One thing is certainly clear: American public education must be overhauled. This especially extends to the traditional district model of providing instruction and curricula, which has proven to be outdated, outmoded and ineffective in providing every child opportunities to learn. We will need a variety of new school operators — including black churches and even collections of families — to make what I call the Hollywood Model of Education a reality.
In this Voices of the Dropout Nation, Virginia teacher Chad Sansing offers his own ideas of what public education can look like. Although I don’t agree with Chad’s view on the No Child Left Behind Act, his overall idea that education should move from the traditional district model is worth considering.
We teach and learn at a profoundly weird moment. Self-directed learning is becoming easier and cheaper every day. Nevertheless, a clear correlation continues to exist between our life outcomes and levels of education as evidenced by diplomas and degrees.
On one hand, it’s no longer necessary to graduate from anything in order to learn and master our passions. On the other hand, as we enter the very information age that makes such self-defined learning and success possible, it’s imperative that our schools do a better job graduating students — especially those struggling with school in struggling schools — who can collaborate to solve community problems and who have survived school with enough curiosity and passion intact to tackle those problems.
What is public school to do? Say what you want about standardized testing and its effects on curriculum and instruction; regardless of our own beliefs, our schools are not assessing students’ collaborative work on real world problems with information age skills and tools. Nor are our schools being assessed on how well they prepare students for this work. All the embedded assessment in all the adaptive, self-pacing hybrid programs in the world doesn’t change that crippling and characteristically American disjunct between why we educate and how we do it.
Clearly we still possess a unique (for now) entrepreneurial drive and a useful mix of entitlement and industry that should help us innovate the schools we want and need, not just the tools that make our current schools more efficient and infinitely measurable.
How do we stop admiring our solutions to the problem and shift the paradigm of increasingly fear-driven public schooling to one of increased civic involvement in public education?
Let’s all open our schools. Let’s pass laws that allow us to bring to bear our full might and compassion as a people in surmounting the obstacles that face us all – poverty and an impoverished agenda for school reform. Lets pass laws that catapult us over the high bar of the No Child Left Behind Act’s hobbling temerity in defining success for all as a certain score and instead create a nation of schools that foment citizens who take it upon themselves not to cling to the letter of the Constitution, but to embrace it’s true spirit – to pursue their own happiness by promoting the general welfare. We are the government. We are the schools. We can ask for a national educational policy that lets us all be part of the solution to graduating learners ready to lead.
So what do I mean? I mean let’s expand our school systems into school clouds of licensed experts, teachers, and volunteers who can meet students throughout our communities wherever learning takes place in service to others – through local altruism and entrepreneurship. We might create specialty schools; we might crate studios; we might create clouds of apprenticeships; we can accommodate all of these models if we’re serious about school choice being more then choosing the school with the best scores. Let’s embed learning in the civic lives of our cities, counties, and towns.
Let’s use schools as clearing houses and town halls for a la carte educations that let teams of parents, teachers, and students graduate kids by readiness to specialize and follow their passions as part of their public education, rather than as a luxury to enjoy after assuming the debt of higher education.
Let everyone passionate about education educate; let everyone who cares deeply for our children teach them everything they can about reading, math, history, science, and the arts through the freedoms and responsibilities of citizenships to which students graduate bit by bit as they age and progress through their educations.
We teach and learn at a profoundly weird moment. The world is exploding with opportunities to learn with every app, conflict, and community that arises. Meanwhile, public schools are narrowing their focus.
Let’s let public education out into the world, into the hands of our students and teams of parents, teachers, experts, and volunteers ready to collaborate with them in stewardship of their lives, homes, and future – ready to jury their work by its beauty and worth to others and their communities. The best way to embrace learning is to let go of what it is not: assimilation to outdated and stratifying norms.
I encourage educators, entrepreneurs, and venture capitalists to work together to imagine a new system of public education instead of fixes to the one we have. Let’s get together and present our politicians with compelling vision for authentic change in public education. Let’s reinforce the pillars of our society – democracy, freedom, and justice – with education that’s free to pursue our communities’ needs, rather than chip away at those pillars with the rusted chisels of compliance and routine.
Let’s all open schools. We and our students will can one another through the revitalized clouds and hubs of our repurposed school buildings. Together we’ll find a better way into our country’s future by better reflecting its ideals today.