since these doctoral candidates had chosen to go back to school, were in their thirties and forties, and wanted to get through their studies to improve their livings, they were basically differently motivated from most of the inhabitants of 1-12 schools. But I think their individuality was similar.

All this makes me wonder about the whole enterprise of schooling. It’s probably impossible to change schools into educational institutions, concerned with wisdom, inquiry and thought, as opposed to indoctrination. But it would be nice if we could.

You're the second person today who has brought up Pinker's new book to me. I'm sure it's impressive, and I would certainly agree that as the research mounts, genetic differences would account for more and more behavior. However, I haven't read his book, but both you and I know the appeal of reductionist theories. Efforts to simplify human behavior and experience are always attractive. We went through a similar period a couple of generations ago with the overwhelming appeal of behaviorism. Fred Skinner did a great job of selling that approach. It was a worthwhile purging of many misguided and unsupported theories at the time, and has led to the important developments in experimental and cognitive psychology. But there has been a corresponding and simultaneous development of social psychology. And the narrow beliefs and orientation of early behaviorism are now history.

Scientists, and the general public, are always attracted to reductionism. Boiling complicated things down to physical differences is undeniably appealing. Most of those scientists ignore relationships, culture, organization, peer pressure, romance, etc. because these factors do not contain physical matter. Relationships don't have genes, even if their variations may stimulate different parts of the brain, but they are overwhelmingly determining, and I think worth just as much study as our genetic makeup. Suppose, for example, you know all about an individual's personality, character, IQ, and genetic makeup, and I only know his or her immediate social situation. Under those circumstances I will do a better job of predicting his behavior. Remember, nobody smokes in church, no matter what the genetic makeup.

I would be sorry if we ignored the impact of genetics on the capacity of an individual to be educated, but sorrier still, if we ignored the power of relationships and the patterns of culture.

Far be it from me to weigh in either way on nature versus nurture. I was talking with a friend the other day about the cloning issue and we agreed that, at least, it will have a lot of insight to offer on how much is caught and how much is taught. The issue for me, as an educator, is that I am left to deal with whatever is left, regardless of where it came from. I have often thought that there are issues of genetics that we don't talk a lot about that have tremendous impact on what happens to children--resilience, happiness etc. I suspect that these things have more to do with life success than innate intelligence but that could be another of my biases rearing its head. The good news, as we discussed earlier, is that we now know a lot more than we used to about the brain, how it works, learning styles and what have you. We also have the capacity, much more than we used to, to shape learning to the individual through the power of technology. We can't duplicate Socrates on the log with Plato, but we can get much closer to shaping an individual dialogue than we used to be able to do. The key, as we have also discussed, is breaking down the resistance to changing how we go about educating children and finding the resources to make these new insights and opportunities available to scale.

Teacher Training                 Top

I have questions about teacher training. I've seen several articles lately lamenting the ability of public school teachers. Do you have a sense of the level of teaching ability actually available in the average public school?

What follows from a concern about teaching ability, of course, is a concern about teacher training schools. 25 or 30 years ago I heard a lot about the inadequacies of many teachers colleges. They had inferior faculties, weak standards, and a doubtful sense of the meaning of education. And now, I would suspect, teacher-training institutions are inundated with students, which probably does not help the quality of their training abilities.

Do you have a sense of the quality of teacher training? Should we be making efforts to improve it? Or is it sufficiently good to be one aspect of school problems we don't have to worry about?

Boy, you just opened Pandora's box. There is no question that a portion of the teachers that are coming out of school today are as good as any we have ever seen. Whether that is due to improvements in teacher training is open to question. Many institutions have increased their requirements dramatically for those entering their training programs so there is an increase in quality for these institutions. However, for many the teacher-training program is a "cash cow" for the institution and they need numbers. We also know that those entering teaching, in general, score lower on many of the tests like SAT or GRE than those in other professions. We also know that the programs vary greatly, although many states have done more about raising their requirements for teachers to become certified.

We now have the federal government through the No Child Left Behind (which I call "Nickelbee") Saying that every teacher must be highly qualified by 2006. That means they must be adequately trained in the subject they are teaching (no more art teachers teaching math) and be certified. All this sounds good, but runs into a huge reality.

