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Where is Education Going?

posted on August 31, 2010

Today marks the start of school in my town and I just watched as both kids left. As you can see from this picture they are growing up just as fast as ever.

First Day of School 2010

But, as I watched the school buses roll away, I began to think a lot about the year ahead for them and at a higher level the entire state of education in America.

If you haven’t noticed, it is completely broken. Sure, our kids are passing tests, going to college and doing ok for themselves. Not all of them and not nearly as many as I’d like to see, but you know what I mean.

I look at my kids and see how different they are and yet I know they are being taught the exact same way. Dylan is logical and direct. He excels at math and science and is on the fast track to some sort of engineering job if I were to guess. Emily on the flipside is overly creative. She excels at all subjects, but is a very free thinker and goes way outside of the box whenever she can. I don’t know what she will end up being, but it is going to be fun to watch.

But, our schools are teaching the same way they have for the past several decades. Same subjects, same approaches and all of it leading up towards passing standardized tests.

A couple of years ago we got called in to talk about Dylan being disruptive in class. When we talked to the teacher she told us that he was always getting his math work done before the rest of the class and then would try helping other kids finish theirs. That is disruptive? Come on now! We asked if he could bring a book in to read while he waited and she said sure. Why couldn’t she have thought of this? It isn’t exactly rocket science.

We need to challenge our kids. They are growing up in a world that moves at a super fast pace. Technology must play an active role in the classroom and teachers at all grade levels must understand and embrace it.

I don’t have all the answers, but I know that the way it is being done right now isn’t the right way. I’ve seen glimmers of hope out there and success stories happening and I pray those continue. We need to value and pay our teachers more. We need to insure that our kids are learning to think on their own and not just memorizing words and facts from ancient textbooks.

I know I’m not the only one worried about this. I also know that I’m going to see what I can do to help change it.

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Categories: Family

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  • http://www.ChristopherSPenn.com Christopher S. Penn

    Education has long been broken and will remain that way until long after the crisis tipping point. Fundamentally, we're using an industrial age education system – batches of perfectly manufactured, mediocre robots called grades, with QA called tests – that is ill suited to the needs of what we need to be successful in this century, in this age.

    The reason Iraq lost the first Gulf War so badly was that they were fighting the last war against Iran, with heavy ground troops. The US just flew over them and bombed the crap out of them from the air.

    Our education system is preparing our kids VERY well for the last war. Unfortunately, the problems of the 21st century that our kids will need to solve will bomb the crap out of all of us.

    • http://www.cc-chapman.com/ C.C. Chapman

      Hell of a metaphor, but you are totally correct.

      We need to teach our children in a completely different way. I hear parents everywhere say this and yet I see so little change happening.

      I fear you are right that the changes we crave will begin happening long after they should.

  • http://matthewebel.com Matthew Ebel

    Your kids will excel for the same reason I managed to graduate with honors from a small private college and start my own business: their parents are their primary educators, and they're smart.

    You don't ship your kids off to school and assume they'll do all their learning there. Mine didn't either. They knew that public school was the multivitamin, a learning-oriented home was the main course.

    • http://www.cc-chapman.com/ C.C. Chapman

      It must be early in the morning because your metaphor took me a minute to get. *laugh*

      VERY true indeed, but even with us teaching them at home it is hard when some of those teachings go against the teachers thinking. We see this when they have some “open” assignments and where the kids take them (and we encourage them) doesn't fit in line with the rank and order.

      • http://matthewebel.com Matthew Ebel

        With all due respect, screw the rank and order. I can't tell you how many times I was called into parent/teacher conferences because of my “attention-getting devices”. What do I do for a living now? Oh yeah… full-time attention-getting device. Tom Hanks was the same way. Bill Gates and Steve Jobs were both dropouts.

        You're arming them in ways their teachers can't really deal with. Personally, I think that's a better approach than shooting for the 4.0 on paper.

      • http://www.cc-chapman.com/ C.C. Chapman

        Bingo! Don't forget that I'm the guy that is infamous for telling my HR department to “trash any resumes that come in with GPAs on them” because I just don't care about book smarts and always want street smarts.

