I'm proud of my great, great niece -- Anna Victoria.

I’m compiling my posts from the last couple of years into a book — Lulu self-publishing makes it easy. This is a first try at a cover, with the picture of my beautiful great, great, niece.

When Anna is 19, in 2030, according to Ray Kurzweil, author of, “The Singularity Is Near,” she will be entering adulthood into a world stunningly different from what it is today. I write here: “Kurzweil predicts that by 2019 a computer with the capacity of a human brain will cost only $1000, by 2030 the process of “reverse engineering” the human brain will be completed and by 2045 the intelligence of computers will be billions times that of today’s humans. Kurzweil says human intelligence itself will increase many fold as humans gain intelligence via machine augmentations — nanobots and implants. He predicts human life expectancy will be multiplied many times and individual human consciousness merged with machines so completely that the consciousness of the individual will live forever.”

The premise of my book, “Kettering Public Education In The Year 2030,” is that I report from 19 years into the future about a community that develops a system of public education where babies, like Anna, in the transformed world in which they will live, are empowered to grow into their potential to be productive and happy citizens.

This whacky idea of speaking from the future, I’ve discovered, has already been developed by the conservative “think tank,” The Hoover Institute. See:

• Conservative “Think Tank” Predicts And Welcomes A Future Where Teaching Machines Dominate Public Education
• Chester Finn Predicts — By 2030 ALL American Children Will Be Able To Choose From A Wide Variety Of Educational Options. In his video, Finn starts by announcing: “It’s the year 2030 …”

My old posts will be the biggest part of the book — probably simply arranged chronologically. The first part of the book will be an expanded version of what follows — maybe, I’m being influenced by Netflix’s offering of BBC’s programs about the time traveler, “Dr. Who”:

Report From 19 Years In The Future:  Public Education In Kettering, Ohio, In The Year 2030 — First Draft

Greetings. You may wonder: Why Kettering, Ohio?

I thought it best to use this unexpected opportunity to visit the future to focus my attention on a system of education that is exemplary, a system worth copying. Certainly, if there is to be any hope for the future, it must come through education, enlightenment.

But, there is a deeper question — “Why Kettering?” — What happened? How did this particular community come to define for public education a whole new plateau of quality and success? What must a community do to emulate its success?

Yes, Kettering is an economically advantaged, stable community. But, this advantaged community succeeded in transforming its system of public education, when other advantaged communities failed to do so. My report will show that Kettering’s system of public education became transformed in tandem with its democracy becoming vitalized. What happened to Kettering’s democracy is a story to itself, but, the point to be made is, Kettering’s success proves, again: authentic communities that work together toward common goals can accomplish great things.

Because Kettering, via an active democracy, became a strong community, it was able to assert local control over its system of public education. It was able to come together to find and apply profound knowledge to answer two key questions:

1. What is the aim of public education?
2. How is the system organized to accomplish this aim?

In 1992, when I had a chance to interview the legendary “quality guru” W. Edwards Deming, I asked the great man how he would define the aim of schools. He gave this answer: “To restore and nurture the yearning for learning the child was born with.” (You can see the scanned article here.) The idea is, if a system can accomplish the aim of inspiring and empowering student motivation, then the accomplishment of every other educational goal will follow.

What I found in Kettering in 2030 was a community united around a very different aim for their system of public education than the aim of their 2011 system. And I found a system well designed to effectively achieve that aim with high quality.

In every aspect of education, there is a big contrast with Kettering’s system of education in 2011 and its system of education in 2030. In my extended report, I will compare the two in regard to:

• The definition of “common good.”
• A theory of how a system of public education advances the common good.
• The definition of “school.”
• A theory of what it means for a school to be considered “excellent.”
• The definition of intelligence.
• A theory of how to increase intelligence.
• The definition of individual potential.
• A theory of how individuals grow into their potential.
• The definition of effective citizenship.
• A theory of how the qualities needed for effective citizenship can be developed.
• A theory of human motivation.
• A theory of the organizational structure that will maximize motivation.
• A definition of “teacher.”
• A theory of how the pay of a professional teacher should be determined.
• A theory of how resources, in general, should be allocated.

