Get Politicians OUT of the Classroom
The chaos provides us an opportunity!
“You never change things by fighting the existing reality. To change something, build a new model that makes the existing model obsolete.”
Buckminster Fuller
In the midst of chaos, there lies opportunity!
Sun Tzu
The truth has not changed; these truths are as valid as when they were first stated. What has changed is the reliability of those whom we once trusted to tell us the truth. The current GOP administration has elevated lying – in a profession known for its avoidance of truth – to a level that would make Pinocchio blush. The chaos we see now is not ending any time soon and is likely to get worse before it gets better.
GOAL: Build a NEW model!
MAGA is doomed to failure. They are fighting the existing reality in education, and there is actually no difference in the education they are calling for – just who gets paid (spoiler alert – it DAMN sure ain’t the teachers!). Their justification for the chaos they are successfully creating is actually true – education is in a mess! Unfortunately the chaos sets education back much further, but their goals never had anything to do with improving education – contrary to the lies they tell.
Combating the chaos, it is crucially important to avoid demanding a return to any previous reality: Such must also fail – which is the essence of Buckminster Fuller’s truth. We must build a new model!
The founders of this nation all believed that without strong education, this grand experiment would never succeed, but they never mentioned the word education in the Constitution. Instead education was relegated to completely local control, and this principle led to a powerful tool that has been used throughout our nation’s history, as local control of education produced an education system emulated the world over.
Then came Ronald Reagan, who proclaimed education was failing our students and introduced the idea that to ‘fix’ education we needed to get the federal government out of education. This has become a favorite GOP strategy: Correctly identify a problem and then make it dramatically worse by ‘fixing’ it while the true goal is obfuscated in the chaos. Due to ‘standards’, ‘standardized testing’ and ‘accountability’ the federal government is far more involved in public education than it has ever been. My teaching career began during Reagan’s administration, but it wasn’t until I moved from private to public education some twenty years later that the ruin of the American education system became horrifyingly apparent. The laws that accomplished this, No Child Left Behind in 2002 replaced by Every Student Succeeds Act in 2015 were quite bi-partisan – and both dramatic failures.
It’s way past time to get the damn politicians OUT of the classroom!
This will require a massive shift in both how we view education and how we go about it. Under normal circumstances there is little likelihood of producing such a shift; indeed Fuller explains clearly why this cannot occur – you can’t ‘change’ your way to innovation. Sun Tzu shows us the silver lining in the chaos that defines public education today, the OPPORTUNITY to make such a massive shift!
Education has been viewed by the business world, and by a not insignificant portion of the population, as merely preparation for a future job. Teachers know that education is preparation for a future life. The ‘job preparation’ myth is widely promoted by those who desire for someone else to foot the bill to train their workers. Certainly job preparation could be a part of secondary education, but that would be through internships funded by the businesses that benefit, NOT with public education money.
Who determines what is necessary to prepare a child for a fulfilling life? Logic says it should be those most involved in the child’s life – parents, closely followed by those most directly involved in this preparation – teachers. Cooperation between these two is both essential and absolutely crucial. Throughout my career as a teacher through decades in both public and private schools, this partnership has been the most important factor in the quality of education provided at every school. It IS the basis of all that is good in public education now. The problems can be traced to the disruption of this partnership, and when I look at how public education has been attacked it is difficult to believe the disruption isn’t the goal.
Ground Zero for the new education model must be centered in the parent/teacher partnership. This must accompany the elevation of the teaching profession to at least equivalent of an MD, especially in deference to judgment in relevant decisions.
Those not involved in education will not fully comprehend what an enormous change this would be: Indeed many would even venture, “Isn’t that the way it is now?” No, that is what the teachers and parents whose primary interest is the child’s preparation are trying to do now. To actually accomplish this would require removing federal oversight of ALL educational decision making. Judicial judgments on failures to respect rights and abide by the Constitution would require corrections, to be done at the local level, the money provided by the state, but paid by the federal government whose only direct involvement would be through the courts. For those saying ‘this will never work in our school system’; I couldn’t agree more. Our current education system is unfixable, as Fuller pointed out.
Throughout my teaching career a massive oxymoron has been thrown at me repeatedly: Every child learns differently; there are visual learners, auditory learners, and at least twenty more I have been told about – but you must teach in a regimented, mission/purpose/order curriculum that only varies within closely specified restraints, and can be easily measured via standardized tests to maintain ‘accountability’ (FOR WHO???). Oh, and be sure you adequately take into account all those different learning styles! The Montessori system of education has done a masterful job of working with different learning styles – since 1929: But it has NEVER been used in a public education setting precisely because there is no way to reconcile it with the regimentation that has always been there. Public schools have performed well as long as they were reasonably adept at adapting their learning style to the norm – and they handled the regimentation well. If a child fails at either of these there is a simple explanation: Kid’s just stupid. Convincing children that they are stupid is criminal: Yet that is exactly what a regimented, graded, highly competitive educational environment does to the ‘losers’ – and on an A-to-F grading system how else would YOU refer to those getting Fs.
Understand that I am not endorsing Montessori for all public education, but if the teachers and the parents in a local system somewhere decided in their district, they were going to try it; shouldn’t they at least be given the opportunity? Shouldn’t they be provided the same resources – from the federal government – as ANY other district? The beauty of putting control in local hands is it will release the creativity of some pretty incredible people – teachers – and the competitiveness of the American spirit will ensure that whatever ‘secret’ to better learning found in one place will be adopted in many more!
In our current situation the chaos created becomes useful. The GOP has been loudly proclaiming the ‘right’ to confiscate public funds to be paid to private beneficiaries under the guise of giving parents a choice that cannot exist because the damn math just doesn’t jive; and the poor (and quite a few not-so-poor) get the shaft again. This method would give parents control over their public school where their taxes go; along with control of all federal and state monies that come with minimal strings attached. This would be parent choice that was actually a choice!
The chaos is bad. If you don’t think it’s bad, it’s going to get worse and eventually even you might have to admit it. If you do think its bad, then getting worse should scare the bejesus out of you, as it does me. Sun Tzu counsels us both to look for the opportunity – it is there!