school choice, school accountability, and the public purposes of education

I work at a private university, I am board chair at a charter school, and my kids go to public school.  Why? Because I believe that multiple types of schools make it more likely that students will learn.  But I also believe that multiple types of schools are most likely to move our communities towards the public goals that most people express for education--civic engagement, global competitiveness, personal responsibility, etc.

In the educational system that exists in most places in the US, the state controls most of the educational infrastructure, but the ends of education are generally private in that they focus on preparation for careers and on allowing students to study what they wish.  There is a required curriculum to be sure, but no common outcomes (besides, at the K-12 level, passing a couple of standardized tests).

So I'd like to make a common sense proposal.  In a time of limited resources, limited capacity, and huge need for more, improved education, let's stop fighting about which type of school is best.  And let's end the false debate between school choice and public accountability.  The needs are too large for a doctrinaire "solution" to education's problems.

Instead, let's do two things: 

(1) Make student access to education easier by radically expanding where students and their families can spend education dollars.  Or, in other words, states ought to quickly and massively expand voucher programs, both at the K-12 and higher ed levels.

(2) In order for those funds to be spent at a school, let's require that the school prove that its students are moving towards the public goals of education--that they understand the history of the nation and the community, that they serve, that they create, and that they know how to do math and science.  No evidence, then no access to public funds.

What are the likely results of such moves?  In the short term, some chaos as students and resources shift within the system.  In the longer term, three things; first, more students in the schools where they want to be, second, more variety in school type, and third, though the state would own less of the education infrastructure, greater attainment of the educational goals that are in the state's best interest.

Civility, tragedy, and silence

Two days before the shooting of Representative Gabrielle Giffords, one of our MBA students, Julie Ann Jorgenson, was killed in an auto accident.

Representative Giffords' shooting has elicited endless comment and discussion, most of it asking whether immoderate rhetoric leads to immoderate action.  The debate itself has become an emblem of the question, with all sides claiming the right to be aggrieved and highlighting the flaws in their opponents positions. The President is compelled to speak.  All sides agree that the question is something we ought to talk about.

Julie's death was a tragedy--unexpected and unfair.  Her funeral was two days ago.  There were tributes to Julie, but little talk about the questions raised by her death--is life fair? who is to blame? what can be done to ensure it never happens again?  Instead, the funeral was a tribute to her faith, and a time to express sadness and loss in song, and in prayer, and in silence.

In the Book of Job, within a few verses Job, a "perfect man", had every earthly thing taken from him--his wealth, and his children, and his health.  His wife urged him to curse God and die. Then he scraped his boils with a potsherd and sat in the ashes.

Three friends heard of his suffering and traveled to be with him.  "And when they lifted up their eyes afar off, and knew him not, they lifted up their voice, and wept; and they rent every one his mantle, and sprinkled dust upon their heads toward heaven. So they sat down with him upon the ground seven days and seven nights, and none spake a word unto him: for they saw that his grief was very great."

Once the seven days passed Job's friends interrogated him and Job responded with courage before them and before God.  But  those friends sat with Job in the ashes for a week, saying nothing in the presence of his grief.

Silence is an under-rated civic virtue.  It is one that pays tribute to tragedy, that acknowledges the inexplicable, that reminds that words are insufficient for most of the most important things in life--love, joy, pain, awe, suffering, sadness, transcendence, and death.

I know that there is some sort of civic duty that compels journalists and politicians and pundits and public servants to speak about public tragedies, to offer an opinion on everything under the sun.  But there is an equal human duty to fall silent before the suffering of others and rather than explaining, sit in the ashes and bear witness to grief.

Data sets, kids, and liberty to learn

The desire to "solve" the problems of education often elicits what could be called the "dream of the perfect data set."  The dream goes something like this: if we could somehow gather and organize all of the data we currently have we would see the solution to our educational problems.

You don't always hear the dream expressed as baldly as it is in this video, though.  In it, Jeff Edmondson, the President of Strive (an organization whose motto is "Every Child, Every Step of the Way, Cradle to Career") suggests that if we could somehow aggregate all of the data we have on kids we could set up systems that help them to full educational attainment, health, and success.

Edmondson's vision is noteworthy for two reasons:

1. it assumes that data speak clearly, and that aggregating data makes it more likely, not less, that we will understand the solutions to problems.

2. it assumes that it is OK for a person or people to look at all of the data and make decisions for the child--assigning the child a doctor, or a mentor at the moment the child needs it.

Both of these assumptions are troubling, the first because it imagines that at the individual and aggregate level, data are unambiguous, or that you can reason straight from data to a solution; the second because it proposes some sort of enormously powerful and wise organization who can implement the suggestions of data in the lives of kids.

Any parent would blanch at these suggestions, because they are false, because they propose that children in need should be open to systematic surveillance, and because they imagine that children and their families fail to make decisions about their lives based on good reasoning.

