Where Do We Go From Here?

Public education today is at a crossroads.  As much of a cliche at it sounds, it is true.  Public education faces two very different paths and I believe if it continues on the one it is currently traveling, the results will be disastrous for all stakeholders.

The current road has been tried for close to one hundred years.  It arose out of a fundamental question asked at the turn of the twentieth century.  With more students going to school, how can the one-room schoolhouse evolve to accommodate these rapidly increasing numbers?  

The answer, as it turns out, came from the factory.  Pioneers such as Henry Ford had become incredibly efficient and profitable by standardizing the factory system.  Education reformers essentially took that model and applied it to the public school.  Students were compartmentalized by age into grades and then into classrooms and standardized tests were soon developed to measure student performance.  Passive lectures that placed emphasis on memorization and regurgitation were prevalent as the emphasis was placed on educating as many students as possible relatively efficiently.  Little thought was put into differentiation as the results were demonstrating the system was working for the industrial economy of the time.

However, that economy has since almost disappeared.  Instead, a new knowledge economy has taken its place that puts emphasis not on memorization and simple recall of facts but the ability to take pieces of information and assemble them into something more advanced, more complicated.  In other words, while the old economy might have you memorize that A + B = C, the new economy might ask where A and B come from and if C is the only answer.  Critical thinking rules the new economy.

Unfortunately, the factory rules our schools.  Students and teachers are continued to be told that their futures are determined by student performance on standardized tests that, while increasingly sophisticated, still force students to become test takers and not tomorrow's makers.

But the situation is far worse than that.  Many students are struggling even to pass these tests and many advanced students find the preparation for these tests to be boring and hardly challenging.  Teachers are placed in the difficult position of teaching to the middle and hoping some of these struggling students pass and that opportunities for the advanced students will emerge.

The problem of differentiation is coupled with the problem of time.  Teachers cannot accelerate for the advanced students because that would jeopardize the success of the struggling students.  Teachers cannot slow down because they risk not covering all the material on the test.  Thus, teachers are forced to move at one pace that works for only a fraction of the learners in the classroom.

Thus, education stands at the fork.  On the left,  is more of the same: one pace, one method.  On the right, is differentiation based on each student's individual needs and mastery learning that allows students to progress at their own pace.

But how do we move public education to the right?  How do we as stakeholders develop public schools that both meet the individual needs of students and allow students to achieve mastery?  Some have suggested that standardized tests have to go.  I, ever the realist, do believe that is viable.  Politicians will continue to push those tests until the backlash is strong enough to suggest otherwise.

The answer must come from within schools.  As to what that answer looks like, I do not believe there is one single solution.  For some, it might be flipping the classroom.  For others, it might be new technology.  Still others might adopt the charter school model.  Whatever the solution, public education needs to wake up now.  The future is calling.