We have a huge teacher shortage and it will be getting worse in the next few years. The reality is that some schools have a hard time getting a warm body to fill the classroom. This tends to be worse in inner city and rural schools--the very places where children are in the most need of highly qualified teachers. This led my association to propose a federal income tax credit for teachers who are qualified to work in these "hard to staff" schools. I have only touched the tip of the iceberg here, but perhaps it will create more discussion.

I was struck on a recent trip to Singapore. They have their teachers take a regular course of work, then take their pedagogy in a yearlong program after graduating. During that time, the government pays their tuition and gives them the salary of a first year teacher. They have no shortage. When they begin their teaching they are paid more than doctors, lawyers or engineers. When we expressed surprise, their response was telling--"We wouldn't have doctors, lawyers, or engineers without teachers." Sadly, that isn't our culture.

In response to the earlier question about the quality of teachers and teacher training, someone described the fact that those attracted to teaching majors in college are close to the bottom in scholarship and test scores. Partly this is due to the fact that since the seventies a great many other opportunities for women have opened up. Women are no longer limited to teaching, nursing, libraries, and secretarial jobs. So the excellent teachers we encountered in our youth may have been a product of those limitations.

I think that the more serious problem is that we are now hiring teachers who are not themselves inquirers. They are not, by and large, on a learning quest themselves. I think I would rather have my children in the company of teachers who are inquirers, than teachers who are skilled in pedagogy.

Another fact that we haven't mentioned is that half of all teachers quit before they have taught five years. There are pressures of accountability, and the continuing erosion of the teachers' ability to use their own discretion and expertise because of the intrusion of parents, school boards, politicians, government mandates, etc.

That coupled with the extraordinary discipline and control problems that accompany compulsory education, have driven these potential career educators out of the system. As I understand it, while they used to leave to get married and have children, they now are more likely to leave because they find teaching so unrewarding. That's part of the reason we have such a shortage looming. Have I characterized the situation accurately?

I think you do have it right. There is really little emphasis on creating curiosity or inquiry in the system and I think those you do are often punished. That is why some of our best folks are really "outlaws." Education has served as a conserving element in our society and has become, therefore, conservative in its approach to open questions. They are dangerous to those who pose them and for whom they are posed, so the safest approach is to merely step past them and go for the safe course of action. One of the current challenges we have is that we are increasingly "educator proofing" education with state based standards, prescribed curriculum, and quality based upon simplistic assessments. I fear this will serve to further drive those with creativity and curiosity out of the profession.

I have thought a great deal lately about how critical curiosity is to leadership. Spare me from leaders who aren't curious--because they think they already know all they need to know. That is very dangerous in politics and it is certainly deadly in education.

The Goal of Education                 Top

I don't see it as quite as dark as you seem to here. I could show you some quotes from a century ago that complained about graduates not knowing history and their facts. We have redefined what "functional" means and while it is true that we have many who are not "functional" that is a higher standard today than it was several generations ago. For example, during WWII reading at a fourth grade level made you "literate." Today, you must be at a ninth grade level. The issue remains not so much that schools haven't changed (although you can make a case they sure look a lot like they always have) but that they haven't changed rapidly enough. I go back to the fact I believe we have changed our expectation for schools from places where everyone has access to the need for everyone to be "proficient." One of the questions I would have for our group is whether they think this is true--and if so what would "proficient" look like? I believe from a number of comments that we are speaking of things much broader than test scores or mere academic achievement. If we didn't have our current system of education (if, in fact, it could be "blown up" and we could start over) what elements would we want to make sure the "new" system would have? I agree with several of the comments that once you get a system created with so many vested interests, it is hard to move

It was interesting to learn that our education system "was created to promote the concept of "civic virtue" for our democracy". It occurs to me that the vast majority of the USA population has received a public education, so it has played a prime role over the past 100 years in shaping the current values, mores, attitudes and behaviors of most adults in our country. Yet, with each passing decade, civic virtue, a sense of belonging and being responsible to a larger community, along with a genuine compassion for the general welfare seems to wane a little. In a sense, the failure of public education is simply the result of the failure of public education.

While imparting specific skills (training) is a necessary part of education, it seems to me that the most important aspect of education is preparing people to be successful as people – not as architects or doctors, or bankers.