Edmondson argues near the end of his talk that it is possible to support "every child every step of the way."  Even if that were true, would it be wise?  Would children be better of because of it?  Would they be smarter?  Wiser? Healthier?  I doubt it.  I want children and their parents to make good choices as often as possible, and systems of schooling should encourage that.  But once they insist they know the right decisions, then they step beyond an educative role to something much scarier, and perhaps much less effective as well.

How does age matter in education?

As I write my house is full of kids--three of my daughters (ages 12 to 18) and four of my nieces and nephews (ages 2 to 8).  I am the only adult here.  I've been watching the kids interact, and seeing the mutual pleasure they find in being together.  Much of their play is about learning--how to play a particular video game, how to make lunch, how to keep track of each other, how to make sure that everyone is having a good time.

Their presence (and a recent conversation with my wife where she pointed out that we are potentially grandparent age (since two of our own children are now over 18) and that she would welcome the presence of some little kids around the place--yikes!) has me thinking about age and what it means for learning.

When my kids were smaller they went for a year to a non-graded charter elementary school called Sundance Mountain School.  (It continues to this date, though under a new name, Soldier Hollow Charter School.) I was never sure how good the learning was in a formal sense, but in terms of practical experience, there was something wonderful about 5 year olds and 12 year olds learning science and math together.

In this now-famous talk, Sir Ken Robinson makes the point that among the industrial-era absurdities of schooling is that students are grouped according to their "date of manufacture" rather than some more educational commonality (or difference).  It is among the practices that squashes the creativity out of people.

It seems like colleges would be a place where we could learn about the roles of age in learning.  After all, most classrooms include students with different dates of manufacture, and particularly in schools where there are many non-traditional students, the age gaps can be quite significant.  But there is no reform movement or pedagogical approach (that I know of) that attends to age (with the possible exception of freshman learning communities which group students by age, sometimes to the frustration of faculty who think it makes the classroom "too much like high school.")

Is it the case that once a person reaches, say, 18, that age no longer matters and therefore we make nothing of in in higher education?  Are we losing potential learning by just assuming that the age system (which, for example, mandates that you have to be between 17 and 19 to start college) makes sense?  Is there some reason to accept things as they are?

Emergent education, or, Can friends start a college?

There is a long tradition in American civic life--one that I love.  It is the tradition of small groups of people, friends often, co-religionists sometimes, bonding together to respond to a social problem.  Many things might come out of that response--laws, for example, or organizations, or movements, or communities.  But at the core, these responses have always been organized around an ethos of friendship.

The intellectual history of the tradition runs from Tocqueville through Mary Parker Follett and Jane Addams to Jane Jacobs and Myles Horton and Ella Baker to Steven Johnson.  The organizational history runs from frontier towns to community organizing and social settlements and folk schools to the civil rights movement and into the movements of today.

Today some of the most important thinking and organizing in this tradition is coming out of evangelical Christianity under the umbrella of "the emergent movement."  Emerging Christian organizations have eschewed mega-churches and literalism and are focused on building Christian community out of questions and friendships.  Doug Pagitt puts it this way in An Emergent Manifesto of Hope: "The emergent imagination is at its most basic level a call to friendship--friendship with God, with one another, and with the world."

When we talk about trends in education today, we tend to focus on structure and infrastructure: charter schools, standardized testing, technology, for-profit higher ed, assessment and accountability.  There is some value in this.  But in doing so, it masks the cultural changes that are going on in schooling.

One major cultural tendency is towards standardization, efficiency, and systems.  That tendency runs through all of the structural trends in education--systems of charter schools, national tests, system-wide adoption of technology, etc.  It is largely about measuring outcomes to create a one-size-fits-most way of education. It values the involvement of parents, students, teachers; but largely as choosers.  Pick this school or that one; select this curriculum or that. Leadership is traditional--one person or a small group of experts in charge.  Elected or selected.

The other cultural tendency is towards emergence, relationships, and ecosystems as the basis of education. Where the systematizing trend focuses on choice as involvement, emergent education focuses on co-creation as involvement.  It  can be seen in charter schools, those started by collections of parents and educators who want better options for "their kids."  It underlies the way that home-schooling is no longer a parent teaching her/his own kids at home, but instead a network of parents taking that role, and meeting to share curriculum, go on field trips, or expand educational offerings.  It is hidden in some portions of the open learning movement  and in some versions of technology-enabled education. It is behind collaborative creation of curriculum, and behind efforts to improve advising. It creates flat organizations and has little organizational structure.  People lead where they can lead--they play the role they seek (and are best prepared) to play.

One wonders, though, if it has any chance in higher education.  One would hope so, since higher ed is the home to some of the worst results of big, efficient, standardized education.  But I know of no instance in the recent past where a group of friends got together to talk education and ended up starting a college.  This sort of thing happened a lot in the 19th century, where many small towns had their own locally grown colleges.  Can it happen today?  Can a college emerge?

