This is probably my last blog for the day. My writing happens in the mornings, and then I’m only good for manual labor. Plus, I hit the road again tomorrow morning to speak at a staff development symposium in Lawrence Kansas on Saturday, and then speaking nearly every day next week in four states from the Atlantic to the Pacific. (This is how you guru, Brian).
I read a good Community Story today in James Daly’s Edutopia piece, Risky Business. He says,
Imagine that two-thirds of the packages FedEx absolutely positively promises to deliver by tomorrow morning never arrive. Imagine that on-quarter of all new iPods can’t play music recorded after 1999. Imagine that Gap advertises to the masses but sells its clothes only to rich customers.
Now you have imagined the business equivalent of the U.S. system of public education (Daly 42-46).
The moral?
Despite being the wealthiest country on Earth, America maintains a public education system in which 30 percent of high school students don’t graduate, one out of eevery four reads below basic grade levels, and compared to students from more affluent backgrounds, few of their low income counterparts are adequately prepared for college.
I’ve mentioned this quote once already today, but It’s worth a repeat. John Gage, of Sun Microsystems says in the same article,
Other countries see education as an investment, but we see it as a cost.
To take another comment from Gage, only slightly out of context, “That’s fundamentally flawed.”
I’ve been collecting some story starters and including them in the online wiki handouts for my Telling the New Story address. This morning, a divvied those stories into the New Story structure page that I added yesterday (see yesterday’s blog, Type of New Stories), adding a link beneath each story type to a page that lists the starters. Each consists of the story starter, citation, and a short moral commentary, added by me, your story teller. 😉
Most of the stories are from Friedman, Prensky, and Florida. We need some more diversity, so please add some. It would be great to have a collection of stories to suggest to teachers for open house in a few months.
Daly, James. “Risky Business.” Edutopia Apr/May: 42-46.
Other countries see education as an investment, but we see it as a cost.
There’s another argument – or story – with respect to this. It is that the U.S. does see education as an investment and is simply asking what are we getting for that investment.
OECD provides a useful analysis of coutry investment in education. Their research concludes, “While the United States does not commit the highest percentage of
GDP to expenditure on education, it does achieve, by some margin, the highest expenditure per student from primary to tertiary education at US$ 10,871.” http://www.oecd.org/dataoecd/34/55/33714494.pdf
Looking at the picture historically isn’t much better. Spending per student has nearly doubled in the last 30 years, but nearly any measure of effectiveness – from test scores, to graduation rates, to number of students who need remedial education in college – has seen no significant improvement. (http://nces.ed.gov/programs/digest/d02/tables/dt166.asp and http://nces.ed.gov/programs/digest/d02/tables/dt166.asp)
The same flat lines in performance are observed despite the fact that the pupil/teacher ratio in public schools decreased from 22.3 per teacher in 1970 to 16.1 per teacher in 1999. (Digest of Education Statistics).
So a significant investment has been made, the challenge is for us to show that it is delivering “returns” for not just taxpayers, but for students themselves.
Larry, and I hope I can call you Larry, you are obviously well read in the data on education expenditure and results collection, and the data does make a compelling case for an education system that is craving for money, yet willing to do no more than just site around and waste it. I suspect that I sound like the “Feeeeeed Me” monster in Little Shop of Horrors.
I submit, however, that education, in its intent to take each child, each class, each school, and prepare a society of skilled, innovative, resorceful, and happily adaptive citizens is far more than the laboratory that your data makes it out to be. It is far more complex, rich, and exciting than simply counting out dollar bills, pumping in the teachers you’ve payed for, the curriculum you’ve paid for, the textbooks, art supplies, a compter here and there, and then watching shinning new adults marching enthusiastically into their futures.
I maintain that investment must increase dramatically because we do not live in the 1950s, we’re not teaching Theodore Cleaver (Leave it to Beaver), and thirty-year careers are a relic of more secure and far less interesting times. Teachers are not technicians applying prescribed, laboratory-tested strategies. They are artisans who fill their classrooms and the lives of their children as human beings.
I’m not just talking about money, the just about everything I am talking about will cost. We must invest in new definitions of what it means to be educated today, the roles of teachers, and what students do in their classrooms. We must restructure our schools of education, and invent a system of sustained, casual, professional development, where all teachers are, above all other things, life-long learners. We must invest time in our educators so that they can research, collaborate, assess, reflect, invent and reinvent, so that every class session is so exciting that children have no resistance to learning.
I know I’m ranting pie in the sky. But shouldn’t the sky be what we aim for for our children, their future, and our future?
Finally, I suspect that teaching a child in a small town in India, with scarce access to telephones, television, and the Internet, would probably be a little cheaper than successfully teaching a child with daily access in their bedrooms to the world wide web, gaming team members from around the world, a network of friends and collaborators, and the tools they need to invent to play and play to invent.
Two more cents worth!
I would also ask Larry to look up graduation statistics for the last one hundred years. What percetage of U.S. high school age kids graduated from high school one hundred years ago? 95%? 80%? 50%? Try 6% … that’s right 6%. Even 40 years ago the most hard core students – discipline problems, students with various health issues, language issues – many kids just didn’t go to school past 10th grade or so. My Dad was an executive and his big education claim on his resume was that he went to college for almost 2 years – no degree, just took classes. Now we expect to graduate EVERYONE from high school – and we should. But it means that we have to deal with issues that we didn’t have to deal with before. A “One Size Fits All” education model isn’t going to work when you have to deal with every “Size” of student issues – you need more of a “Custom” fit and that is more expensive.
Things have changed – business puts way more money into infrastructure than ever – but for some reason schools are wasters if they need to do the same. Businesses dump money into research and development, would any of us want drug companies to drop their R&D to save money? – maybe we have all the drugs we need already? But – schools are bad if they think of doing the same. Yes schools need to watch the pennies – but what great investment would we have made if the next generation of American students, with all our diversity, were the most educationally ready generation ever? What if many of those recieving assistance were paying taxes?
Learning is messy!
I have been trying to catch up with a lot of my blogs, mostly reading, but the comments about the efficiency of FedEx or Apple iPods caught my interest. Let’s take the example of iPods . . .
” Imagine that on-quarter of all new iPods can’t play music recorded after 1999.” That would be a terrible way to produce and sell a product, but I would respond with this. . .
Imagine that at a factory for iPods technicians had to use whatever parts were brought in by the general public. They could not pick and choose the parts they used, and they were not given time or money to create new machines or tools to use on those parts. Instead they were asked to create iPods with these parts using the same tools, in the time allotted to them with no additional funding. In this case I think that it would be amazing if 25% of the iPods played music, or even had power!
If you then added in chasing the parts around, dealing with each individuals parts problems (both personal and from the parts place of origin) you would be lucky to even get something resembling an iPod together. I hate these “efficiency” blurbs! No business is just like teaching. No business is asked to take a more volatile product and then reach such lofty, often conflicting goals, with so little time and support. And, to top it off, teachers are vilified for the time and effort they put in. You don’t see adds about teachers teaching through wind, rain and sleet, I would like to see how the postal service held up if it had to deliver mail to moody, mobile, and fickle mailboxes!
The education system has problems everywhere and it is a giant beast that seems to just stagger obliviously across a landscape filled with pitfalls and dangers. Who is going to guide this beast, rein it in, or train it? Not the politicians, not the “public”. Everyone has a complaint, but no one seems to have a solution.