Recent posts on this topic:

1. In Order To Reform Public Education, The First Task Is To See The Big Picture, May 11th, 2011
2. Humanity Is On A Wire — In The Future, Education Will Seek To Develop Character More Than Intellect, May 9th, 2011
3. Schools Of The Future Will Center On Development Of Virtue, The Whole Person, May 2nd, 2011
4. What Is The Educational System That Would Empower An Explosion Of Virtue?, April 21st, 2011
5. When Computers Are Billions Of Times More Intelligent Than Humans — What Should Be The Aims Of Education?, April 12th, 2011
6. Bob Sommers — Ohio’s New Director Of 21St Century Education — Explains His Vision Of The Future, April 6th, 2011
7. In Education, How Do We Accomplish More — While Spending Less Money?, March 25th, 2011
8. Who Should Control America’s Schools?, March 10th, 2011
9. What Is The Aim Of Our System Of Public Education — That Justifies Coercive Taxation?, March 9th, 2011
10. Ohio’s SB5 Provides The Greenspace Required For System Transformation — Needed: Profound Knowledge, March 4th, 2011
11. Our System Of Public Education Should Be Centered On Advancing “Liberty And Justice For All.”, March 2nd, 2011
12. Watson’s Jeopardy Win Should Force Us To Rethink Education And The Profession Of Teaching, February 18th, 2011
13. Transformation Of Public Education Is Possible Only Via Strong Communities Exerting Local Control, February 16th, 2011
14. Great Teachers — Through Their Behaviors And Attitudes — Serve As Good Role Models, January 6th, 2011
15. The Dumbing Down Of What It Means To Be A “Great Teacher” — Will Lead To Machines Replacing Teachers, January 5th, 2011
16. What Is The Public Education That Will Sustain An Ever More Successful America?, December 15th, 2010
17. ABC News Propagandizes That 5% Increase In Student Test Scores Would Boost U.S. Economy $41 Trillion, December 8th, 2010
18. If The Aim Of Public Education Is To Provide Opportunity — How Should $150,000 Per Student Be Spent?, November 22nd, 2010
19. Diane Ravitch Says Guggenheim’s Movie, “Waiting For Superman,” Is UnFair Propaganda, November 2nd, 2010
20. Strengthening Local Control Of Public Education Is Key To Achieving The Transformation That Is Needed, October 8th, 2010
21. To Bring Excellence To Public Education We Must First Engineer A Better System, August 16th, 2010

As I research material for the book I’m writing, “Kettering Public Education In 2030,” I’ve discovered that a distinguished and well funded “think tank,” The Hoover Institute, last year published an e-book, “American Education In 2030,” and also posted a series of videos with the same theme. In future posts, I intend to analyze this material, maybe incorporating some of these thoughts about twenty years in the future into my own project.

Chester E. Finn, Jr. serves as chair of the the Hoover Institute’s “Task Force on K–12 Education.” He is also president of the Fordham Foundation, originally a Dayton based foundation. Fordham has been an active supporter of charter schools in Dayton.

In this video, Finn predicts that by 2030 all American children will be able to choose from a wide variety of educational options. “Districts will no longer be operated by a single bureaucratic school system,” he says, “(parents will choose from) dozens of providers, operators of schools and learning institutions that have all kinds of contractual relationships with the district.” Here is a partial transcript:

It’s the year 2030 and world of school choice in American primary and secondly education has evolved dramatically from the old days of 2010. Almost every child in America is now able to exercise some kind of school choice. That’s up from about one-half of the kids, back in 2010 and they go to an astonishing rich variety of schools in 2030. …

Let me illustrate with Columbus Ohio, which has about 50,000 students in 2030:

• About 5000 (10%) students study at home, mostly on-line, occasionally with their parents. They have a wide variety of providers they can tap into from home
• About 10,000 (20%) attend what we might call old fashioned brick and mortar schools. They look like schools, they smell like the old fashioned schools with a teacher at the head of the class providing instruction.
• The rest of the students in Columbus, 35,000, (70%) attend an amazing variety of hybrid educational institutions in all sorts of physical facilities with partly on-line and partly face-to-face instruction. Some of these are akin to old fashioned schools by the way they look, but when you walk in the door they don’t feel that way. A lot of learning is taking place in a lot of different formats. And these schools are not operated by a single bureaucratic school system, but by dozen of providers, operators of schools and learning institutions that have all kinds of contractual relationships with the Columbus city and with the State of Ohio.

