Insanity Defined

According to Einstein, it's doing the same thing over and over expecting a different result. Is the American Education system insane?

According to Lou Gerstner's editorial in the Wall Street Journal, it would seem so.  He suggests very dramatic change. I don't agree with everything he wrote, but I also don't think he went far enough; more about that in a minute.

But many don't agree with him at all. Joanne Jacobs feels that it's "nationalization," which hasn't succeeded. Case in point: Hawaii, with a single, state-wide school board that has apparently not done well. Deborah Meier at Bridging Differences suggests that we can't trust the federal government to raise our children, that Gerstner's approach would eliminate the parents from the equation, and they MUST be involved. Many others (including those who commented in Joanne and Deb's blogs) oppose Lou's proposal, some of these people have pretty solid educational backgrounds, so their views should be heard and considered credible.

I'm not an educator, but I'm not talking about learning. I'm writing about education systems - that's something very few educators have experience with - they're great in the classroom, no doubt; but how many have successfully created or run large-scale systems?

Going back to the definition of insanity - we've been attempting to reform this system for decades to no avail. In fact, the performance of the American education system is declining. I wrote about this here and here. What's more, there is a huge disparity in the performance of the states in educating their students. Unless we believe in the absurd notion that students are dumber in one state vs. another, the disparity is due to the poor performance of the education systems in that state, which means that there is no equality of education in this country. Why persist in repeating our failures? Change, dramatic change is needed. 

Some suggest we need to include the parents in this process - why? What qualifies them to operate an educational system? (Please don't get me wrong, I totally believe that schools exist to educate, and parents exist to raise their children.) But that has nothing to do with building the best possible education system for the country's children.

The current system is based on an Industrial Revolution mentality, where students are widgets (all the same) and the system's job is to turn them into widgets that can pass an exam <-- this can't be right? The beacon of the Industrial Revolution, the American automobile industry is failing, in large part because it persists in being tied to it's legacy (people, process and management), and attempting to build a product that is 25 years behind the times. It is being eclipsed by automobile manufacturing systems from other countries that have evolved and don't have these problems at all, they're successful.

Does this sound familiar?

Why would anyone in their right mind want to help our education system follow the path of the US automobile industry? This is what all the status-quo people are saying. I say no. We must also jettison current views of assessment, teacher tenure, old curriculum, arcane administrative machines, NCLB, etc.

Back to Gerstner, he is wrong about assessments - standardized testing is a proven failure, why use that as the basis for measuring performance? We need to go beyond this - the measures need to be about preparing our students for life beyond the given school and should be objectively measured on that basis. He's also wrong about creating 70 separate school districts. That's 69 too many. I think we need to create one K-12 Education System for this country that is measured in three ways:

1. 100% student success rate - every child must graduate.
2. The performance a school's graduates in tertiary (university, college, etc.) systems - this measure is relative to every other school. Since it is not controlled by the K-12 Education System, it is that much more objective.
3. The capacity (and reality) of a school's graduates that didn't choose tertiary education to earn a family wage within two years of graduation.

These are not measures the K-12 Education System can rig. Plus, these are also ways to measure each individual school's performance.

I don't argue for individual teacher-assessments, but rather aggregated school assessments. There's a lot of debate on how to reward the best teachers. That's a separate topic.

I do believe that the success of a student within the school is based on the overall quality of the school vs. any one teacher, and that's why I think there should be pressure on every teacher to help their peers be great so that the school as a whole is great.

I think we need one national system, it needs to focus solely on K-12, and it needs to be accountable as above. Further, it should embrace the brilliance and creativity of schools like Seattle Girls School, among others.

There is much more to be written on this.