The current educational philosophy discourages appropriate use of resources to the detriment of students achievement. Therefore, federal and state governments should encourage the development of charter schools and other comparable organizations that encourage taking into account the varying interests, investment, and abilities of students.
The issues explored above exist when there is an attempt to lump together a group of students into a learning environment that is vastly heterogeneous and therefore divides the resources allocated to the students in an inefficient manner guaranteeing that no student can benefit fully from the opportunities presented by universal public education.
To fully understand the nature of the problem it is important to understand the context surrounding the current philosophy. Education in America has evolved over the years and has become an institution that very few of its early promoters saw coming. This young avant garde philosophy is that universal primary and secondary education is a fundamental right. This revolutionary concept runs counter to the history of human educational philosophy. Education, for most of our history, originally not so much about teaching as it was finding and or cultivation of the exceptional. Thomas Jefferson a pioneer of the early “universal” education movement envisioned a system where a total of twenty students would be sent to high school.
The natural extension of this was a man named Alfred Binet who was charged by the French Government to create a test where in those with natural ability could be cultivated, the lazy singled out, and the mentally disabled removed from public institutions as not to be a burden on society. This commission derived what would eventually become the IQ test and it still serves basically the same function today.
In the book "Whatever It Takes: How Professional Learning Communities Respond When Kids Don't Learn," it is argued that:
The idea that a student's education should reflect his or her innate ability and socioeconomic status went largely unchallenged for the first three quarters of the 20th Century. Researchers continued to argue that differences in student achievement were not a function of the quality of schooling they received but merely a reflected their aptitude and environment.
By this way of thinking the old clique is true: schools are glorified babysitters, and the only useful thing a teacher could do was to impart knowledge, usually in the form lectures, knowing that if there was misunderstanding it was the students fault, while also having full confidence that the targeted exceptional student would have no such issues.
However, these ideas were challenged beginning in 1966 and culminating in 2004 with a study by Lawrence W. "Larry" Lezotte who proposed “two bold new premises: first, ‘all students can learn’ and second ‘schools control the factors necessary to assure student mastery of core curriculum” In the early 2000’s educational philosophy went through a kind of revolution, but like with most revolutions, the pendulum swung to the far opposite end, avoiding moderation all together. Before it was assumed that there was no way to affect student achievement through schooling, but now is has been flipped completely on its head claiming that not only can an effective school system benefit students, the success or failure of a student rests solely in the hands of the teachers and administrators who are charged with the students care by society. This can easily be seen as a jump from one restrictive unrelenting philosophy to another.
Regardless of the history of American educational thought, modern thought encompasses three basic ideas.
One, education to some extent must service the needs of society. John Dewey explains this principle in depth in his book “Democracy and Education.” Society has needs and so schools “socialize” its members and encourage development in arias that society needs. This thought can often be seen being brought to insane levels. An excellent example was a Wisconsin governor's proposed changes to the University of Wisconsin mission statement “removing words that commanded the university to ‘search for truth’ and ‘improve the human condition’ and replacing them with ‘meet the state’s workforce needs’"
Two, everyone has the right to learn. As explained above, Jefferson's model of universal education was focused primarily on a type of quasi elitism and it was the idea behind most forms of education throughout human history. Confucianist China, Babylon, Greek and Roman cultures. The Bible provides an excellent example of early educational systems:
“Then the king ordered Ashpenaz, chief of his court officials, to bring into the king’s service some of the Israelites from the royal family and the nobility— young men without any physical defect, handsome, showing aptitude for every kind of learning, well informed, quick to understand, and qualified to serve in the king’s palace. He was to teach them the language and literature of the Babylonians.”
King of Babylon instructed Ashpenaz to conduct what was commonly thought at the time as education. The philosophy was the same as the science of farming: cultivate the good seeds and burn the bad. Except for the language does not teach anything. The idea is see what they already know and reward them accordingly. In this system there is very little of what we would recognize as education.
