Old School

When you work in the public school system, it’s easy to become hardened by what you see. That is probably true of anyone who works in any bureaucratically run system. Still, each year that passes, I become more aware of the system’s faults and less tolerant of those who run it. I can not compare education to any other profession since I have never worked outside of it. However, I do know it can not be successfully run by people locked into following business models from the private sector. They just do not work. I once had a first year principal who spent less than five years in the classroom tell our staff how she loved reading business models in her free time and that she planned to run our school after the model used by Starbucks. After a lengthy description of her plan, I pointed out two flaws: 1. Starbucks is designed to sell products to paying customers who want them while our middle school students wanted nothing to do with what we had to offer them for free; 2. Starbucks is interested in maximizing their profits while we lacked sufficient capitol to meet the basic needs of our students. She lasted one year before the district fired her. Needing something and wanting something are two different things. Our youth need an education but in too many cases, they do not want it. Too many parents would rather have before and after school programs to look after their kids so they can be dropped off and picked up around the parents busy schedule than a great school with no day care. By the time parent and child get home, both are too tired from their long days and want nothing more than to escape into a zone of nothingness: the Internet, television, or whatever else helps them escape. How do we get children to want an education? For starters, we need to dump the endless testing and teaching to the tests and return to an education that focuses on developing the whole child and not just test takers. We also need to invest in more hands on learning that allows students to experience what they learn rather than requiring them to simply recite one concept after another. While we are at it, we need to scrap the goal of making every student ready for college when in fact, college is not for everybody. We should be providing more career training for the non college bound student and let them know it is alright to choose a path other than college. If we decrease class sizes, teachers will be able to once again know their students as individuals and not as potential scores on a standardized test. Students will then begin to feel they actually matter beyond their academic progress and appreciate more of what their teachers have to offer. Finally, let principals run schools knowing they have the support of a district office that only wants what is best for the community. We need to stop trying to make all our schools the same when not every town or neighborhood are the same. I am not suggesting we eliminate everything we are doing and return to the dark ages. However, a little more of the old school approach mixed with modern knowledge and strategies would go a long ways toward improving our public schools.