For those readers who care, I have begun listing the books I am reading at the moment for no other reason but to let people know. I intend to start providing some thoughts about the books when I complete them or as ideas pop into my head about the books. The first book to get this treatment is Crash Course by Chris Whittle. Whittle, is, of course, the head of Edison Schools, one of the first for-proift school management companies in the U.S.
The book presents some very good ideas in broad strokes, but fails to follow up on any of those ideas with much in the way of plausible, concrete methods to implement those ideas. Whittle comes from a viewpoint I share, that competition among schools and school management will generally improve schooling for everyone. But large segments of this book are more like an infomercial for Edison Schools and school management companies than I would have liked. While I agree with many of Whittle's concepts, I don't think I am ready to be a full-fledged Whittle-ite.
That being said, there are some ideas that Whittle emphasizes that I am beggining to embrace whole-heartedly. Those ideas are education R&D, changes to teacher/principal education, and barriers to real school change. Each is treated below in reverse order.
Real School Change
To me, the idea of real school change is to significantly alter the manner in which we as a society deliver educational services to our kids. But Whittle correctly points out two major barriers, fear and inertia, although he doesn't call them that specifically. Fear comes in two forms, fear of change and fear of "experiementing with my kid." The first fear is understandable. Human nature understands that we must change and evolve, but change is hard, it is scary and fearing change is thus natural. But this fear can be overcome.
The second fear is that of having any education experiment done to one's own children. This is completely understandable, no one wants their kid put at a disadvantage because some egghead with a brilliant but unproven ideas wants to try out his educational theories. But unfortunately, if we are to find new ways of educating our kids, we need to embrace the idea that we have to try new ideas on real kids. I am not sure how to overcome this, since any new model will rely on parents taking a leap of faith in the hope that their kid will not be harmed in the long run.
But educational inertia feeds into our fears. For over 100 years, the basic model of K-12 education has not changed in this country. Kids still spend six to seven hours in school with time divided in to roughly equal segments. Time is spent working on specific subjects during those periods, with an adult in charge of the class and providing instruction. Simply put, inertia has caused our conceptions of proper schooling to become calcified, hardened into a mindset that does not permit any real school change. We, our parents, our grandparents and possibly even our great-grandparents were educated in the same way.
To overcome this inertia, we need to overcome our failure of imagination. Right now, we simply cannot conceive of a different method of educating kids. We assume that we must have one adult to every 20-35 kids in a classroom, discussing one subject at a time, on a strict schedule. That is the way K-12 education is done. But Whittle asks the question over and over again, explicitly and implicity, do we have to do it that way? The answer he supplies is no, and I agree.
My fraternity has a saying, "Merely because a practice is prevelant may be the poorest reason for continuing it." I don't necessarily agree with all Whittle proposes in this light, but he is right--we need to rethink our preconceptions.
Teacher/Principal Education
Right now, those in the edusphere and other places find themselves in a battle to figure out how to improve the preparation and professionalism of our teaching corps. Whittle states that which we intuitively know, without high quality, professional teachers, the greatest curriculum in the world is essentially useless. While a great teacher cannot make great students from thin air, a poor teacher can destroy the value and mind of potentially great students.
There have been many articles about the shortcomings of modern education schools. Having not been through education school, I can offer no concrete criticisms. But Whittle suggests providing specific training schools for teachers, similar to law schools. I have long thought that we should consider this approach. Whittle urges a system in which students must complete a bachelor's degree in a field other than education before going to teacher's school. Even early childhood education teachers should have a more specialized degree in say, developmental psychology before starting to learn how to be teachers.
Whittle argues, and I agree, that a stringent curriculum in how to teach coupled with a long-term apprenticeship, similar to the medical residency or attorney associateship will improve the quality of our teachers. Whittle envisision large state or regional schools, graduating thousands of teachers every year to fill the ranks with high quality educators.
But Whittle does not stop there, he seeks also to provide professional level training to principals as well. From what I understand, most principals learn their job through on-the-job training, perhaps time spent as an Assistant Principal or Vice Principal. But being a principal involves so many knowledge areas and skills, from teacher evaluation, to budgeting and cost analysis, public relations, negotiation, legal and regulatory knowledge, teh list goes on and one. Whittle envisisons a national or large regional principals schools. Not a bad idea since, the quality of a principal can impact the quality of the school, both positively and negatively.
Education R&D
This is the one idea where I am squarely in the Whittle camp. We as a nation spend practically no money on research and development of new ideas and new models for education. There is plenty of research being done on education, but no development work to take those well-researched ideas and put them into action.
Whittle points out a couple of key points. Large organziations, particularly those in the service and information industries spend a significant portion of their budgets on R&D. But Whittle provides the best comparision between national defense and education.
Surprisingly, to me at least, the United States spends about the same amount of money on national defense as it does on education (taking federal, state and local funds together). But the Defense Department spend between 10 and 15 percent of its entire budget on R&D--looking for new weapons, new tactices, new medical procedures, training regimes, you name. They are looking all the time for ways to make our military stronger and more effective.
By comparison, education R&D totals less that 1% of all education spending in America and that 1% may be on the high side. Just on a basic level, the inability to educate our kids betters is going to mean that we may have difficult developing military R&D to defend ourselves.
Whittle's call is clear--we as a nation must make a committment to spend 10 to 15 percent of education spending on R&D.
Conclusion
Crash Course is part informercial on Edison Schools and part laundry list of ideas. Whether Whittle is right about his vision for education, the fact that his ideas challenge the status quo so much makes his ideas invaluable, if for nothing else than a starting off point for debate. Get the book, look past the infomercial and ask yourself, can we do better by our kids? Are these the best ideas or can we modify them?
At least we can start by looking outside our fears, our inertia and our preconcpetions to find new ideas.
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