      • http://matthewebel.com Matthew Ebel

        Of course, that makes it a lot harder for YOU. If they ever bring home bad grades, you can't just yell at them. You have to find some way for them to prove they know the material better than the grading system can record. Otherwise they'll call you a hypocrite.

        Well, once they're 17 they'll call you all kinds of worse things, but you're probably prepping for that already. Good luck!

  • http://www.usefularts.us/ usefularts.us

    As a parent, as someone who has helped two states with educational data and technology, I've seen how our education system is set up to resist change. While the tools of technology are welcome, they are used in an old paradigm in with the District is the primary organizing unit.

    District control in education is as much a vestige a as travel agency control in booking air fares. There are a ton of exciting models for distributing education to leverage star performers (Bill Nye teaches Science Inc) to data driven states, to telecommuted home schoolers. But all this rests on units of organization which leave the district.

    Education has yet to be disrupted by digital technology. What's happened in journalism, travel, and soon medical records, is still in the making for education.

    • http://www.cc-chapman.com/ C.C. Chapman

      Interesting angle, I'd love to hear more about what you do and if you found any even slivers of change out there.

  • http://www.redgiantconsulting.com Tamara Gruber

    Good luck C.C.! My 6 yo started first grade last week. We decided to send her to a Laboratory school, where at least they try out a variety of different teaching methods and can adjust or apply which best fits your child. However, even there, it is hard to really teach individually. I know my daughter is reading at a 3rd grade level and ready to learn grammar, and get deeper into math, including multiplication, and they will try to challenge her but they still have 20 other kids to work with. I see that the more involved I am and able to understand what is happening in the classroom and supplement at home the better off she'll be. I'm lucky that I work for myself and can mostly try to adjust my schedule to be able to manage this. I'm curious to watch and see if you discover ways to bring technology into the schools to help not just in the classroom, but also the administration and parent associations. I've been thinking about that a lot recently and trying to come up with some recommendations on how to use available tools to improve how things are done.

    • http://www.cc-chapman.com/ C.C. Chapman

      I've never heard of a “laboratory school” so I'll have to check that one out.

      A growing trend in the comments and from what I know personally is that it IS up to us concerned parents to supplement what they are learning in school. It is the only way our kids are going to turn out right. *grin*

      • http://www.redgiantconsulting.com Tamara Gruber

        A laboratory school is a test bed for new teaching methodologies. They pick the best of the best. It is also a training ground for student teachers so that can be a small downside. Our is associated with RI College (Henry Barnard School), but I've heard there is one associated with Tufts.

  • http://twitter.com/reachstudents Luke, Reach Students

    There are so many things wrong with the way we educate kids, it's hard to know where to start in improving things, if indeed we could ever have much of an influence faced with the Goliath of institutional resistance. It's also daunting and sad.

    There's a TV series starting in the UK this week I'm looking forward to catching: http://www.bbc.co.uk/tv/comingup/extraordinary-…

    It's an attempt to tackle the issue that boys underachieve at school – a situation perhaps caused by the way we try to teach them within a structure that suits the educators rather than the learner.

    • http://www.cc-chapman.com/ C.C. Chapman

      That looks like a really interesting program. Definitely chime back in and let me know how it turns out since I obviously won't be catching it live :)

  • http://twitter.com/dsobkowiak dsobkowiak

    My children started school last Wednesday. My daughter is going in to 4th and my son is just starting Kindergarten. While I was hopeful after meeting with the teachers that the school year was planned out and that there would be opportunities for them both to learn in a way that fits their learning style, in only a few short days I've started to see the same assembly line educational system that I believe Christoper Penn was alluding to.

    Unless we start to challenge our educators to challenge themselves, all our children will be able to gain from school is the rote regurgitation of facts/figures and data.

    Both of my children are very bright and creative and I do not want their education to drive the creativity out of them in order to make room for answers to outdated standardized testing.