Your observation that the failure of public education is the failure of public education is, in many ways, right on target. While the schools were created to teach "civic virtue" we have drifted greatly from that original course. Part of my plea to school folks is that they rediscover their original mission. It is still the right one for our country and the one only the public schools can do. As technology improves there are many ways to gain access to knowledge and learning. There are few ways to learn to live in a complex democracy. I couldn't agree more with your thoughts on the overall purpose of schools to make a fuller human.

As I think about today's problems in education I realize the futility of focusing on them. By the time we recognize a problem, find a solution, initiate training to deal with it, and implement the new methods, there will be a new problem. Using such an approach we'll always be playing a losing game of catch-up.

Our society has undergone considerable diversification and polarization over the past generation. There are countless differing opinions about everything, which makes it very hard to set a clear course. I have the sense that there is a purpose to such fracturing, that it offers the potential and maybe even the impetus (if we so choose) to bring about a significantly better future. In terms of process, when situations are fractured, it is easier to identify both the discrete elements of the situation and their interaction. It is a time to contemplate, to consider and to envision. We are in the midst of an incredible opportunity with the legitimate mandate to look at the past, the present and the future and to undertake a disciplined and renewing mental view of the concepts that inspire us in our life.

Our examination of the past, however, is not simply to search for successes and failures, but rather to help us identify the problems that we, as a society, are likely to face in the next 5, 10, 15 and 20 years. A daunting task given the accelerating rate of change our world is experiencing.

We also need to decide on a specific vision for education over the next 20 years. What will the purpose of our educational system be? Will it be to simply crank out adequate workers? Or will that aspect be treated more as a mechanistic function with the real emphasis being placed on building civic virtues? If the latter, then what civic virtues do we want to promote? Clearly the virtues to be promoted must be the ones best suited to dealing with the future problems we identify.

Whatever vision is decided upon it must contain within it the very ends we hope to achieve, because every person who is educated by that vision will live it out - either to our benefit or our detriment as a society. The means are inevitably the end.

I think you are calling for an education for wisdom. At least that's what I think we will need. Funny, but I never hear the word "wisdom" in the same sentence with the word "children", or for that matter the word "school". But I think children have wisdom and can get more of it through education. The future calls for wisdom more than anything. Most specific skills will be quickly outdated, but critical thinking and wisdom and inquiry are self-renewing.

One attribute of a good teacher is the enjoyment (and thrill) of working with children of whatever age and sharing with them an enthusiasm for the subject. This is hard to maintain if you are a "professional" teacher, teaching the same or similar material each year. One partial solution for this is the adjunct, or part-time teacher who is occupied primarily in another world.

Your notion of the "fracturing" of education is very interesting. In many ways that is exactly what is taking place. We have vouchers, charters, home schooling, e-schools and the like. In many ways this can lead to a renewal of creative approaches to learning. What worries me about it is the social fragmenting that it can create. I will need to think more about your thoughts here.

For most of my active years in various occupations, all of which were exciting to me at the time, I also was an "adjunct" teacher in subjects that interested me. At times I was connected as adjunct to a University -- e.g. Columbia, NYU, College of the Atlantic. At other times I taught via email, e.g. ConnectEd. Surprising we haven't alluded to this important addition to education before this!!

I think the notion of "adjuncts" merits attention. It is easier at the higher education level where issues of child development and readiness, classroom control and the like are less an issue. There is a lot of action on "alternative" tracks to teaching. My organization is pretty much alone within the education "blob" as being in favor of openness to this issue. I don't see it solving the teacher shortage problem as the Secretary of Education does, but I think it is worth being supported. The key to any of these systems is proper "induction" that helps the new person (traditionally trained or adjunct) to feel successful and supported in their work. However, good induction tends to take resources that most schools don't have.