Today such a system would be horrifying and unthinkable. Schools are meant to teach and grow not sift through the rabble. The belief of education as a right is today as ingrained into our culture as democracy itself.
Three, everyone learns in basically the same way. This last assumption is not so much a actual belief held by teachers and administrators who will generally spout off the importance of understanding visual, auditory and kinesthetic styles and further remind you how important it is to see every student as an individual who has multiple pathways to success. No, the last assumption is not apparent by the actual beliefs held by individuals but it is apparent in the institution of school, which tends to encourage common curriculum for all students, regardless of the multitude of factors that leads a student to their current situation. And above all else, every student is on a path to college, and no one has any ambition of entering the workforce immediately after high school graduation.
This worldview is very effective and makes the logistics of administering an effective education to every child simple. It is however not the case. Everyone has the right to education and ‘everyone’ is not a homogeneous group. Different students have differing levels of engagement, differing interests and differing cognitive ability. Common sense makes this clear enough: a student who wants to become a lawyer requires a fundamentally different education than someone who wants to be a surgeon, or run a construction company. Someone who thinks that school is the most important part of their lives at the moment cannot be taught in the same way as someone who is only in class to meet the minimum legal requirement of school attendance to keep their driver's license. Add on top of this that it is scientifically impossible to effectively teach people with certain neurological differences the same way. The conclusion is that the pop philosophy of the modern American school system is either incorrect or incorrectly focused.
The result of this is a classrooms full of students whose only educational similarity is that they are indeed students of roughly the same age. Teachers are told to compensate for this diversity through a concept called scaffolding:
“In education, scaffolding refers to a variety of instructional techniques used to move students progressively toward stronger understanding and, ultimately, greater independence in the learning process. The term itself offers the relevant descriptive metaphor: teachers provide successive levels of temporary support that help students reach higher levels of comprehension and skill acquisition that they would not be able to achieve without assistance.”
In summary teachers are to tailor make every lesson to accommodate every student regardless of that student's interest or cognitive ability. Though this is the ideal it is not an attainable idea. “Some Salem-Keizer class sizes are reportedly as high as 44 students per teacher” (Natalie Pate) and as Eric Miller, president of the Salem-Keizer Education Association has argued "Large class sizes effect student learning; they make it very difficult for teachers to provide individual attention to their students."
If a high school physics teacher wants to teach a simple lesson on gravity to a class of nearly forty students and guarantee that everyone is getting the most out of the lesson the teacher must go through a number of hoops. First a coherent understanding of each individual's reading levels, math levels, and cognitive ability. Next it might to helpful to be aware of the students social situation. If they have parents who both went to college and is decent at studying then the teacher can trust them to learn have read the homework and have no need of the structural support of “scaffolding” maybe they would benefit most from higher level reading, but if the student does not come from a collegiate family and is prone to headaches it might be important to check in every now and again to make sure that they are engaged in the activity. Another student is brilliant but has autism and has certain IEP requirements and it would be wise to give him some independent readings, maybe he would find a video helpful, but still check in on him to make sure he is not getting overwhelmed or distracted. Then there is the student who shows up once a week at the end of the class period, is there any way to reach her? Add on top of this ten IEP, five 504, and at least six anger management cases. Now please repeat this process seven more times, for seven more class periods. Keeping in mind that with a work day of 7:30 to 3:30 you have a total of one minute and nineteen seconds to spend per student per day and this includes prep, passing time, lunch and bathroom breaks.
This is, of course, a worst case scenario but the issue is real. The term educational equity is important to further understanding the problem:
“The term educational equality refers to the notion that all students should have access to an education of similar quality— the proxy for which is frequently educational inputs such as funding, facilities, resources, and quality teaching and learning. In contrast, the term educational equity connotes the requirement that all students receive an education that allows them to achieve at a standard level or attain standard educational outcomes.”