    America needs to refocus its efforts on educational goals and stop looking for the easy answer. My experience has shown that the best things I've experienced in life were the ones I had to fight tooth and nail for, struggle the hardest to understand and work at the longest.

  • Sean Platt

    I've lived in California my entire life and just moved to Ohio. The primary reason – the schools in Ohio are a bajillion times better.

  • http://www.stephendill.com Stephen Dill

    CC, have we talked about this? I have been asking this of everyone who cares to think: “If you could start Public Education over from scratch, with no preconceived notions of what, who, when, or how – what would it look like?” I have put my answers to that question, along with reviews of various books and TED talks that seem to point us toward a different future, out on http://www.allnewpubliceducation.com and I invite you to spend some time there and comment freely. This is, indeed, a “completely broken” system that you have sent your children off to. And the worse news is that the majority of people trying to fix it are wasting their time, as they are focused on improving the surface of a system that is based on incorrect foundations. People do NOT need to all learn the same information, people learn at different speeds and in differing ways, and even more important, children's learning is influenced while in the womb by the thoughts, words and deeds of their parents, who have little to no training on how to parent.

    Four years into this thought process, I am now close to convinced that Public Education should no longer be public, but private. But I will leave THAT discussion to the AllNewPublicEducation.com site.

    Thanks for the post!

  • http://twitter.com/RevBug Mike Foster

    Does our education system teach our kids what to think – or how to think? is there a difference? IMHO yes there is. With the emphasis on 'passing the standardized tests' the system as it has made this last transformation – emphasizes that each child is supposed to be on the same track. You're right, we are not set up to meet the individual distinctiveness that manifest in each of our children.
    Some would want to lay the brunt of responsibility on the 'recent' emphasis on 'No Child Left Behind' – that has institutionalized the misnomer that everybody could/should learn and be productive at the same level – ; but I think an even greater contributor to the dynamic we're finding ourself in, is that the public education system is being viewed as a standalone model of education. parents have abdicated their role in the education of their children. The system was never intended to be the sole source of a child's education. It was intended to be augmented by a family's participation at home. In talking with educators, I've heard that in addition to the reading, writing, 'rithmatic – they're teaching personal hygiene, (brushing teeth, use of deodorant, washing, bathing, etc.) they're teaching nutrition (as well as having to provide nutrition) – all this additional education subject matter that should have been (you'd think students should know this by the time they're in high school) taught by parents – is being dumped on an already overloaded educational system.
    so, is the system broken?? yeah – but the brokenness is quite a complicated, multivalent dynamic.

    • http://www.stephendill.com Stephen Dill

      Mike, “but the brokenness is quite a complicated, multivalent dynamic” is SO true. I advocate thinking from square one for just that reason. “What is education?” is the first question, nothing else. The answers to that will begin to dictate a much different view of what the process of providing education has to look like, I suspect.

      When education was introduced as a public service it was a force multiplier because parents had no education other than practical experience. Today, there is no reason two parents couldn't handle reading to and otherwise exposing their children to all sorts of experiences to spark their interests, help them find their strengths and passions, and arrange for teachers, study groups to gain practical knowledge and provide the sounding boards so crucial for learning.

      I would welcome your thoughts on allnewpubliceducation.com as well Mike. The overwhelming scope of such a change can be brought down to manageable steps if a group of us can focus on the clean-slate approach to system design.

  • http://www.TheDADvocateProject.com metzgerbusiness

    CC sounds to me like your daughter will be an entrepreneur like her daddy. As for school I completely agree that they fail miserably at teaching children to be independent thinkers and fail miserably at helping them learn the skills of life. Schools generally still do a good job of teaching basic reading and math skills but when you go beyond that the schools are not designed to do anything better.

    This past week I was up in PA talking with an old friend who started in Journalism and then decided to become a teacher. She teaches a High School Journalism class. I asked her how she was preparing the kids to participate in the new media. Her response was, “well our school doesn't really want us to have open access to any social media sites but we do have a blog internal to the school.” Can you imagine trying to teaching a Journalism class to high school students without any focus on new media? She and I talked a bit and came up with a general plan that she could use within the constraints of the classroom but she is so severely limited that it's not likely to be successfully executed. This is an example of failing to prepare children for what is directly in front of them and quite honestly it's scary.