Wisdom doesn't come from the acquisition of skills. Wisdom comes from a marriage of examined experience with great ideas. Some of us share this emphasis, perhaps partly because Robert Hutchins was so important to us. As president of the University of Chicago, and a member the Center for the Study of Democratic Institutions, he fought against the intrusion of factors that he felt undermined that kind of education. At Chicago, this thirty-year-old boy genius who was the new president (he was dean of Yale Law School at twenty-six) got rid of "football, fraternities and frivolity". Not an easy task, what with Chicago being the school that had the most national football championships, and the legendary Amos Alonzo Stagg as coach. Hutchins was particularly down on vocational education in the university, and of course is remembered for his work bringing the great books into the curriculum. I remember his joking he had been driven that day by a man who had a Ph.D. in driver education. "I'll admit, he was a very good driver." Although he is long gone, the university he helped build remains the most serious educational institution in the world. No student there escapes education, which is more than I can say about any other institution I have attended - including Harvard.

The arts and humanities are not just important dimensions of education; they are the sine qua non of education. But they are getting short shrift these days. Although they are not unrelated, if, considering what would harm the future of civilization least, I were forced to choose between ending art or ending science, I'm sure I would choose to keep art.

As another remarked, some of us were exposed to Robert Hutchins as an educator and administrator. He was a serious educator, and also a remarkably clear writer and thinker. Because I thought it might be appropriate, I had transcribed a few of Robert Hutchins words, and that message follows.

In 1969, Robert Hutchins wrote:

"The post-industrial society could be one in which men set seriously to work to straighten out their relations with one another and in which they sought, not material goods, but intellectual, moral and spiritual, or what might be called cultural goods. The society would be a learning society.

"The affluence of the world will make it impossible to plead poverty as a reason for not trying to educate everybody everywhere.

". . . . This view of future education is not utopian, because it involves no dependence on the intelligence and character of the present residents of this planet. The industrial system has set in motion irreversible tendencies that will lead to its own extinction. It has dug its own grave. World War is now impossible. The nation state, which is a war system, is now impossible. Manpower will be unnecessary. Therefore the aim of education will be manhood. This change will eliminate institutions and institutional practices appropriate, if at all, to a superseded regime. Education may at last come into its own."

Of course Bob was more hopeful than current events confirm. But I think he was basically right. World War has indeed become impossible, one result of which is that we are inundated with many local wars that we haven’t yet figured out how to deal with. Indeed, the nation state, which is a war system, has raised that practice to a higher level. Manpower is still the ruling notion in our society and our schools. But Bob’s concept of education as an activity that, as he said, "requires the interaction of minds." He notes elsewhere, ". . . if the war in Vietnam where stopped, $30 billion would be available annually for other purposes." Think what it would mean if we could stop the Bush administration from spending so much on going to war in Iraq. We’d have at least $50 billion, and if we could get the military budget under control, many billions more to spend on education–instead of cutting educational expenditures as almost every State now intends to do to meet their "budget crises."

I think the purpose and aim of university education ought to be what Bob meant by manhood – the interaction of minds about issues he called "cultural goods." Elementary and high school education should be preparing students for that activity. Several of you have expressed similar ideas. Is there any chance, in this affluent country, that we could bend our educational system in that direction?

Great to read that wisdom from Hutchins. We had such optimism about the future in those days. I would love to know what he might say now. The end of poverty is nowhere in sight, and we are now rattling nuclear weapons again. It's difficult to see a change in education anytime soon, but stranger things have happened.

Partly, it is because schools and schooling play a different role in society now. They are functionally autonomous--no longer serving the function for which they were created, but nevertheless indispensable. We are aware now that even some of the best of the graduates can't pass a 7th grade history exam. It is argued by some that a huge portion of graduating students is functionally illiterate. But schools don't change much.

Suppose we could demonstrate that students retain nothing that is in the curriculum. Do you think we would discontinue schools? I don't. For many reasons, schools are where we want children to be.

Should it be the obligation of education to teach wisdom or skills? Should students graduate with the skills to be productive, but without the skills to cope well with life? If we HAD to choose one or the other, which should we choose? Which would benefit society more?

What a question. It reminds me of the old joke, "sound mind, sound body--take your pick." If you were holding a gun to my head, I would have to go with wisdom. I do believe that education has to serve some use, but it's greater truth has to be about the kind of person who are nurturing. And it has to be about a fullness that if often lost in our current efforts. Our forefathers promoted the notion of "civic virtue" as the reason for common schools. While that is instrumental, it is an instrument toward the common good, not the individual good. Having great workers who do a good job and create a stronger economy is certainly important. But if they don't know why they are doing what they are doing, if they don't see the connection between what they are doing to what others are doing, and more importantly to the welfare of others. We have probably failed to promote wisdom. So I would say wisdom, coupled with virtue.

