Education is a hot topic in my town these days. A local budgetary crisis is happening at a time when my kids are considering re-entering the public school system and my wife is prepping for a radio interview with a leading critic of incentive-based education. Throw in a recent talk by a Nobel Prize winner, and the ‘Verse has afforded me a lot of opportunity to reflect on what it means to educate our own.
Previously, GeekDad has offered suggestions on raising good geeks. Topics have ranged from gender issues to using the Internet to racism. An underlying theme across all this advice is that education matters. Here are some things to consider when cultivating a learning ecosystem for your little geeks.
Invest in Intellectual Infrastructure
Thanks to a number of factors, our local school corporation is facing budget cuts that will likely mean elimination of jobs, student services, skills training, and exposure to non-traditional learning. Despite what our current Governor may believe, this isn’t bureaucratic fat being hacked—it’s the meat of an effective education.
At a local school board hearing Tuesday night, 92 public comments were heard expressing concern and outrage over both the expected loss of critical programs and the lack of stakeholder inclusion in the process. Much of the blame is being directed at Indiana Governor Mitch Daniel’s hard-line policies on taxation and balanced budgets, which has led to a situation where the state is some $300 million short of educational funding in 2010. The scenario only gets worse over the next couple years, cultivating a culture of local education budget cuts that remove almost everything educators know to be conducive to learning.
My community seems to have only three solutions facing them. Organize an quick referendum to give local taxpayers a chance to come to the rescue. Convince the Governor to reallocate “rainy day” funds to offset the state’s shortfall. Or, get some famous folk with deep pockets to pony up a donation. There are enough geeks with IU roots to do the trick (I’m looking at you, Mark Cuban, Will Shortz, Jimmy Wales, Jeri Taylor, Lee Majors, James Watson, Scott Jones, Jeff Sagarin, and Jamie Hyneman.) In this case, failure shouldn’t be an option.
Dollars alone don’t solve problems in education, but neither does treating education like an isolated line item. At the Federal level, education is getting a 6-percent increase for 2010, one of the few areas where the Obama administration is proposing adding funds. As the President put it, “The best anti-poverty program around is a world-class education.”
Reduce Competitive Measures
One intriguing suggestion to help our budget woes is to eliminate standardized testing. The argument is that the time to administer the test and the cost of the assessment could significantly offset the funding gap. Whether or not it would help keep teachers from getting fired, it would improve the chance of student learning, according to Alfie Kohn.
Kohn points to the trend to focus on test-taking earlier and earlier in elementary schools. The argument for early preparation is that kids need to get used to taking tests in order to do well. Kohn likens the “better get use to it” philosophy to the Monty Python skit about getting hit in the head lessons. (What geek can resist a reference to Python?) He has a nice resource making the case against standardized testing and what can be done to combat it.
Standardized testing, though, is only one example of how entrenched competition is in public education. This month’s budget proposal signaled support from the Obama Administration for renewing No Child Left Behind, with a couple key changes. First, the metrics for funding would switch from showing progress to achieving college readiness. Second, the proposal cultivates competition for nearly 30 percent of the federal dollars. Secretary of State Arne Duncan emphasized penalizing perceived failures (and re-branding!) when he talked about renewal of the legislation last fall.
For Kohn, this kind of organizational competition detracts from learning:
Several years ago, one superintendent in the Northeast vowed that his city’s test scores would “never be last again” in his state. Like so many others, he was confusing higher scores with better learning. But this appalling statement also implied that his students didn’t have to improve; as long as kids in another community fared even more poorly, he would be satisfied
NCLB helped create many new problems with our public school culture. Competitive dollars adds institutionalized failure to the education dynamic.
Reconnect Objectives with Practice
The politics of funding is not always reflected in the pedagogy of schools. Districts that are socially progressive on the outside may have a conservative methodology for how kids are incentivized to learn. “The challenge is not to find groovier methods,” Kohn warns. “The challenge is to rethink the objective and the respects in which we may not be supporting kids’ autonomy in the way that know they would benefit.”
This disconnect between what we hope for an outcome—smart, caring, versatile thinkers—and our practices as a community of educators can produce odd choices. Empty praise can be a negative, serving to confuse would-be learners who aren’t getting constructive feedback on their actions. Assigning more homework is meant to honor the assumption that working harder leads to better results. Not only has it never been proven that homework has a positive effect on learning, it likely enlarges the achievement gap in favor of those with better resources to complete it. Fear of liability can dominate curriculum and bring us policies to remove science from science fairs.
Public education has a questionable history of reform. We alternate between grand movements lacking either local controls or an understanding of long-term dynamics, and the small incremental adjustments that fail to reflect the big picture as practice drifts over time. As parents and community members, our role is to keep our educators and legislators on task by repeatedly asking two vital questions: What are we trying to achieve? and What are we actually getting?
Communicate to Trust
Indiana University professor Elinor Ostrom, a newly-awarded Nobel Prize economist, devoted much of her career to studying cooperation in successful organizations. She challenged the conventional wisdom that tragedy of the commons is both inevitable and only corrected with central regulation or privatization. Ostrom’s work pertains to common pool resources, or resources that support other things and need to be managed to protect against overuse (i.e. pastures feeding livestock).
In a way, local schools are a common pool resource. Too many students with too few supports can lead to irrevocable damage to the system. If we accept that, then we can learn something about our kids’ schools by drawing from Ostrom’s prize-winning insights about creating a stable system:
- Clearly defined boundaries
- Localized rules for managing resources
- Member participation in the decision-making process
- Effective and accountable monitoring
- Graduated sanctions for violation of community rules
- Accessible conflict resolution
- Community self-determination recognized by higher-level authorities
- Multiple layers of nested enterprises (polycentrism)
Top-down policies that limit teacher’s ability to innovate, for example, do not seem to be a recipe for success.
Successful organizations also have members who trust each other, a behavior that accumulates into widespread cooperation. Ostrom discovered this is facilitated through communication, in the form of monitoring, information sharing, and local creation of rules and graduated sanctions. It also helps when this self-determination is recognized by the high-level powers that be.
Communication is a two-way street. As stakeholders in the community who benefit from education, you have to pursue it with administrators and educators. In successful systems, they will do the same with you.
[For more from Alfie Kohn, listen to his interview about unconditional parenting taking place on February 24. You can also watch Elinor Ostrom's Nobel Prize lecture online to learn more about her award-winning research. Finally, contact Gov. Mitch Daniels to encourage him to fully fund education in Indiana.]