    Another method of teaching that could be implemented but doesn't work well in current schools is taking a subject or concept that a child is interested in and using the topic to teach across all disciplines. For instance if a child is interested in the Titanic he can learn everything about the history of the ship, to the physics about why it sank, to the financials for building and sailing it. He can learn about the science of navigation and astronomy all related to the titanic because he/she was interested in it. Oh and look all of the sudden the child has learned reading, math, science, history and independent thinking because he/she was interested and guided through all of it. Maybe the child can document everything he/she learns on a blog or in a book and now they have learned new media and/or self publishing skills. I don't think it would be too difficult to change the school systems to allow for this type of learning except for the fact that it's scary, and massive change to the current monopoly. It's threatening to teachers who may not currently have the skills necessary to teach this way and it changes the entire idea of mass education. However if we don't go down a path of educational change now our kids will be the ones who pay the price. They already have to take on our debts; the least we can do is prepare them the best possible way to pay for them.

    Sorry I think I might be a bit passionate about this one.

    • http://www.stephendill.com Stephen Dill

      Your student-centric curriculum idea is brilliant, or, was brilliant when “alternative schools” took it up in the early 70's. Our public school system in Sharon, MA started one class in each grade in 1973, K through to 12. It was a cooperative model, every family had to contribute 2.5 hours per week, either in the classroom or on projects (socials, fundraising, field trips, etc.). The school year included one week in the late Spring spent at a camp on Cape Cod with the teachers taking the week off and naturalists hired by the school taking over to teach biology, natural history, ecology, weather, astronomy, and first-hand exposure to the bogs, beaches, woods and trails of the upper Cape for a week with parents along to aid and chaperone the kids.

      When my daughter arrived 20 years into the history of the school it was down to K thru 6, the parents of the older grades had no interest in supporting the time commitment. Until my son left in 2000 the school thrived, 4 of the 7 original teachers still in their roles of asking the first day, “What would you like to study this year?” and smoothly modifying their required teaching to accommodate the class wishes. (I remember being at a picnic for new parents just before the start of the school year and hearing a teacher respond to a new parent who had just asked if she had all her curriculum ready by saying, “Oh I won't start that until I hear what the kids want to learn!” You should have seen the look of shock on the parent's face.)

      Unfortunately, the Alternative School is now gone, voted closed this last year by a School Committee that had two people on it who had no idea that the imbalance of parent support in the form of time and money at the Alternative School was an indicator that the standard school was hurting, not that the Alternative School should be eliminated. The Alt School alumna realized it too late, and could only make sure that one of them did not get reelected. And so passes into history one of the best models of how to build community around children and call it school.

  • http://www.pjmullen.com/ PJ Mullen

    So many thoughts on this one C.C. We've been thinking about preschooling for little man. I've been following a dad who happens to be a preschool teacher at a Cooperative school near Seattle and I really like that model of education.

    I agree that the system is truly broken and that educating to fit standardized tests not only stunts creativity, but doesn't reinforce why that particular bit of knowledge is important in the first place.

    A friend of mine, and a fellow Bentley alum, has his son in a Montessori pre-school and they love the progress he has made because the kids interests drive the lesson plans. As a result, I have been looking at what co-op options and Montessori schools are near to us for when the time comes.

    I've also seriously considered the prospect of homeschooling. I have two other dad friends I've met through blogging that are knee deep in it and they have provided some great resources that we could use should we choose to go in that direction. Personally, I'm not sure I would have the patience to do that full time, but I would use the tools they are using to supplement my children's education at home.

    I wholeheartedly agree that teachers need to be valued more for their contributions, which includes being compensated commensurately to that value.

    Regardless, and I'm sure you'll agree with me on this one, is that as parents we need to be the true educators for our children. We can't abdicate responsibility to someone we barely know, no matter how well qualified, to teach our children everything they need to succeed in life.

