School Reform Predictions: Easier Said Than Done
It's been said the only two constants are death and taxes. Not true.
There are at least two more: change and the need for change.
The
need for change is particularly true of public schools in the United
States, and has been since the emergence of the system with the passage
of Pennsylvania's Common School Act in 1834. Yet perhaps no other
institution has been so successful in resisting change and outwitting
all predictions of improvement.
Even so innovative an individual
as Thomas Edison, who reportedly was awarded more patents than anyone
else in history was hopelessly optimistic when he predicted that the
motion picture, which he invented and subsequently improved so that
pictures and sound were synchronized, would so revolutionize the
schools system that within "a few years it will supplant largely, if
not entirely, the use of textbooks."
Not quite. And similar predictions on the potential for technology has proved to be similarly erroneous.
In
1945 it was William Levenson, director of the Cleveland, Ohio public
schools who proclaimed that "the time may come when a portable radio
receiver will be as common in the classroom as is the blackboard." It
never happened.
Not many years later, in the 1950s and 1960s,
psychologist B.F. Skinner was promoting the use of "teaching machines
and programmed instruction" which, he thought, would make it possible
for students to "learn twice as much in the same time and with the same
effort as in a standard classroom."
As a teacher in the 1960s
I recall an instance where considerable effort and planning went into
creating "language laboratories," where a foreign language classroom
was subdivided into individual cubicles whereby students could
simultaneously proceed with relatively individual instruction using
technology. I also recall visiting one such classroom only to find
that the teacher had turned off the technology and was attempting to
teach the class as a unit in the usual fashion, which meant trying to
do it over the walls which were on three sides of each student's unit.
A
bit closer to the mark was then-president Bill Clinton's still-quoted
remark about building "a bridge to the twenty-first century" whereby,
among other things, computers would be as much a part of classrooms as
blackboards.
Well, here we are in the twenty-first century
and computers are certainly more common in the schools than there were
during the Clinton administration but blackboards are also still with
us and student achievement, drop out rates, and other indications of
educational achievement are not appreciably higher than 15-20 years ago.
Other
predictions along the way included one by John W. Gardner, a brilliant
education leader. In his 1969 book, No Easy Victories, he wrote: "I am
entirely certain that twenty years from now, we will look back at
education as it is practiced in most schools today and wonder that we
could have tolerated anything so primitive. ‘The pieces of the
educational revolution are lying around unassembled."
Nearly 40
years later, not a mere 20, the "pieces of the educational revolution,"
if they exist, are still lying around unassembled, often not even
recognized, and the "primitive" education in the schools is still
tolerated.
Nor was Gardner alone. When his book was published,
a well funded National Educational Finance Project involving a number
of leading scholars was coming to a conclusion. When their work was
published in 1970 their conclusion was virtually synonymous with
Gardner's as they wrote, "One thing that is certain is that the
pressure on the American educational system, which has been intense in
the last ten years, will continue to diminish as we move into the
future." It has not diminished. It has also continued the long
history of such pressure being largely ineffective.
In 1991
President George H. W. Bush convened an education gathering of
governors who devised Goals 2000, "the most far-reaching education plan
of any President since Lyndon B. Johnson." Not one of the Goals for
2000 was achieved by 2000. In 2001, they were repealed.
In
brief, anyone looking for a career in education should become a school
reformer. Not because they will succeed. But they will be assured of a
lifetime career where the need never ends.
David W. Kirkpatrick is a Senior Education Fellow with the U.S. Freedom Foundation and The Buckeye Institute.