Who’s teaching what?
Life in America in 2021 is drastically different than it was in 1921, so who would expect schools to look or work even remotely the same? Nobody, except a timeworn bureaucracy that’s most concerned with maintaining its status quo.
A century ago, no kids had smartphones in their purses, pockets or backpacks. No kids had Google. Few kids in rural Arkansas even had electricity, and many still had outhouses. Travel speed was measured in the low tens of mph. Two-parent households were the rule by a 20-to-1 margin; many extended-family households had three or more adults.
The main aim for schools was to produce graduates to meet expanding industrial-era needs; conformity in class and curricula prepared them well for factories and assembly lines.
Everything’s changed in a child’s life in 2021—except the trappings of systemized teaching: classrooms with rows of chairs and one instructor, in a school that breaks instruction down in periods through the day, all organized around 12 grades to correlate with students’ ages.
Virtually everything can be dissimilar for groups of kids (family structure, income, dwelling, background) and their neighborhoods (home values, cleanliness, economic level, safety), but education experts still insist that standardizing schools is the way to teach them.
Educrats clinging to centralization and uniformity in the system are looking top-down, from an archaic administrative perch. Schools should be re-imagined from the ground up, to most effectively serve the children in that district.
The school for poor inner-city children may not need to look anything like the one for affluent suburban neighborhoods and even less like the one in agrarian rural areas, so vastly different are the children showing up for kindergarten in those different environments.
Transformative change toward a learner-centered model is a big ask, considering that today’s school-centric system has trouble making minor changes to address what we now know from a century of study about kids and schooling.
Poor kids do much better in smaller schools, but bureaucrats keep pursuing more consolidation. Teenagers’ brains perform better when classes start around 9:30 a.m., but administrators prefer keeping high schools and elementary schools on identical schedules. Many students backslide badly during summer vacations (a holdover from farm families needing kids to work), but schools continue to close the doors. Parents overwhelmingly support having direct control over some of the funding for their children’s schooling, but districts demand dictatorial power over every penny.
Pretending that all kids who arrive for class in the morning across the state are equally prepared for standardized instruction is an embarrassing example of pervasive ignorance in a profession that calls itself education.
Especially since so much of what kids learn today happens outside the classroom.
Who’s teaching children about citizenship, particularly its responsibilities? We can hardly expect parents who can’t tell the difference between sentences from the Communist Manifesto and the Constitution to impart much knowledge on their offspring.
Who’s teaching youngsters how to interact with police? Children raised in a crime-infested environment aren’t very likely to get the right learning about law enforcement.
Who’s teaching them about drugs? If drug abuse or trafficking is a prominent part of their home, household or neighborhood, those D.A.R.E stickers handed out at school don’t mean a whit.
Who’s teaching them about sex? To the extent that kids learn more from watching than from being lectured, if they have unsupervised access to TV or other screens, a school sex-ed class will be too little, too late.
The widely differing lifestyles and backgrounds of kids has an enormous effect on their education.
Living on a backlot in Polk County is nothing like living on a bustling city corner in Pulaski County or a barren farm road in Phillips County, but we’re supposed to believe that the school experience in each should be as uniform as possible?
Overhauling education toward a learner-centered strategy can meet and teach children where they are. In farming communities, summer vacation may still make sense. In gritty urban settings, it won’t. In high-crime neighborhoods, maybe the school helps teach kids the safety basics for behavior in police encounters. Schools with high free-lunch populations probably need more after-school specialty programs than those with lots of designer lunch boxes.
Local schools being able to tailor their curricula and methods to the specific needs and situations of their students would violate every misguided notion of standardized learning— and bring high-value individualized instruction to public education.
Seven decades ago, the U.S. Supreme Court decreed that separate is inherently unequal, but that case only involved white and Black schools. The court said and did nothing about remedying separate but unequal schools for rich and poor neighborhoods, for urban and rural communities, for lowand high-crime areas, for stable and unstable households.
Monopolistic bureaucracies never innovate. The pandemic’s interruptive effect on education has been unequally damaging to students, and has underscored an inflexible system’s inability to adapt.
The time is ripe for legislative leadership. Public education should be refocused on funding student learning, rather than a centralized system of schools, because our state’s children are anything but standardized.