Education

 

By David Slautterback

 

1.                  The purpose of our public education must be to provide an equal opportunity to every single student for an excellent education.

 

            Equality among schools does not mean uniformity because they serve different student populations, different neighborhoods, different parents, different environments, and are controlled by different school boards.  Nevertheless, every school must be equal in infrastructure, educational resources, funding, administration, and excellent teachers.  While we believe in local control of public schools, it is especially important that the wealth of the school district not determine the funds available for schools, that regressive property taxes not be the primary revenue source for schools, and that state and national governments assume responsibility to assure that each child has equal educational opportunities regardless of the school attended. 

            It has become common to punish inadequate schools by removing students and resources via vouchers.  It is not clear how underfunding a school in trouble will make it a better school.  We do not approve of vouchers for that reason but for other reasons as well.  Vouchers often go to parochial schools that evangelize students, are not held to the same standards as public schools, and may “cherry-pick” their students leading to social stratification.  Laundering taxpayer money through a voucher would not seem to make it less offensive to the constitutional prohibition of supporting a religion.  We recommend that teams of excellent educators, administrators, and trainers be established to travel to underperforming schools to analyze the problems and have authority to bring appropriate and sufficient resources to return the school to excellence. 

            We believe that Charter Schools can be helpful, especially not-for-profit Charter Schools, but they should not be used in such numbers as to replace the public school system.

 

2.                  We appreciate the current emphasis on reading and math but it is clear that science, art, foreign languages, social studies and in some cases computer literacy are not receiving sufficient attention.

 

            Many Americans have no understanding of what science is, how it is done, or what can be expected from it.  It is important to recognize the role of uncertainty, innovation, and predictability in science and other disciplines for it is possible, even probable, that today’s facts will change when they are better understood in the future.        Further, appreciation of the role of meaning, creativity, and beauty in the visual, auditory, and literary arts is essential to intellectual development.  Participation in science and arts projects provides very valuable experience but should be accompanied by an analysis of each of the disciplines and how knowledge and understanding are achieved in them.  Also, the importance of thinking critically and challenging orthodox interpretations must be appreciated  

            Furthermore, it is evident from the behavior of the electorate, that it is not being generally understood that our government belongs to the people and not a ruling elite nor do people understand their civic responsibility.

 

3.                  Equal opportunity for excellent tertiary education is also essential to the future of our democracy.

 

            Access to our excellent university systems is at risk for the failure of our states to adequately support them or recognize their contribution to the state’s economy.  As a result, very high tuitions and other costs are precluding higher education for many students or burdening them with serious debt which may even lead to bankruptcy.  We strongly object to the move to privatize state universities.

            Education should be challenging, exciting, and liberating.  The purpose of education in a democracy is to enhance the actions of a self-governing, thoughtful, and responsible citizenry.  Such an education aims to prepare workers with the knowledge and skills to create new ideas in an expanding 21st century world; it does not aim to produce a quiescent and obedient workforce.

 

4.                  Opportunities for individual achievement through the exploration and development of individual interests and abilities.

 

            Public schools should offer a varied curriculum, rich in intellectually demanding activities and varied in content.  Teachers should discover students’ strengths and offer challenges in studies of natural and social sciences, history and mathematics and in participation in creative and cultural arts (music, visual arts, dance, drama, literature, foreign languages), computer literacy, and athletics. 

            Such a varied curriculum goes beyond routinized learning limited to exercises in reading, arithmetic, and test taking, to include conceptual understanding; it goes beyond listening, watching, remembering to include searching, discovering, analyzing, creating, participating in doing natural and social science, thinking mathematically, becoming cultural artists, using computers imaginatively, participating in athletics. 

            Such a varied and demanding curriculum requires teachers who are qualified in terms of their background knowledge and in terms of their technical professional abilities to teach to varied interests and abilities of students.  It requires staffing levels that permit knowing students as individuals and school spaces (classrooms, libraries, laboratories, workshops) and equipment that support all facets of the curriculum.

             This curriculum is for all our children, not merely for a fortunate elite few and it will require adequate local, state, and federal funding.

 

5.                  Teacher recruitment, preparation, and compensation.

 

             Teachers who can meet the demands of a varied and individually responsive curriculum must have great intellectual and creative resources.  We need to attract and recruit students for teacher education from among the most capable people attending the university.  That means that teacher education programs must be intellectually appealing and teaching as a profession has to offer its practitioners exciting and creative work and adequate compensation. 

            For example, qualified students can be offered incentives to become teachers through a system of loans with a percent of the loan amount being forgiven for each year taught in a school that serves rural or urban low-income families.  Teacher education strengthens its appeal to students when it is both academically demanding and practically oriented.

             Powerful teacher education programs have several characteristics in common.  The programs are built on a solid basis in academic studies in the fields to be taught; the programs include significant practical experience as supervised student teachers in schools; classes in professional studies model the kind of active, learner-responsive teaching that the program aims to produce in its graduates; there is active recruiting of students from many ethnic and cultural backgrounds, representing the variegated social fabric of American life; there is the use of teaching materials that increase students’  sensitivity to and skill in teaching successfully to social, ethnic, and cultural differences

 

6.                  Accountability, testing, and educational research.

 

            Schools have a responsibility to be accountable to their supporting public for the efficacy of their programs measured through the productivity of their students.  A varied curriculum of the type described earlier requires varieties of “tests” to assess student achievement.  Some of these may be standardized tests.  The value of standardized tests depends on their freedom from cultural bias and on who sets the standards and what these standards are.  Despite claims to the contrary, no standardized test has been shown to be unbiased against children from low-income families and children of families whose first language is not English.  In the “No Child Left Behind” program, each state determines the standards and these vary so much from state to state that failures in one state would easily pass the test given in some other states.  Yet the penalties for “failure” are the same.  These penalties are enough to encourage schools to commit huge blocks of school time to preparing students for tests in reading and math.  That is not the same thing as learning to think mathematically or understanding a scientific argument or learning to understand the development of a character in a novel. 

            The writing that students do, their use of mathematics to solve authentic problems, their organizing to learn about and deal with social issues, the books they read, the paintings and dances, the music and drama they perform, their athletic participation and school completion rates are all tests of student learning and individual development and these should be used, in addition to standardized tests, to hold schools accountable for the resources they use. 

            There is firm evidence that smaller class sizes (about 15 for Kindergarten-Grade 3) and an early school start (e.g. four-year-old entry) enhance the school performance of all children and especially children from low-income families, so if the goal is to close the performance gap between social groups, committing school resources to funding such programs is far more productive than committing the same resources to testing.  We need to assess student performance through standardized testing and through collecting other evidence, in a systematic way, of students’ abilities to achieve aspects of the varied curriculum. 

            We also need to commit resources to educational research that searches for reasons for good and poor performance and that explores the reaches of student possibilities for conceptual understanding and for achieving excellence in a variety of academic, artistic, and other practical areas of work.