What has made this kind of change possible are six historical developments.

Six historical developments in the United States:

1. National standards and tests have made transparent the performance of each school as well as a lot of other information about it, so it is possible to get more and better information than it used to be, and many families are making better choices than they use to do.
2. School finance is now piggybacked on the back pack of each child in America. The money travels with the kid to the school of his or her choice — the State, local and federal money, too. Different amounts per child, depending on special needs, etc.
3. Charter schools take hundreds of different forms, all kinds of operators can contract with communities and states to operate different kinds of schools. School systems are no long big bureaucratic behemoths … rather they enter into these contractual relationships with educational providers of many different kinds.
4. Venture capital has become available for educational entrepreneurs. It wasn’t in the old days, but now with a whole lot of valuable changes in state and federal tax law, venture capital is now rewarding investment, just like it used to be in the old days when it was used for green technology and energy efficient cars and things like that.
5. Federal education policy has changed. Children who are eligible for help from the federal government — for example, disabled or very poor kids — the money travels with the kid. It no longer is sent to a district to be administered centrally. It is now part of that backpack that stays with the child as he or she attends a school of choice.
6. States have rewritten compulsory attendance laws., the rules that say you must go to school. Well, what is a school? It used to have a homogeneous definition. Now those laws have been liberalized so that many different educational providers qualify as “schools” for the purpose of satisfying the compulsory attendance requirement.

The upshot of all of this is that choice is now universally available to all American children and lots are taking advantage of those option, particularly poor and minority kids. And the remarkable news is that student achievement is beginning to inch up and achievement gap that has troubled us back in 2010 is beginning to narrow

This has been a promising and fruitful development for American education, and I’m really glad it’s happened between 2010 and 2030.

 

Conservative “Think Tank” Predicts And Welcomes A Future Where Teaching Machines Dominate Public Education, May 17th, 2011

Republican Governor John Kasich seems to be getting everything he wants from the Republican controlled Ohio Assembly. Kasich calls Ohio’s new biennial budget a “Jobs Budget.” Policy Matters Ohio calls it a “Seize, Slash and Sell Budget.”

Policy Matters Ohio is a “nonprofit policy research organization founded in January 2000 to broaden the debate about economic policy in Ohio.”

About Ohio’s new budget, Policy Matters Ohio says, “The budget seizes funding that usually goes to local government, libraries and schools, instead using it to fill gaps at the state level. It makes deep cuts to public education and diverts more public money for private schools. And it gives this governor and the administration much more power to privatize, reducing legislative oversight. The slash, seize and sell budget sells state assets financed by generations of Ohioans without assuring savings, a market rate of return or adequate service delivery.”

Policy Matters Ohio reports, that the biennial budget slashes:

• $2.1 billion from K12 education over the biennium
• $490 million from higher education’s state share of instruction.
• Kinship permanency program, which helped 8000 kids stay with grandparents and other kin, reduced by $2.7 million.
• Funding to counties for services for families who have adopted special needs kids.
• Early learning initiative cut $24.4 million.
• Child, family and adult protective services cut by 10%, $1.5 million.
• More seniors may receive care in their homes but face 23% cut in home service levels, 15% cuts to the Area Agencies on Aging that manage their care, plus cuts to provider rates.
• Low-level offenders are expected to serve sentences in the community instead of institutions, but the budget for community and parole services is reduced.
• Local government funds cut by 25% in 2012 and an additional 25% in 2013, reducing allocation by 50% and taking $441 million from municipalities, counties and townships.
• Another $563.4 million is seized from tax replacements for local governments, compared with prior biennium.
• $1.1 billion seized from tax replacements for schools, compared with prior biennium.

The budgets calls for the sale of state assets:

• Six prisons are to be sold.
• The state’s liquor wholesale business will be privatized.
• Provisions to privatize the turnpike are placed in the budget
• Privatization of economic development services is already in place through JobsOhio; actual outsourcing of funds and services pending.

Policy Matters notes In Ohio, “The largest tax cut in 70 years preceded the Great Recession. This tax cut took $2.1 billion a year from Ohio’s budget, but it did not bring jobs and economic activity.” Policy Matters says that Ohio needs to raise taxes on the wealthy and on businesses and should close tax loopholes. See report here.