To Fix America's Education Bureaucracy, We Need to Destroy ItByApr 2 2012, 10:50 AM ET Successful schools don't have a formula, other than that teachers and principals are free to follow their instincts. America's schools are being crushed under decades of legislative and union mandates. They can never succeed until we cast off the bureaucracy and unleash individual inspiration and willpower. Schools are human institutions. Their effectiveness depends upon engaging the interest and focus of each student. A good teacher, studies show, can dramatically improve the learning of students. What do great teachers have in common? Nothing, according to studies -- nothing, that is, except a commitment to teaching and a knack for keeping the students engaged (see especially The Moral Life of Schools). Good teachers don't emerge spontaneously, and training and mentoring are indispensable. But ultimately, effective teaching seems to hinge on, more than any other factor, the personality of the teacher. Skilled teachers have a power to engage their students -- with spontaneity, authority, and wit.
Solving the nation's most entrenched problems
See full coverage
Good teachers typically are found in schools with good cultures.
Experts say you can tell if a school is effective within five minutes
of walking in.
Students are orderly and respectful when changing classes;
there's a steady hum of activity. Good school culture typically grows
out of good
leadership. Here as well, there are many variations of success. KIPP schools
have a formula that includes, for students, longer hours and strict
accountability to core values, and, for teachers, a cooperative
role in developing school activities and pedagogy. David Brooks recently
described a
highly successful school in Brooklyn that abandons the
teacher-in-front-of-class model in favor of collaborative learning.
Students sit around larger
tables trying to solve problems or discuss the task at hand. In
every successful school, whatever its theory of education, a good
culture sweeps
everyone along, as if by a strong tide, towards common goals of
discovery and learning.
Successful teaching and good school cultures don't have a formula, but they have a necessary condition: teachers and principals must feel free to act on their best instincts. Minute by minute, as they respond to students and each other, their focus must be on doing what's right. Humans can only focus on one thing at a time, sociologist Robert Merton observed. That's why it's vital for teachers to be thinking only about how to communicate the lesson to the students in front of them. Any diversion of this focus is apt to be seen as indifference or boredom, and will break the magic. This is why we must bulldoze school bureaucracy. It is a giant diversion, focused on compliance to please some administrator far away. Every minute spent filling out a form or worrying about compliance interferes with the human interaction that is the essence of effective teaching. Law is everywhere in schools. It permeates every nook and cranny. Teachers spend hours every week filling out forms that no one ever reads -- because the laws and regulations that have piled up over the years require them. Hardly any interaction is free of legal implications. Teachers are instructed never -- never ever -- to put an arm around a crying child: the school might get sued. Misbehavior and disrespect are met with weakness and resignation; teachers are trained to be stoics, tolerating disorder rather than running the risk of a "due process" hearing in which the teacher, not the student, must justify her decision. Principals suffer a similar inversion of authority with teachers, who are armed with hundreds of pages of work rules that prescribe exactly what teachers can be asked to do. Managing a school -- say, setting the hours, deciding how to spend the budget, and deciding which teachers are doing the job -- is an oxymoron. Public schools today are, by law, basically unmanageable. Throw onto the legal pile a mono-minded compulsion -- complete with legal penalties -- to satisfy minimum standardized test scores. Recess has been canceled, arts and humanities courses scrapped, and creative interaction replaced by rote drills -- largely because of one law, known as No Child Left Behind. Another unintended effect of focusing only on the lowest performers is that all the all the other students get left behind. Teachers are treated like machine tools, their personalities and passions extruded through rigid drilling protocols. Demoralization has never been considered a good management strategy, but that's what NCLB has accomplished. One teacher in Florida put it this way: "I love teaching, I love kids, but it's become harder and harder when you're teaching to the test. Can you hear the discouragement in my voice?" America's schools face many external challenges, particularly the breakdown of the nuclear family and an imbedded underclass. But numerous public, charter, and parochial schools succeed notwithstanding these challenges. What all these successful schools have in common is that somehow, usually with strong leadership, they figure out how to repress the bureaucracy and unleash the human spirit. "We have a great deal of freedom here," observed a teacher at a successful school studied by Sara Lawrence-Lightfoot, because the principal "protects his faculty from 'the arbitrary regulations of the central authority.'" The organizational flaw in America's schools is that they are too organized. Bureaucracy can't teach. American schools have been organized "on the totally erroneous assumption," management expert Peter Drucker observed, "that there is one right way to learn and it is the same for everyone." We must give educators freedom to be themselves. This doesn't mean they should be unaccountable. But they should be accountable for overall success, including, especially, success at socialization of students through a healthy school culture, not just objective test scores. This requires scrapping the current system -- all of it, federal, state, and local, as well as union contracts. We must start over and rebuild an open framework in which real people can find inspiration in doing things their own way. |
Reuters
Fixing Education: The Solutions
The consensus is clear: America's school
bureaucracy rots the quality of public education. Here's how we can move
forward and reform the system.
