Lyndon Furst's
A Different Perspective
"The Only Way to Fix the System"
POSTED 5/1/09
The Only Way to Fix the System
A recent issue of Time magazine carried an article on education by Walter Isaacson, former managing editor of Time magazine and currently president of the Aspen Institute. He suggested that "national education standards are the only way to fix the system." In his essay Isaacson suggested that the American system of education is broken. We are way behind the rest of the world in what our kids are expected to know when they get through with school, he claims. America’s economic future is threatened by this failure of our schools.
The author notes that in America we have no national system of schools. Rather, each state has the authority to operate its public schools, and in most cases they have delegated much authority to local school districts. Each district can then develop its own expectations for what children should learn in school. This hodgepodge of a system is the cause of America’s failure to properly educate its young people. Isaacson’s solution is to give more authority to the national government, in other words to centralize the decision-making function regarding schools. He especially proposes that educational standards be set at the national level. That’s the way it’s done in most countries of the world.
From my perspective, Isaacson is dead wrong in both his analysis of the problem and in his proposed solution. First, as I have mentioned on previous occasions in this column, international comparisons of student test scores have been discredited for so long that I can’t imagine why anyone is still bringing them up. In most countries of the world only the best students are tested while in America we test everybody. Such comparisons are not valid and serve no useful purpose.
Further, centralizing the control of education in the federal government is not the solution to any problem that might exist within the public schools. Of course,we have a hodgepodge system of rules, regulations, procedures, and practice among the 50 states in their operation of public schools. We fought a long war some 200 years ago just so we could have such a system. The American revolution was about getting rid of centralized government. Why should we go back to that?
Coincidently, the same week that Isaacson’s article was carried in Time, I attended the annual meeting of the American Educational Research Association in San Diego, California. There, over 10,000 professional educators from around the country and even some from foreign countries met to share the latest knowledge regarding various aspects of education. At any given time there were a hundred concurrent sessions where research findings were presented and critiqued.
One of the sessions I attended was a report of research conducted in New York state regarding effective schools. This was a very intensive research effort which resulted in some interesting findings. "What are the characteristics of an effective school that differentiate it from an ineffective one?" was the research question.
I listened with a great deal of interest as the researchers unfolded their findings. What they discovered in this study merely confirmed numerous other studies that have been conducted for many years. There are things that schools can do which result in being more effective. Rigid national standards is not one of them, nor is high stakes testing. True, constant assessment is the mark of an effective school but this type of testing is done at the classroom level and is for the purpose of teachers being informed on the effectiveness of their teaching specific concepts, not as a measure used for state or national comparisons.
Teachers who constantly assess student’s understanding and restructure their instructional technique to meet the specific learning needs of individual students are more effective than those who do not engage in such intensity of activity. Our schools do not need rigorous national standards. What they need is flexibility on the part of teachers to modify instructional technique based on data provided by continuous assessment at the classroom level. We do not need national standards to achieve such a condition in the schools.
Other factors resulting in effective schools is a plan of partnering with parents in support of the educational process, an orderly school environment which provides both physical and psychological safety for students, and continuous professional development for the teaching staff. Further, while schools supply a variety of services to the children they serve, effective schools have an intense focus on the teaching learning process. True, schools must provide transportation, entertainment, health services, sports and recreational activities, personal counseling, and meals for children, but their primary focus must be on learning if the school is to be effective.
The research in support of these factors for making schools effective is overwhelming. Achieving effective schools does not require rigid national standards, more centralization of control, or even more national testing. What it does require is strong leadership that keeps the work of the school focused on learning. Fortunately, our local schools, both public and private, seem to have adopted that formula and appear to be getting on about the task of becoming even more effective than what they already are. Hopefully, those who keep proposing more centralized control over education will fade away into the sunset.