Earlier you asked: if we were to blow it up and start over, what would we do? Well, I think refocusing on wisdom would be the best start. In the "old days" we focused on the three R's reading, 'riting and 'rithmetic. I can't imagine that we should throw those out, but perhaps we might add such things as communication, cooperation, and coping.

We might also consider making classes more relevant and more eye opening. As an example, many years ago in Hawaii I had to build a house for my family. I knew nothing about architecture, had no experience with building anything, and was pretty much tool inept, so this was a challenge. Fortunately I had the 3 R’s well in hand. I designed it, drew the blueprints, got the permits, and then built it myself. Along the way I ran into a few problems that would have been much easier to solve with algebra and geometry. I had taken both in high school and had found them difficult, boring and of no apparent real world use. I solved my problems with rather primitive methods.

Had I built a house (even a very small one) in high school I would have learned many practical skills, and I would have learned how algebra and geometry could be useful to me. I could have had a great experience and learned many things of real value. Had I built a house I would have also learned how to communicate, to cooperate, and maybe even how to cope with frustration, mistakes, lack of knowledge and more.

We learn best what we experience, so perhaps our education system should provide the experiences from which students will learn whatever we think is most valuable. Perhaps the experience should be related to our world. History is important, so what experience could we give students wherein they would discover its importance by needing to turn to it to solve a real problem. Virtue is important - what experience would allow students to discover that in a visceral manner?

I love your response--perhaps because it so aligns with my own thoughts. I have often said that education needs to be meaningful and engaging for students to be excited and motivated. You need that "forward lean' that comes from doing work that engages your mind and heart. You are right--most of what we do in schools, even in our very good ones, rarely reaches this level.

For me the beauty of your example is that each student involved would learn something different, things particularly important to him or her. That, of course, is why such a program can't be adopted currently, because we're stuck with the idea that everyone must learn the same things, even though they don't remember them, as you didn't remember your geometry and algebra.

Perhaps with a combination of online education and a range of such learning projects that, like building a house, might make a social contribution, we wouldn't need to have such huge expenditures building and maintaining physical plants.

That is part of the beauty for me too, because I know that it is impossible for us all to learn the same things. As our world grows more and more complex I think it crucial that children should learn well what they could learn - rather than learning poorly what somebody else thinks they should learn (with a few exceptions of course).

A house is just the example from my story - it really could be anything - computer, telephone, telescope, etc. Communication and cooperation could be learned if acting were a required subject.

It shocks me that with all of our knowledge and wisdom, we insist on doing what doesn't work all that well. Perhaps the risk of change is too frightening. For sure we wouldn't be able to predict the results (not that we can now, but we think we can).

With respect to "with all of our wisdom and knowledge, we insist on doing what doesn't work all that well" is not a charge that applies only to education. As we have learned in our ILF conferences on health care, criminal justice, etc., there is no area of professional activity that is not rife with similar discrepancies between knowledge and action. Perhaps the field with the greatest discrepancy between what the professionals know, and what we actually do, is criminal justice, where criminologists seemingly are never consulted. (Gov. Ryan of Illinois just today emptied death row, after a study of the death penalty. The furor is enormous--but that's the first sign I know of than anyone in power is paying any attention.) By contrast, education is able, on occasion, to make use of advanced pedagogy.

What most of us reformers find to be the case in education is that it is not difficult to start an innovative program in a classroom or school, but even if it proves effective, a year later it is gone. As I have said before, it is like fighting a war with China--you win, but somehow China prevails. I've always liked the analogy someone once told me about trying to fix education, "It's like kicking a mountain of mashed potatoes--easy enough to make a dent, but somehow the dent soon disappears."

There seems to be little contagion of ideas and programs within the larger system. Business, it seems, is always trying to ape successful programs elsewhere, but the professions, at least in the ones I know about, don't. That's true even in higher education. The U. of Chicago's vaunted great books program caught on only at St. Johns. Antioch's innovative work/study program is nowhere else, is it?

What do you suppose accounts for this state of affairs? Do you think it is particular to America, to technologically advanced societies or some aspect of human nature in general?

