On Sunday Nancy Flanagan wrote a beautiful post that said, “When teachers trust principals, when parents have confidence in teachers and administrators, when teachers feel free to take risks in improving their practice—student learning and school operations improve. It’s as simple as that.”
Of course trust is an essential ingredient to successful social systems. But school improvement is not as simple as that.
The prevailing view of education is classically industrial. The problem is always scarcity so we need more. If only we had more hours in school, more homework, more expertise, more parent involvement, more testing, more creativity, more risk-taking, more trust. . .
But the results of more are causing the problems.
5-year-olds attend full days of school and are assigned homework to meet academic standards, even when we know that play is essential to development.
12-year-olds are bussed from their neighborhoods into large centralized schools, have 6 courses with 5 to 6 sets of homework from 6 teachers who each have 120+ students, even when we know that preteens search for new identities and roles that require positive social interaction and adult support.
Although 15-year-olds require 10 to 12 hours of sleep a night and three meals and two snacks a day, they miss breakfast to catch buses as early as 7, start school at 8, eat junk at recess, eat lunch at noon, work or do sports after school, and have hours of homework at night. We blame their poor attitudes on “hormones” while their schedules are illegal in a workplace.
Teachers are required to teach to the standards, but children simply aren’t standardized. Despite our teachers’ often heroic efforts, the system creates “behind.”
Our 30% national high school dropout rate—50% for minorities–is a crisis and a shame.
All of the energy, time, talent and resources can’t evolve a system designed, like a factory, to maintain order and prevent change.
Dr. Flanagan ends her post with “Our national values are spread out before us for re-examination. Individual gain vs. public good? Free markets vs. effective regulation? Me and mine vs. you and yours.”
But can we blame parents when they seek a better way?
The problem isn’t our national values. The problem is that the education system is not aligned with our values.
Further support of and enforcement of this system not only won’t work. It’s inhumane.
The question isn’t “How can we build trust?” The question is “Is there another way?”
Is there a new system, one that supports teachers, students, and parents, one that is more aligned both with our values and with how so many of us are learning today?
The answer is yes.
A hallmark of industrial thinking is that we can only change if we are all “on the same page,” all moving in the same direction, all trusting each other. But new social systems, like Wikipedia and craigslist.com don’t work like that at all. They start among a few, at first distrusted by many, and then grow exponentially until they are part of our cultural fabric.
That’s how our new system is going to emerge. It won’t be a learning system or an education system. It will be something else.
I’m betting on icanology.
{ 2 comments… read them below or add one }
Your analysis of time in a child’s day is interesting. As an adult, I don’t often think about how many hours should go into sleep, and how often they are fed. (The latter became much more apparent on our recent 3-week family vacation, when meal stops were more frequent for the teens than for the parents).
I’ve been fortunate in living in an older city neighbourhood where our young children easily walked to kindergarten and primary school. The high school is a longer walk, but a trivial bike ride. When I was a child, I lived in a small town where the travel distance was about the same.
Schools and neighbourhoods are a natural coupling.
Wonderful Toronto. When I was a child, kids in my neighborhood in San Jose, California walked to kindergarten and elementary school and we made friends on that walk. In seventh grade we were bussed to the brand new junior high. The day started earlier. The bus was social, but we missed the walk. That was a long time ago but the very beginning of the trend. There are studies about how gangs formed out of that change.