Here is the interesting question: Suppose my local community came to be united in a common vision of the purpose / aim of public education — the aim I suggested here,

Our only hope is that the coming generations are more mature, more thoughtful, more aware, more politically active, more compassionate than the generation now in charge. Our hope is that coming generations will be full of thoughtful citizens and visionary leaders. Such should be the aim of our educational system.

a community, so united, would ask questions like these:

1. What criteria could we use to judge whether or to what degree our system of public education is accomplishing such an aim?
2. In a system with such an aim, how should teacher professionalism be defined and what is the design of a system where such teacher professionalism will flourish?

A school system that seriously pursued accomplishing a more holistic aim would stop spending resources on raising test scores and as a result may slip in the state ratings. Local control would mean that a local community would have the guts to reject the state’s criteria, and, instead, agree as a community to evaluate the local system of public education using the community’s own standards.

Our only hope for a happy future is via an energized democracy. I’d like to imagine that Kettering’s current system of public education by 2030 is transformed into an innovative system, one with stunning results and national recognition. The Kettering superintendent in 2030, I imagine, might say: “It all started in 2011 when somehow Kettering began to activate local control ….”

It seems inevitable in the next 20 years, humanity, like some crazed adolescent will flip off the road and crash — drunk on ideology, speeding on religious zealotry, prejudice and ignorance — and the fact that the drivers will have been highly “educated” will have been of no help.

If somehow humanity survives, the next 20 years will bring about astonishing advances in technology and in scientific knowledge. The big hope for humanity is that the new generations coming up will be better than the generations of their forefathers and will have the capacity and the desire to use the enormous new opportunities presented to them to build a wonderful country and world. The accomplishment of this big hope will require a revolution in education that will result in a more complete development of human potential.

Our capitalist culture sees a fully developed human as someone who is financially successful, someone who can out compete others and win in the market place. The aim of our education system reflects this capitalist culture and the production of a few winners and many losers by the education system reflects this culture. In President Obama’s SOTU speech, for example, he said we need to “out educate” so we can “out compete” other nations. This narrow focus on competition underlies the entire educational system.

We need to be rescued from an educational system that is delivering the results we see today — where those who have bested the competition, those most successfully “educated,” are those who are driving us off the cliff. Our only hope is that the coming generations are more mature, more thoughtful, more aware, more politically active, more compassionate than the generation now in charge. Our hope is that coming generations will be full of thoughtful citizens and visionary leaders. Such should be the aim of our educational system. But our capitalist culture isn’t interested in producing a mature and thoughtful citizenry.

The hope for our democracy is that somehow a “democratic” culture can gain control of public education and transform the system to reflect democratic values and principals. It is the premise of the book I’m stewing about — “When Anna Is Nineteen: Public Education In Kettering, Ohio, In The Year 2030” — that in Kettering such a transformation actually occurs.

I sent the following e-mail to my state senator, Peggy Lehner

Dear Peggy Lehner, Congratulations on being chosen Ohio Senate Education Committee Chairperson. As a long time Kettering resident, I am proud of you.

You have a great platform to focus the public’s attention on important issues concerning K-12 education in Ohio. You are probably getting a lot of suggestions, so, I hope you will add the suggestion from this e-mail to the list.

One important function of government deals with the setting and monitoring standards. We have a lot of confidence, for example, in the high standards for quality and safety of food that is government inspected. In government inspected schools, however, citizens have little reason to have confidence in the evaluation process. We have a situation where school after school is deemed “excellent” when even a casual observation shows that the school is far from excellent.

If the state government, via the Ohio Department of Education, takes responsibility for evaluating local schools, then it should take its responsibility seriously. It is clear that in Ohio, “excellence,” as determined in the Ohio Report Card system, is equated with minimum scores in core curricular areas on objective tests from a sufficient number of students. Ohio has a very low standard for judging what schools are “excellent.”

Low standards for “excellence” perpetuates complaisance. In 2009, I sought election to the Kettering School Board and, as part of my campaign, said, “Public education needs transformation.” Schools like Kettering should be working hard to break through to new levels of quality. The transformation that is needed will be difficult to achieve, why make the effort? Why disturb the comfort of those working and happy in the current system?

I heard a school board candidate in an adjacent school district say that since his district already was “excellent,” if elected, he simply would work to maintain the status quo.

The problem is, the status quo, in even the highest rated districts is simply not good enough. Somehow, we need to elevate the discussion about public education by asking, “How can you tell if a school is excellent?” We need to elevate the discussion about public education by finding new criteria for evaluating schools.

I’m thinking the Senate Education Committee would be a great venue for such a discussion, and I’m hoping you might inquire within your committee if there would be support for planning a hearing that engaged experts in discussing the question: “How can you tell if a school is excellent?”  Imagine the witnesses you could call to talk about how to think about excellence in education, about how to design benchmarks for excellence, and about how to improve Ohio’s current system of school evaluation so that every school is motivated to continually improve.

I hope sometime I can discuss this idea with you in more detail.

Sincerely, Mike Bock