May 4, 2012
Reuters
What America Can Learn From Ontario's Education Success
In the last decade, the Canadian province
dramatically improved its education system to become one of the best in
the world. Its success can provide a blueprint for U.S. reform.
Reuters
The Clear Consensus on Education Reform: Voters Want Major Change
81 percent of the nation's electorate believe education bureaucracy needs systemic reforms
discpicture/Shutterstock
The Litigious Mess of Special Education
The Individuals with Disabilities Education Act has
helped millions of children. It has also bogged down the courts and
spawned a whole industry based on paranoia.
AP
Raising the Bar on the High School Diploma
As the chancellor of New York City's public schools
explains, graduating from high school is not necessarily the same as
being ready for college.
Reuters
Let Teachers Teach
The co-founder of the Knowledge Is Power Program
explains how charter schools may solve bureaucratic red tape in the
American school system.
Apr 30, 2012
Lia Koltyrina / Shutterstock
4 Common-Sense Proposals for Special Education Reform
Today's mandates for special-needs students set
schools up for lawsuits, conflict with No Child Left Behind
requirements, and waste taxpayers' money. Here are some alternatives.
Brandon Bourdages / Shutterstock
Politics and Education Don't Mix
Governors and presidents are no better suited to
run schools than they are to run construction sites, and it's time our
education system reflected that fact.
AP
Grade Retention and Other Dead-End Educational Policies
Why do we keep returning to ideas that have been proven not to work?
Reuters
The 3 Main Obstacles in the Way of Education Reform
Previous attempts have only piled more money on the heap of a broken system. We need transformative changes, not additive ones.
AP IMAGES
Are Lawmakers Asking Too Much of Our Schools?
Mandates have tied down educators' hands for too
long. Maybe we should re-examine the expectations of what schools should
even accomplish in the first place.
AP IMAGES
Alone in the Classroom: Why Teachers Are Too Isolated
Educators spend most of their time distanced from
their colleagues. Instead of forcing them to compete with each other, we
should help them find new ways to work together.
Reuters
The Paradox of Public Education
Schools are controlled by the government, but they
serve specific communities with niche needs. How can education be
publicly funded but privately managed?
Gamma-Ray Productions/Flickr
The Culture of 'Can't' in American Schools
Education leaders often act lazily, blaming union
contracts and federal regulation rather than confronting the problems
they have the capacity to solve.
Olly/ Shutterstock
How Micromanaging Educators Stifles Reform
We ask teachers for higher student achievement, but we don't trust them with the authority to make meaningful changes.
AP Images
Picking Up the Pieces of No Child Left Behind
The past decade has proven that teaching to the test doesn't work. Here's a look at what does.
Robert Adrian Hillman/Shutterstock
How Expanding Student Rights Undermined Public Schooling
Paralyzed by the threat of litigation, educators are often unable to strictly enforce rules.
ecastro/Flickr
Why School Principals Need More Authority
Under the current system, educational leaders have
all of the responsibility but none of the power. Allowing principals to
act like CEOs may foster a more efficient system.
Alan Smythee/ Flickr
To Fix America's Education Bureaucracy, We Need to Destroy It
Successful schools don't have a formula, other than that teachers and principals are free to follow their instincts.
Apr 2, 2012
No comments:
Post a Comment