I recently made a suggestion to my niece that she tackle this question as a project in her graduate school class: “What is the best future for public education and how can this future be accomplished?” I also sent my niece a link to my little on-line book — Public Education In 2030 — that organizes selected articles I wrote over the last ten years that together show some of my thoughts about how this important question should be answered.
When I unsuccessfully sought election to the Kettering Board of Education, seven years ago, for the League of Women Voters Voter Guide, I wrote, “The biggest challenge for the Kettering School Board is to inspire and empower teachers and citizens to work together to define system excellence and to create a plan for long-term transformation that will result in a great future for public education in Kettering.”
After failing to be elected to the school board, I resolved I would not try again for election until I could present Kettering voters with a specific plan that would address the challenge I indicated in my response to the LWV. I determined to write a plan called “Kettering Public Education In The Year 2022: How Do We Get To A Great Future?” (I later changed the date to 2030.) This was to be a solitary effort. As it turns out, I’ve done little to work on this project and my note to my niece underlined to me of how lazy I’ve been. I feel convicted that I need to honor my promise to myself and follow through with what my heart and head tells me to do about this matter.
Kettering is prosperous and stable, with many civic minded citizens. It is known for its active volunteer program and for its consistent and generous support of its local schools. For many reasons it would be an ideal community to show leadership in creating a new model of public education. These are the six steps I’m proposing:
- Make a detailed analysis of the current system of public education in Kettering in terms of program and budget. Identify the aim of the system and explain how resources are used to accomplish that aim.
- Make predictions of the future state of the system, based on established trends in the system.
- Make a detailed analysis how technology can be expected to change in the next ten and twenty years; make an analysis of how this change in technology will impact economic opportunities, and how this technology will impact systems of education.
- Determine what the aim of the system should be to best meet the challenges of the future.
- Propose a system structure that will most effectively use resources to accomplish the aim of the system.
- Outline a ten year process for changing the current system into the transformed system.
To complete these six steps with convincing competence is a huge task. Rather than making this a solitary effort, my thinking now is that the best way to proceed is to invite the public to help. My goal is to outline a ten week study — meeting once each week, starting in January — that would involve presentations by experts who have experience and research to share in an effort to complete these six steps. These study sessions would be posted on the internet and there would be structured an online discussion / forum open to participants who are part of the study.
To finance the participation of experts and researchers needed to make this study a success will require a budget. I’m thinking that if I could prepare a proposal in sufficient detail, showing who the teachers in this study would be, how research on these questions would be conducted — and the financing that would be required — the project could get the needed financial support via a crowdsourcing web-site like Kick-starter or Indiegogo. This crowdsourcing effort would be the beginning of bringing together a core group of citizens who support investigating the question: “What is the best future for public education and how can this future be accomplished?”
My experience as a teacher left me with a compelling desire to help transform the current system of public education to something much better. Here at age 68, I’m impressed more and more that if I’m going to make the effort, it is now or never. My goal: create a ten week study and design a crowdsourcing pitch to fund the study. Making these thoughts public today is my way of pushing myself .
Mike,
I think the error in your approach is to assume that some overarching government organization needs to be involved in the details of the education process. That inherently has problems due to the bureaucracy of government and the cost burden of public unions. I think a better title would be along the lines of “How can we get competition and choice into Kettering K-12 education?” By giving parents choices in a competitive environment, the problems with bureaucracy and ever increasing costs will be reduced. And the pursuit of innovative transformation will be inherent in the competitive nature. The biggest problem with “public schools” is that they are “government schools” and they basically have a monopoly for the public funds. Your approach is dealing with symptoms of the problem and you’re essentially rearranging the deck chairs. The problem is the “government” part of it.
Mark, Thanks for your comments. I’d be glad to dialogue with you. However, in this response, you are making some wildly inaccurate assumptions about my POV. These inaccurate assumptions lead you to conclude: “Your approach is dealing with symptoms of the problem and you’re essentially rearranging the deck chairs.” You must have some reason for arriving at that assessment, but I can’t imagine what it is. In this post, I give this link to download a PDF of my 46 page little book — Public Education In 2030 — that uses articles I’ve written over the last ten years to summarize my approach, my POV, to transforming public education. If you are interested in understanding my POV, please consider reading this collection.
I agree that the question you suggest — “How can we get competition and choice into Kettering K-12 education?” — is a key question to ask and that a better designed system would somehow incorporate the power of competition and choice as part of its system design. But, the key to transforming a system is to identify system aim. Adding competition and choice as a means to advance the current aim of the system would be woefully inadequate and as much of Ohio’s experience with charter schools has demonstrated, in fact, could make a bad system even worse. Transformation means that a system begins to focus its resources on accomplishing a new aim. I write about this in my little book. Competition and choice needs to be part of the discussion, but a better place to start, in my analysis, is the more general question that I shared in this post, originally suggested to my niece for her research in a graduate level education class: “What is the best future for public education and how can this future be accomplished?”