Doing Our Part

I know. You are just one person. Today, however, I want to suggest how each of us, wherever we are, can be the change agent that we need to be for public education. A confluence of two occurrences over the last few days serve as provocation for my thoughts today.

Occurrence One. Thursday morning I attended the Wake Education Partnership Annual Breakfast. My friends at the Partnership tell me that they spend most their time each year either preparing for or following up on the Breakfast. It is that important.

Thursday's event was especially remarkable because of the presentation by someone whose work I have long admired--Tony Wagner of Harvard University. Wagner began his remarks by asserting that the alliance of educators, business people, and elected officials, such as the present audience, uniquely has the capacity to address the approaching catastrophe posed by public education's position between a "rock and a hard place."

The rock, explained Wagner, is the need for new career, college, and citizenship competencies involving the application of knowledge across disciplines. Public education has a habit of neither teaching nor testing students in applying knowledge, much less doing it across disciplines. The hard place, he said, is the "net generation" whose occupants are "on" 24-7, driven by social connection and self-expression, and fearless in the face of authority.

Bottom line: If the United States is to regain a competitive standing among the world's nations, said Wagner, we must teach students to think beyond the fact-based system in which both they and their teachers are imprisoned. Wagner's ideas are advanced in his new book, The Global Achievement Gap: Why Even Our Best Schools Don't Teach the New Survival Skills Our Children Need--and What We Can Do About It. 

Occurrence Two. Last week, I finished reading Diane Ravitch's The Death and Life of Public Education: How Testing and Choice Are Undermining Our Schools. As a graduate student and part-time SERVE employee in the early 1990s, I met Dr. Ravitch, then Assistant Secretary of Education in the George H. W. Bush administration. From her professional home at the Office of Educational Research and Improvement in Washington, Ravitch flew to our University of North Carolina at Greensboro education R&D laboratory to check up on us.

We did our best to curry favor with our federal boss by preparing a home-cooked barbeque dinner with all the fixings. We may as well have taken her to the campus cafeteria. At one point in the evening, Ravitch sniffed to our executive director as he attempted explain to her the high standards of professional transparency to which SERVE strove, "Roy, in Washington you get no points for honesty." It might be said of Ravitch that, neither then nor presumably now, is she one who suffers fools lightly.

Imagine my surprise then when I read a book review suggesting that quite simply Ravitch, now in her 70s, was blowing up everything she had stood for to that point. The reviewer was right. The old Ravitch: Vouchers--not a bad idea. Charter schools--bring 'em. Accountability--slack teachers need it. The new Ravitch: Market-based education is tantamount to market-based law enforcement--an untenable idea that will result in a nation of have and have-not schools where have-not students grow up to be economic albatrosses, moral implications of failing to "keep your brother" aside.

And testing? She could have been reading a page from Wagner's book. Perfectly well-intended people, she says, have created a fill-in-the-bubble testing system that demands nothing of what 21st century citizens and workers require.

And teacher merit pay? Don't get her started. Have we learned nothing from the recent mortgage melt-down debacle whose Wall Street architects were rewarded for bringing down the house? Systems built on extrinsic rewards, Ravitch reminds us, invariably get gamed.

Bottom line: I'm thinking that if a smart, sassy, self-assured old bird like Professor Ravitch can change her mind, then there is hope for the rest of us.

To conclude, what can you do? First, acquire and devour Wagner and Ravitch's books. Their concluding chapters are themselves recommendations for action. Two, listen critically to what elected officials say about public education. In a nation of 55 million school-aged children, the private sector will never be able to serve even half of them. The numbers just don't add up. Third, when experts talk about school reform, think re-invention. I agree with even the most ardent free-market critics of public education that the system is broken and needs rebuilding. It's just their solutions with which I disagree. Fourth, turn down the volume and listen to those whose opinions you do not share. Attending to them is not the same as agreeing with them. My last suggestion is easy. Let's act like the grownups we want our children to become.