RBAB2: Education solutions

While I was in Cleveland getting ideas about Great Lakes arts, I met Bill Mullane. Bill is on the board of the Wean Foundation and is currently School Improvement Supervisor, Ashtabula County Educational Service Center. He has served as principal for Warren G. Harding High School in Warren. We began discussing the issues around public schools and particularly the dire predicament that Youngstown City Schools find themselves in.

I found Bill’s ideas compelling and will do my best to share some with you, with the help of the text of a keynote speech he gave to the YSU Teaching and Learning Conference in February of this year.

At the heart of our nation’s political debate about education is the struggle between those who look to the schools to reinforce and promote a political and social conservatism that desires to preserve a social order and those who see the schools as providing the means for individuals within a democracy to realize their ultimate purpose which is enfranchisement and who look to our schools to provide a pathway to endowing upon our children the rights and responsibilities of citizenship.

Some quick points:

• Match up social services programs to existing school facilities and alternate hours. So, instead of kids being pulled out of class for social services, do it after school and use the public school buildings to run the services out of.
• Introduce an “E” grade for not attending, allowing distinct identification of those who are failing for lack of understanding from those who are simply not showing up.
• Create quicker milestones for assessing students’ abilities to move on to new information. For example, at the end of a nine-week period, evaluate the student’s progress and determine whether to move them forward or repeat the lessons. After all, a year in the life of a child is a significant portion of their life. Can we afford to hold them back after waiting a full year to assess them?
• Engage with students where they live, for example on their mobile devices. Instead of trying to shut it all down, engage them through these tools that are their comfort zone.
• Recognize that, like college, students need different amounts of time to make it through. Some will need just three years, and others will need more like six. Restructure the system to support that, with the goal that students have the time they need to prepare for college.
• Involve artists in using school facilities, such as media, photo and arts labs, so students see how the professionals do it.

Education in our country is at a cross roads. True reform for the twenty-first century will require more than curriculum and standards development and more than an infusion of money. It will require a cultural change within our profession. Here are some simple examples:

Educators have to reexamine their core principles. Educators can not be successful within a framework of misguided labor agreements that are more concerned with rules and regulations that govern employment than they are with having the tools necessary to create schools that engage students around high standards. The more we separate ourselves from the students and communities we serve the harder it will be to make inroads toward meeting the academic and social needs of our students.

Teachers must use their bargaining power to address the needs of their students and community by including them in contract negotiations. Not until the communities that we serve see themselves as an integral part of the system and see the system as an advocate for them will we win the financial support needed to secure the future of public schools. We must use our ability to organize to help our constituents develop the same skills within their neighborhoods. And we must strive with our community in seeking real enfranchisement for all of our citizens.

Legislators must understand that we can not and will not legislate our way into effective schools. We need to make a new rule that requires legislators to remove a regulation each and every time they add one. And we must shift from our current rules based economy in schools to a standards based economy. The two are not compatible. We can not continue to operate under a set of rules that were developed to evaluate and reward school systems for compliance and at the same time think that schools will be able to innovate and change fundamental structures to meet high standards. It can not be done. The nineteenth century, agrarian schedule and factory style organization that permeate our schools can not produce twenty-first century results.

We must reintroduce the responsibility side of enfranchisement into every conversation about school reform. Nothing has contributed to a pervading distrust between schools and their community than the continued public discourse that disparages schools and tries to convince our citizens that the schools are failing them without any complicity on their part.

Just as we all must take responsibility for today’s financial crisis, so must we take responsibility for allowing the standards movement to result in a complete bastardization of the standards that it proposes to promote. No Child Left behind should not be criticized for the introduction of measurable standards. (We must though look critically at those standards and how they are measured). Nor should we suppose that schools will do better if only they had the mandates funded. No Child Left Behind is problematic because it failed to articulate in clear and simple terms the responsibility of the learner in the learning process.

I look forward to continuing the conversation about education and hope sharing Bill’s ideas sparks something from you. Please share in the comments.

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