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COPYRIGHT 2006 Hoover Institution Press
The past few years have seen a whirlwind of developments in school reform. Dramatic efforts to upend the 20th-century model of local schooling--among them, increased accountability and charter schooling--have made considerable advances. What if we look a little further out? To the near future, a place we can almost touch. What will it take to create schools that are efficient, effective, and equal to the challenges of the 21st century? In this forum, two veteran observers--one a savvy entrepreneur, the other a leading scholar--take a look at the world of schooling circa 2030, sharing two widely different perspectives on what education is likely to look like and what that means for school reform today.
Dramatic Growth Is Possible
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Untangling education's Gordian knot
Until Thomas Friedman recently discovered otherwise, we believed the world was round. We also thought that phone calls had to travel through Ma Bell wires, and that your operator would be in Des Moines, not in New Delhi. Remember when we had just three daily television news programs, one with father Walter, and all at precisely the time when only our grandmothers could watch? And are you bothered that now anyone can see what's on your rooftop or in your driveway, anytime, via Google Earth? Does all this change, turmoil, even progress, concern you? Is your world being rocked?
Don't worry; if you need a fetal-like retreat to times gone by, there is a place you can find respite: your childhood school is still here. Even if the old buildings are gone, your old daily routine within them has been superbly, if unconsciously, preserved to a degree that would make King Tut beam brighter than the gold in his tomb. And not only can you return to your school-day experience just by visiting your children's schools; at the rate change is occurring in education, your great-grandchildren will attend the same ones!
The point is simple: how we educate our children today is remarkably similar to how we educated them decades ago. Perhaps more than any other modern-day institution, schooling is nearly impervious to change. If our "old school design" was working with a high degree of consistency and reliability, such inflexibility might be fine. But decades of facts say that it isn't fine. Results from the most recent National Assessment of Educational Progress (NAEP) show that roughly 15 million American children--more children than reside in all of England--are achieving below basic levels of literacy and numeracy. If the scale of this number concerns you, you should find it even more troubling that it has been that way for decades. And our problems don't stop with the children most in need. Even our best students are falling behind, in international comparisons and at home. Among the "talented tenth," those in the top 10 percent of NAEP test-takers, reading scores have dropped four points since 1971, and math scores have not budged since they were first measured in 1978 (see Figure 1).
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Simply put, we are not making the grade at the bottom or the top.
Why Things Stay the Same
Why does America seem so unresponsive? Let me suggest three reasons.
First, because "numb" is the root word of numbers. We have lost our outrage (if indeed we ever had it) about the deplorable statistics noted above. Education inadequacy is not sexy. Illiteracy is not sudden in its cause nor quick with its solution and thus lacks the "production values" highly desired by our ratings-craved media. Illiteracy can't compete with Katrina, 9/11, Iraq, or even a good Supreme Court nomination fight. Sure, there's the obligatory annual story in most news vehicles about "our education crisis," but contrast that to, say, round-the-clock, multiple-week coverage of a devastating hurricane. Our sound bite--oriented media find it far too complex to connect what is going on in our schools with the possibility of a 21st-century, full-eclipse of the American economy, imported from the Pacific Rim. Let C-SPAN or PBS do that kind of dull coverage.
A second reason is the colossal, $400 billion per year status quo that makes the military-industrial complex look nimble by comparison.
The third reason for our inaction is even more important: America does not believe there is a "next" generation of schools. What, we think, could be that different in schools of the future? We might change the calendar around, pay teachers a little more, update the curriculum, but none of those things is that big a deal. After all, schools are schools are schools.
A Failure of Imagination
I've now been involved in the world of public education for 15 years, as the founder and CEO of Edison Schools, one of the country's first private companies to take on the challenge of improving public schools. If Edison, which now works in various ways...
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