Daniel makes stuff, and, in his spare time, writes about things like movies, kid culture, and geek stuff.
A Quick Fix for America's Worst Schools

By Gilbert Cruz for TIME Magazine.

Alright, a few quick thoughts here:

  1. There is no “Quick Fix” for education. If there was, we would’ve found it long ago.
  2. While I’ve been generally supportive of charter schools as a mechanism that would allow for a broader spectrum of educational philosophies and more focused school leadership – I don’t see how turning the charter school idea into, in essence, a corporate takeover of schools is at all a good idea. If the Duncan education department is serious about making charter schools work, they’ll have to lay out some pretty clear guidelines for parties who are interested in setting up charters (including the requirement that they be a nonprofit and articulate a clear educational vision and philosophy).
  3. We’re relying on the same criteria for measuring school performance as before when establishing charter schools, but not stopping to consider whether the measurement tool itself is faulty? Depending on your own purposes for education, there’s a valid argument to be made that you just can’t simply quantify the true benefits of education into testing and congregate school scores. Something more’s gotta go.

Mostly, though, I think if we’re to be serious about education reform, the number one question that has to dominate our efforts has to be: What is education really about?

The actual mechanism or mechanisms for how we enact education reform matter far less than the philosophy that drives our efforts. Education in Sweden and the Netherlands, for instance, operates on a voucher-based but seems to consistently fulfill their cultural expectations for education (as well as rank consistently high in global education ratings). Sure, I think there’s zero chance that a voucher system would be (immediately) a good thing in the states – but the point is, in Sweden and the Netherlands it seems to work fine as a mechanism, given their cultures and philosophic expectations of education.

I’m not providing much of a fleshed-out answer here, but I will say this: My instinct is that the real key to “fixing” education doesn’t at all lie in the mechanical elements of structure – but rather, in the cultural arena, with how we approach education altogether.

Feb 15, 2010 :: Tagged under: , , :: #