The accepted philosophy is, according to this source, that every students has the right to the same educational resources and outcomes. The troubles starts if you make the very short leap from resources and outcomes to method.
Method could be said to be the way resources are spent on each individual student, but as has been explored above the resources cannot be spent in the same way for each student as it fails to take into account the student's interests, ability, and ambitions as well as the teachers limitations.
Charter Schools and other comparable organizations, such as AVID, C-TEC, International Baccalaureate and many more represent an opportunity for students and teachers to change the nature of their education to meet their educational needs. C-TEC’s, or the Career Technical Education Center, official website makes the following claim:
“The Foundation for Educational Choice and the Cascade Policy Institute concluded that dropouts reduce Oregon’s tax revenue by $173 million per year, have higher Medicaid costs by nearly $219 million per year, and the cost of incarceration (2008) was $48.9 million, for a total of approximately $440 million. There is no doubt that the best outcome for every Oregon student is to achieve a diploma and Oregon CTE supports this with a 97% graduation rate.”
It goes on to say that “81 percent of dropouts say relevant, real-world learning opportunities would have kept them in high school” . AVID, International Baccalaureate and many charter schools that focus on things like science, humanities, and the arts boast the same claim. In spite of the fact that organizations like this have little in common in method and philosophy but they do boast the same general principles:
One, education to some extent must service the needs of society.
Two, everyone has the right to learn.
Three, not every student can be taught in the same way and by the same people so sometimes separate curriculum must be set aside so that the students can thrive.
And above all else these student participate in these programs because they want to.
“Student interest in a topic holds so much power. When a topic connects to what students like to do, engagement deepens as they willingly spend time thinking, dialoging, and creating ideas in meaningful ways. Making learning contextual to real-world experiences is a key learning technique with differentiating for student interests.” (McCarthy)
Students are not the same, they are individual and diverse. It is high time our educational philosophy reflect that. When like minded students work with like minded students this not only promotes greater participation among students, but it ensures efficient use of resources that ultimately benefit the student. The Principal of Howard Street Charter School explains:
“Sometimes when kids are struggling they have to have a reason to go to school, if you can get them there then you can really improve their learning. High School can’t be one size fits everybody, we all know that; we know not everybody's the same type of learner so why do we not have a CTEC or other options? I am very familiar with the European model; they have different tracks, “normal” school and “vocational” school and “college bound” and all these things because they know that kids may need a different path. There is nothing wrong with a different path if we are all trying to get to graduation. The end is the same: graduating, but how you get here might be different.”
The overwhelming consensus in research, philosophy, and common sense dictates that when allowed to celebrate diversity through free choice of education, grades, graduation rates, as well as the self-fulfillment of the student themselves. All three of these things, grades, graduation, and self-fulfillment, are things that the United States has striven to overcome since the cold war but has failed to do so thanks to our current educational dogma.
In a study published by the CATO Institute it was clearly demonstrated that after decades of increased spending in education there had been a zero percent change in testing outcomes, and in some cases testing scores had fallen. It was summed up perfectly by Andrew Coulson, director of the Center For Educational Freedom at the CATO Institute, he said “the take away from his study is that what we’ve done the past 40 years hasn't worked… Moreover there's no relationship, effectively, between spending and academic outcomes”(qtd in “Study: No Link Between School Spending, Student Achievement”).
Money doesn’t solve problems, what does solve problems is money and resources properly applied through an administrative system that takes into account the individuality of students learning styles.
The Charter School and alternative education movement in the united states offers just that. When Howard Street Charter Schools principal asked if she thought that the success of her school could be applied to public schools, she responded “The research that was done to start this school was about what was best for a public middle school, not a public charter middle school, and part of our success can be replicated in a bigger environment."
With this alternative philosophy, concretely proven as beneficial to student achievement, allowing for a branching of interests, and a diversity of pathways that could see the revitalization of American education that we have hungered after for so long. Not a Jeffersonian education, not a Babylonian education and not even a modern education, but an effective education.
