New ideas needed to improve education
POINT OF VIEW | MORE MONEY NOT THE SOLE SOLUTION
Raises of $5,000 are reasonable. The amount needed can be raised from resources that are available without raising taxes.
GLEANINGS
The most important thing we do in this life is educate our children. It is widely believed that we are failing. Employers complain that they cannot find qualified employees. Knowledge and education are the foundation of our economy.
Knowledge is wealth and power. With few exceptions, if you cannot read you cannot work. Pure manual labor is obsolete. If our country is to maintain economic leadership in the world and our superior standard of living, we must solve the problems with our education system. We can do it! It may require a larger portion of our gross domestic product. We must start thinking outside our current educational box.
For 15 years, my family has been giving the Brock International Prize in Education (brockprize.org) to laureates who have created, discovered or developed new ideas, concepts or teaching techniques in education that can be used by others to improve education. One thing I have learned is that there are many ways to teach and learn and that “one size doesn’t fit all.”
Sugata Mitra has demonstrated that the poorest, low-caste East Indian children, who have never attended a school or known anyone who has, can teach themselves almost anything. Geoffrey Canada (“Waiting for Superman”) has shown that you can change the ghetto experience of 10,000 students in the Harlem Children’s Zone. Salman Khan, a Bengali, has created the Kahn Academy which teaches, on the internet, nearly any subject from kindergarten through college to more than 500 million students around the world. Many University of Oklahoma engineering students use the Kahn Academy to assist them in math and science. Self-learning is the wave of the future.
It’s the job of our schools to facilitate our children’s learning. Learning must be fun. KIPP schools teach addition, multiplication, etc., by singing, not by rote. Singing is fun. Failing schools are not fun. To rescue them, we must make it fun to learn and to be in school. There are many new techniques to do this and our schools are adopting them. This requires change and change is difficult. It also requires motivated teachers.
Eighty percent of Oklahomans agree that our teachers should be receiving competitive salaries. Raises of $5,000 are reasonable. The amount needed can be raised from resources that are available without raising taxes. Let’s call on Gov. Mary Fallin to convene a special session and for the Legislature to respond to solve this immediate problem before the November vote on the 1-cent sales tax plan.
That plan is bad policy and bad precedent and contains seeds that will produce a crop of unattractive economic and political consequences. We need to break the cycle of giving more and more money to educational failure factories without the reform most agree is needed to improve student outcomes.