10 reasons why general education should come at the end, not the beginning, of college

Nearly every campus in the United States front-loads general (or liberal) education.  At many schools, students take all of their GE courses in the first two years on campus.  Even those schools whose GE programs include upper-division courses place most of the GE credits in the freshman and sophomore years.

Here are some key reasons why schools should consider reversing the GE/major sequence:

1. Students arrive with an inherent mis-understanding of GE.  Several years ago my colleagues at BYU and I polled freshmen on their views of GE.  Most thought it was a continuation of high school.  Of course, many students treat the courses as a continuation of high school.

2. More and more students bring AP credits with them to college.  Those credits routinely count for GE courses, thus causing havoc even with the best-designed GE curricula (or if a school decides to accept AP credit only for placement and credits toward graduation, then the AP/GE problem breeds resentment).

3. Passion leads to engagement and retention.  Most students coming to college have some passion in the curriculum.  Front-loading GE defers real engagement with a student's areas of passion, replacing it with courses that the student may not engage with.

4. Faculty mentoring is essential for engagement and retention.  And the more closely that mentoring is attached to a student's passion and major, the more durable and meaningful the relationship.  Some students find their mentors in GE.  Many more find them in their major.

5. Employment prospects depend on working in the field prior to graduation.  More and more employers expect that their new hires have meaningful work experience prior to hiring.  Placing the major at the end of the curriculum means many students do not get that meaningful work prior to graduation because they are not prepared for it.  Completing the major by the end of the junior year gives students a year to begin working in the field (be it in paid or unpaid jobs) prior to going on the market.

6. Employers want students with GE skills--communication, critical thinking, teamwork, etc. They are generally disappointed in what their new employees bring.  There are two curricular reasons why this is the case.  First, most of the GE skills get practiced in the first two years of college, but only vaguely or implicitly reinforced in the major.  Second, many of these skills are discipline-specific.  Placing a substantial portion of GE after the major ensures that the student will be able to connect their major to the GE skills they practice at the end of their college experiences.

7. GE is about making connections across the disciplines.  When students don't know the disciplines, they are hard to connect.  Students know little about the disciplines in their first couple of years.  And they certainly don't know enough to connect their area of passion--their major--to the disciplines until after substantial engagement with that major.

8. Students need an opportunity to sum-up prior to going into the world.  A key part of GE is reflecting on learning, summing up and taking stock of how one fits into the world.  With a GE-first model, that sort of purposeful, curriculum-based summing up is rare.

9. Colleges need a chance to make their case to students.  Most colleges and universities believe that important things happen to students in GE.  They become more mature, they join the human conversation, and they understand how life at a particular college helped shape them.  These beliefs are by-and-large true.  But if GE is doing this in the first couple of years, by the end of the college experience the student may not associate these outcomes with the college, but instead with the major.  If colleges want to hang onto their alumni, GE at the end helps.

10. Students are ready to engage with the big questions at the point of graduation.  Anyone who has taught a freshman seminar and a senior seminar on the same topic knows that the discussion and learning are richer at the senior than the freshman level.  If GE is in part about these big issues--justice, community, truth, beauty--then the time to focus on them is when students are ready.  Or in other words, at the end of their college experiences.

Generosity, debt reduction, and civic life

Rates of personal debt and corporate debt are in decline.  Rates of personal savings and corporate savings are up.  Banks are "sitting on" (whatever that means--odd phrase) over one trillion dollars of excess reserves; corporations 3 trillion.

The decline in indebtedness is generally seen as a good thing--a reassertion of the old American value of thrift, a marker of the end of "consumer culture."  I understand this. And I am pleased that banks are re-capitalizing. But I wonder what it means in the context of this fact: in this difficult economic time, rates of personal giving are down, (see also here and here) even while need is up.

Of course the simplest explanation is that people's budgets are tighter, and so they can give less.  Or its variant, that with unemployment at 9.6% there are simply fewer people who can share their wealth.  I am willing to accede to this argument.  But only up to a point.

Because one thing underlies both debt and giving--the belief that making a promise to another entity about our future behavior is a good thing.  Taking out a loan is, at its most basic level, a wager that things will be better in the future.  You make that assumption by connecting with an entity--a bank perhaps, but as often a family member or friend--which is willing to invest in you on the assumption that things will get better too.  (After all, no one loans money on the assumption that it will not be repaid.)

Generosity carries the same assumption--that in giving, both the recipient and the giver will be better off.  The improvement takes place in three places: in the life of the recipient, in the life of the giver, and in the relationship between the two of them.

So when lending and giving are down, there are impacts beyond the economic ones.  And key among those impacts is the effect on civic life.  When there are fewer connections to other people, civic life becomes coarser, less intertwined, more selfish.  We certainly see this in politics; if the decline in giving and lending is being occasioned by a decline in the willingness to wager with others on a better future, we will soon see it in our communities as well.