One fundamental difference between the institutions of business and the institutions of higher education is the issue of permanence. Business is rewarded for taking risks, and nobody expects businesses to last forever. Almost all of them fail quickly. But colleges and universities, because they must honor their degrees and tenure commitments, and because they stand as a bulwark against the efforts to close down inquiry by the barbarians, are expected to last forever, and I guess they probably will. The University of Paris is something like 1200 years old. When you have to last forever, you can't take big chances.

It is no accident that the great civilization changing contributions have never happened at universities--because they can't stand the controversy and upset that would come from the likes of Darwin, Marx, Freud, etc. So university research is essentially mainstreamed, and always will be. Universities have to be conservative and risk averse. That would be my first explanation for why they don't make radical change.

I suppose one could then ask about those fundamental innovations that Robert Hutchins made at Chicago, or that Antioch made, and how those came about. They surely did raise a lot of controversy. But nothing of the sort that Freud raised. Freud was so hated that by the time he became accepted into the universities, he was already on the way out of popular culture acceptance.

Another fundamental difference between business and higher education is that business is almost entirely market oriented, while universities are goal oriented, driven by high order professional and humanitarian concepts. That makes them less vulnerable to the changes that might come from public demand. That professional insulation from the market is eroding, of course, as our recent ILF discussion of the profession of medicine demonstrated rather compellingly.

Richard has asked me to raise any questions I need answered prior to the end of this forum. While there are many. Let me hit just two.

1. In rereading the comments of the forum, in addition to the enlightened responses that have been given, there is an undertone of some despair of ever changing the system. Could you wonderfully creative people out there give me some sense of hope as I battle the Huns at the gate? Do you see things that can be focused on that might move us forward? If you were in my shoes, heading a national organization of school system leaders--what would you tell my people?

2. So much of the discussions around education center on the form of education, and we don't talk much about the substance. I once wrote that I was tired of defending the church--I want to defend the faith. The question I would raise for our group is, what is the values/common virtues/elements etc. that we should try to defend from the heritage of our common schools and for our needs as a diverse democracy as we work towards changing education. If we don't have a clear take on that we could win the battle and lose the war. I would love to see what you guys have to say about that.

To begin the process of answering your questions, Paul, I would offer this hopeful consideration, already familiar to you, I think: Big changes are easier to make than small ones. What Martin Luther King called "the tranquilizing drug of gradualism" seldom leads to radical change. People know how to resist small changes, because they can more easily get their minds around them. For example, the small items on a budget discussion often get more attention than the very big ones. It's easier to talk about a thousand dollars than ten million (or 1.6 trillion!). I know it goes against most conventional thinking (crawl before you walk, one step at a time, etc.) but I don't think education will change, in the profound ways you care about, incrementally.

As to your second question, while I think that questions of form are at least as important as questions of content, and of course they are really inseparable, I will try to respond. Although it will seem like an oversimplification, I suggest

We de-emphasize a curriculum that is based on basic skill development (already undermined by TV, calculators, computers and the Internet) in favor of one based on great ideas and achievements in the arts, humanities and sciences, which would help students understand how things work, socially, culturally, politically, environmentally and physically. Talk about a radical change of direction!

Can this kind of curriculum be developed for the early grades? I think it's been done, by people like Mortimer Adler. If that kind of learning could take place, I'd be willing to bet that students would emerge as responsible, educated, useful and, yes, employable citizens.

The Difficulties of Change                 Top

Professions are not very good at changing themselves. Most organizations aren’t either. To the extent that any radical change occurs, it usually comes from rebellion or invasion, but seldom from planning. The invasions of technology into education, however, have pretty much failed to make the fundamental changes that were predicted. So everything from the "magic lantern" slide projector, through radio, television, video and now the computer, each entering with revolutionary expectations, seems not to have had much impact on the basic design of education. One of the comments made in most fields is that if you are doing what you were trained to do, you're obsolete. But that's probably not true in education.

Why do you think education has been so resistant to change? What would you change if you could? And why can't you?

