Food For Thought
Conversations enhance knowledge, provoke analysis and strenghten beliefs as well as cause discomfort when met with a challenge to tried and true axioms that don’t appear to fit any more. The conversations that I have had lately have underscored many of the things I have read, heard, and believe but many of these conversations have provided a chance to revisit many topics as well as make me see that sometimes my vision has been not quite where it should be.
On Saturday, Tim and I had two friends from North Broadway for dinner. Two tidbits of conversation stuck with me and later, were enhanced by what I read. The first conversation covered the internet and online communities. Our friend says that one of the greatest things about the internet is the ability to communicate with people all over the globe about subjects that intrigue us. The flip side, he says, is very troubling to him because more and more we are becoming isolated from the people next door, down the street, and the day to day community is suffering because we do not see a responsibility to our fellow man. The next day, I picked up this book Time For Truth by Os Guinness.
This quote took me right back to the conversation of the night before;
“The discipline of living in truth is urgent today because modern life reduces community and accountability to its thinnest, thereby tempting us to live in a shadow world of anonymity and nonresponsibility where all cats are gray. In such a world, becoming people of truth is the deepest secret of integrity and the highest form of taking responsibililty for ourselves and our own lives.”
I can’t help but think that community is going to be more important rather than less important in our combined futures. I wonder will we be prepared?
The second tidbit had its roots in education. It is strange that no matter who I have a conversation with here in Cleveland Ohio eventually there is a thread that talks about education-early childhood, the special challenges for middle school learning, high school drop out rates, and/or higher education. The story our friends’ related is hard to imagine but nonetheless I am sure is quite accurate. A few days before, they had attended bible study in their neighborhood. A young man had struggled to read the verses of scripture he had been assigned. He stuck to it, and got through it, but our friend said he was almost certain that this young man’s reading level was probably at third grade. He was a young man in his 20’s and my friend said that the young man had determination and desire but where was he going to find a good paying job with such a dismal ability to read? And then, Ed Morrison posted this, at Brewed Fresh Daily. How do we indeed go forward as a community if we do not see that the education level of our community as a whole defines who we are and what we hold dear.
If we do not strive to educate every child in our community regardless of where or how he or she was born, what does that say about us as a community. And this question came to mind, as we look for ways to attain “brain gain” instead of “brain drain” are we forgetting that gaining brains is directly related to the overall brainpower of the existing community? How comfortable and safe will highly educated people be in a community with a 61% dropout rate? Should we be fostering an educated community rather than looking outside ourselves for new blood? In the seventies, when I taught in the Cleveland Public Schools the beginning of the migration out of Fortune 500 companies began. One of the top reasons for leaving was a sustainable workforce. Almost forty years later, we are still talking about the gap between workforce development and skills training and the needs of the business community. How when we were told so many years before are we still debating whether education is important?
Should we ask the college students in our midst how we should improve education at the elementary and secondary level? How would they have changed their early years so that they would be better prepared for college? When I was a junior at BGSU, one of my classes-reading development, I believe, required that we spend x number of hours tutoring students in reading. Since I was a student in the college of education, I had a lot of interaction with school children from the BG City School System. Imagine my surprise when I arrived at the library at 9 a.m. on a Saturday and the student I was tutoring was a college freshman. This young man struggled mightily trying to read his textbook, and I tried to show him how to try to read for content rather than words, but he just wasn’t there.
As I walked back to my dorm very slowly, I wondered where we were going when we were teaching remedial courses at the University level. Now, forty years later, we still have remedial classes, tutoring, and additional help at the University level. Should we be doing things differently? Should we accept that not everyone needs a fullblown four year college education? Should we be stressing workforce and skills training? Should there be different tracks in high schools? Are traditional schools not what is needed in the 21st century? Educational change has moved ever so slowly at the grade school and high school level. Is it time for change? There are glimmers of hope in spots throughout Northeast Ohio, but how could we work together to make it work better and faster so that our children become part of the new knowledge economy and prosper. How do we make it so being born in Ohio is an advantage?
February 15th, 2008 at 10:15 am
“Should we be doing things differently? Should we accept that not everyone needs a fullblown four year college education? Should we be stressing workforce and skills training? Should there be different tracks in high schools? Are traditional schools not what is needed in the 21st century?”
Yes, yes, yes, yes and YES!
The public educational school model is a failure. It fails to realize that different people will need to learn different things. Sure the rudimentary knowledge of the R’s (reading, writing and arithmetic) need to be taught to all, but at the high school level there needs to be sort of a choice given to students. Now, to be fair there is some choice. Vocational educational is offered at many schools. More should be done to encourage it.
The truth is there is a social stigma about not going to college now. There is a social stigma about going to a trade school. School counselors give out statistics all the time about how college education helps your earnings potential. Well, thats true but only if you go into certain fields. Law, medicine, engineering and accounting is what makes going into college worthwhile. Instead we have many students who go to college to party, major in business management or communications, get out of college and are SHOCKED that they can’t find work. I have known a lot of these people myself and if they weren’t my friends I would tell them “What did you expect???”
The root of the whole problem in public education is the word “public”. As has been proven in many, many, many things when the governments tries to stick its nose where it doesn’t belong, be it the economy, social issues or education, the system goes awry. Sadly, we EXPECT the government to do something. But the real answer is not more government intervention and more government money but LESS of both.
Imagine a system made up purely of private schools where cirriculum and testing would not be determined by some government bureuracrat, but by individuals who are intimately tied to the schools. Imagine if these schools were REALLY accountable. Both sides now talk a lot about accountability but if you really want accountability in the schools give parents the choice to pull their kids out of bad schools and transfer them to better competitors. What incentive do Cleveland Public Schools have to get better? How much do you think the teachers and administrators care about the failing grades they get from the Ohio state government. OK, I am sure they care about it to an extent. I am sure they are tired of politicians nagging and nagging them. But either way, they know that the kids are still going to be coming to the schools and as long as thats true the schools will still get money and as long there is money they have jobs. So, the accountability pressure is not really economic its purely political and thats not enough.
Competition and free choice is the answer. Subsidizing a bad system is the wrong course. Will we do anything different? Given the strength of the teachers union in the Democratic party and the fact that the Democratic party will now be in power, I say don’t hold your breath.
February 15th, 2008 at 8:19 pm
Privatizing the public school system is ideological happy talk that is both politically and practically naive.
Transformations of the public school systems are coming through innovations in teacher preparation, school design, curriculum design and new connections (such as the skills centers in Washington State or P-16 councils).
Holding out competition and free choice as The Answer to transforming school performance is, well, a bit like believing that the tooth fairy will cure my tooth ache.
The best place to start to get educated on some practical approaches to education performance is the KnowledgeWorks Foundation and the Center for Excellence in Leadership of Learning at the University of Indianapolis.
February 19th, 2008 at 8:02 am
I’m thinking that the existing setup needs less union tampering; it gets in the way of standards for the teachers and costs way too much overall. Teachers should have a guild, a place where they declare their unparalleled skills, and not the fact that they can bargain collectively and shut down a system if their demands aren’t met. As for the support staff, they have government jobs–how in the world did we ever let the union thuggery infiltrate our government and extort the taxpayer? So, let the support staff proclaim their excellence as well, throw out the superfluous layer of union presence, and begin to move forward as honest working people who deliver a fair work product for a fair wage.