  • JB

    I got called in to see the teacher and the “learning assistant”, as my 8 year old daughter apparently couldn't add, subtract or multiply larger numbers. I was a little confused, as I'd got her doing so a number of years earlier, by using that old fashioned concept of “columns”, I'm sure you know the one I mean….

    Anyway, after seconding guessing myself on the first 2 questions, the problem being they looked right to me, she'd done them in columns, I had to ask, “Er, can either of you tell me why she's got these first 2 questions wrong?”

    After a few seconds, whilst the pair of them had another look, it turned out that she'd not only got the first 2 right, but, out of the first 10, 8 of which were marked wrong, she'd actually got them ALL right….

    Go figure. She's not returning to the place, I'm sorry to say. I've lost all confidence in schools. If I've got to do it all myself, she might as well stay home and we'll make it a blast whilst we learn and do things we want to do.

    Finally, you might like to have a read of some of the books by John Taylor Gatto.

    Take it easy CC.

    JB

  • http://michaelschechter.me MSchechter

    It really is embarrassing what teachers and schools have to go through to get funding these days. My wife is an 8th grade teacher in an high need NYC school and the lack of support for teacher funding or even funding the school itself is just simply pathetic.

    It has gotten so bad that the principal at the school has literally taken to sleeping in a tent on the street in front of the school to try to raise awareness and get votes for a #kohlscares contest. It is so sad that we live in a world where a guy who has dedicated his life to education is spending his 40th birthday on a tent on 12th street and 1st Avenue just to try to get the funds necessary to get the technology in the classroom. http://www.ny1.com/content/124770/high-school-principal-continues-to-camp-out-to-win-cash?r=4939012685

    We are living in a world where the educators are killing themselves in the face of little support and even less financial reward to help their kids get the education they need. Sorry for the rant, but it is a topic that needs some serious examination or all of our kids are in deep, deep trouble.

  • http://socialbutterflyguy.com/ DJ Waldow

    So many thoughts on this one, C.C. – as a new parent (@babywaldow turns 6 months old in a few weeks!), as a former 8th grade teacher (I taught American History for 2 years), as the son of a college professor (my mom).

    The short answer is, “Yes. The education system is broken.” I heard Seth Godin speak a few months back here in Salt Lake. He is very anti our current education system. He referenced it often in his talk and book (Lynchpin). The issue that Seth points out – and one that I agree with – is that we are teaching our children stuff that can be found in a book (aka online). What we *need* to be teaching them is now to think, how to problem-solve, how to use sound reasoning to figure out a problem that they will encounter in some form in the future.

    It's not an easy issue to solve. I think part of the issue is that there is a shit ton of politics in the education system. Politics, hierarchy, “this-is-the-way-we've-always-done-it” type attitude. It's unfortunate. There are some amazing teachers out there. There are also a bunch of really crappy ones.

    What's the answer? In short, I think it all comes back to good parenting – providing your children with guidance, support, encouragement. Allowing them to fail. Teaching them right and wrong, but letting them explore on their own.

    Ahhhhhhh – so much to say. Just typing my fingers off right now. Very very passionate about this topic. Something we get to really dig into as Eva gets older.

    Thanks for blogging about it.

    DJ Waldow
    @djwaldow

  • StrongFather

    Get up to the school dad! GO see what is working and not working. Visit the classes as an observer. DO NOT go volunteer yet. Just go and observe. Take the initiative with your kids. Schools are stuck on the middle sometimes. It is our job to stretch our kids where a system for all kids cannot always do that. Get the kids the technology they need at home, learn how to use it or get them to teach YOU! Great post. Go see “Did You Know 4.0″ on youtube. it will get your attention on this matter.

  • http://www.davemadethat.com Dave Delaney

    I just want to say thanks for sharing this topic C.C.
    It's something I'm very interested in, being a dad with two young kids of my own.

    Your insight and everybody's comments are helping me shape a panel that I'm moderating on education in the classroom at BarCamp Nashville: http://www.davemadethat.com/2010/09/27/we-need-technology-in-the-classroom/

    Cheers!