I think part of education's resistance to change results from a conservative approach. I also think that its greatest strength is also its greatest weakness. It is a democratic system designed to be responsive to multiple constituencies. The closer it comes to that, the more difficult it is to change. The education system is overseen by lay legislatures and school boards, all of whom assume that since they went to school they are expert at deciding how it should be. There are community groups and parent groups to satisfy. (Folks tend to want schools better, but not different from how they were when they went to school.) The increased power of unions, both through the formal power of contracts and the informal political power of electing their own board members, mitigates against change.

Further, the inequities built into the system work against its changing. We have rich systems, that are doing pretty well and don't see a need to change and poor ones that aren't doing well but which lack the resources to change.

And, we are the kings and queens of incrementalism. Radical change is not easily done because it tends to look like experimentation and no one wants to see their children as lab rats. So things change gradually, but so gradually it seems glacial.

As for technology, I still think computers have a chance to change things more fundamentally, but not the way we have done them. They are not used as tools in a consistent way and are grossly under-funded in most districts, so they are just a wonderful toy. The sad fact is that most of our children (except the poor) have a much fuller and richer relationship to technology at home than they do at school. The sad fact is that technology hasn't worked in schools because it hasn’t been tried. There are exceptions. There was a school in Tucson where a computer was given to every student and considerable funding made available for staff development to help teachers make it a basic part of their teaching. Guess what? Test scores improved. Attendance improved. Discipline improved. But it was costly both monetarily and politically. This isn’t rocket science. It is resources. We must continue this discussion. Your question was much too provocative for a single answer.

There is a built in resistance to change in the education industry as there is in many other industries. Vested interests are entrenched and it is almost impossible to unseat them in a significant way. I speak particularly about the textbook industry, which is multi-billion dollars in sales. With new technology, already in place and demonstrable, the cost of textbooks could be cut at least in half and a better product would be forthcoming. In presentations before school boards, I see the lack of desire to change the status quo, while there is great interest in the concept of better utilizing technology and solving many problems. It is just slow to get that old horse moving.

Besides, school boards are so burdened with many issues that they don’t have time to listen. If you talk about civics education, someone pipes up saying that they are worried about something else. Practical solutions are possible for many of the mundane tasks that now occupy our schools, but often nobody is listening or proactive. In the last ten or twenty years, huge companies have gone into the education industry to provide all sorts of products. For all of the complaints, education spending is still very high, and where the money is, big business follows. The capitalist system is very operative here, and it seems to be in the best interest of those involved to have large budgets, which then command large salaries for administration purposes. Many school districts are top-heavy with administration costs.

Perhaps, it would be more accurate to say the educational bureaucracy has too few good administrators. While many systems are overly bureaucratic and perhaps overstaffed, nationally only about 4% of the workforce in education is actually in "administration." That is very modest when compared to other industries. The problem is that when you need good ones, there is never enough and when you have bad ones, one is one too many.

One of steps taken by the education system has been to "layer" on various positions to make up for having too many troubled children with needs in classrooms. So we have "remedial reading specialists," social workers, federal programs coordinators, special education specialists etc. These are all people who are neither administrators nor classroom teachers. That is why some folks feel more program flexibility is needed so resources could be better arrayed.

With respect to the so-called excess of administrators, I, of course, agree that we need more leaders, not fewer. Actually, I think experienced teachers should be elevated into leadership roles (meta-professionals) where they become architects of the learning experience, supervising others, paraprofessionals or laymen, who could do most of the person-to-person activities. That seems to me to be a better way to treat class size problems, as well as other issues, such as special education, that require more individual attention. It also addresses the developing problem of teacher shortage. We do, of course, already have such programs as teacher aides, but as I understand it, expanding those programs runs into union problems. Is that right?

One of the assumptions we stay stuck with is that we must organize learning as it has been organized. I think if we do that we will be stuck with a perpetual shortage of teachers. There probably aren't several million really great ones out there waiting to be tapped - at least not for what we are currently paying. However, the issue of differentiated staffing needs to be re-examined. A school organized around a few great teachers, who could then lead the work of others who may be less gifted or dedicated along with paraprofessionals, volunteers etc. might be very dynamic.

Historically this has run up against the unions, though we have seen some statesmanship from some union leaders of late. Are some unions trying to dumb things down? Possibly. Is that an overarching goal--I would say definitely not? Do unions need to come to grips with the changing world and become more flexible--no question.