By John Bebow - January 11, 2008
Michigan rates a barely-above-the-national-average C-plus in Education Week's 12th annual "Quality Counts" national benchmarking report.
Michigan gets great marks for standards, assessments and accountability, but terrible marks for K-12 achievement and the teaching profession (in part because teacher evaluation is not tied to student achievement and few performance incentives are provided for teachers.)
One of the best education journalists in Michigan, the Kalamazoo Gazette's Julie Mack, considers year-round schooling as one possible solution to assure Michigan students keep up with the rest of the world...
"What's necessary, educators say, is a wholesale rethinking of the traditional school calendar, with built-in options to expand the number of school days," Mack writes. "It would be expensive. It would be a radical change for students, parents and school employees."
And, speaking of Kalmazoo, the Chicago Tribune reports that more than 20 cities nationwide are pursuing their own versions of the groundbreaking Kalamazoo Promise tuition guarantee program.
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Breaking ties with traditional calendars is just one of the essential changes required to convert our schools from the factory model, widget producing enterprises that schools have become. This type of change will align education with the world schools allege they are preparing our children for.
As the article indicates, each child requires different amounts of time and different entry points to the acquistion of knowledge.
But the focus on the child (or a parent or a teacher)as the problem, or as the barrier to "efficient" (another wrong headed goal) educational practice, is very, very wrong; and continued perception of the child as the focus of our current malaise will continue to lead us down the wrong pathway to authentic learning.
It is now scientifically understood that each child presents a unique perspective and cognitive process to the learning environment created and presented by the logical-linguistic adults that structure both process and curriculum. (A remarkably linear view of a very non linear process)
Look at 'logical-linguistic" as only one perspective from which to view and assess education and you will begin to see its shortcomings; the most significant of which is the tendency of this world view to put almost two thirds of the student population in our schools on any given day - asleep. Or, if you prefer, brain dead, unable to learn. It is not the teacher nor is it the student. It is the product of a SYSTEM OF EDUCATION designed in the 1800s and only tinkered with since that time.
Like saying that continued design and development of the ICE will resolve our dual problems of pollution and a shrinking supply of fossil fuels.
Those who populate the profession and bureaucracies of education must learn to observe the realities of their chosen vocation while concurrently suspending their belief in logical-linguistic as the only way to deliver education.
And those who are groaning that this will cost too much; suspend your allegence to that fallacy. For the assumption that changing the currently dsyfunctional system will cost more is wrong!
And if you did not understand the previous comments ask yourself seven times "Why?" the current system only graduates 70% of their customers.
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