The Nature of the Necessary Revolution in K-12 Education

The Nature of the Necessary Revolution in K-12 Education


With Observations on the Key Impediments to Achieving Educational Excellence


I have recently encountered, in action and in print, various representations of life’s reality in the United States that have steeled me even more firmly for the difficulty that lies ahead in revolutionizing K-12 education. Here I present a summary of the nature of the needed revolution, followed by observations on the key impediments to achieving educational excellence in the United States.



The Nature of the Necessary Revolution in K-12 Education


The necessary revolution in K-12 education requires first of all that we understand the meaning of an excellent education and the qualities of an excellent teacher. Understand first, then, the following:


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An excellent education is a matter of excellent teachers imparting a rich liberal arts curriculum to all students.


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An excellent teacher is a professional of broad and deep subject area knowledge, possessing the pedagogical skill to impart that knowledge to all students.


The revolution must be waged at the level of the local public school district, in that conventional centralized system that by tradition has been the main conduit for education of the broad citizenry.


Understand, then, the following:


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Charter schools are a distraction from the task at hand and result in haphazard approaches to curriculum and pedagogy.


We should take note of those charter schools that are the rare examples for promising approaches, but we should not put further energy and resources into the creation of new charter schools.


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Fledgling efforts to promote a system of vouchers whereby economically poor students would have tuition paid at private schools with public funds is wrongful and should be abandoned.


There are not enough private schools to accommodate the masses of students currently served by the public schools. Disparate private schools present the same problem as do charter schools in terms of varying quality and lack of a common curriculum. We should concentrate our efforts, therefore, for attaining educational excellence on the strength of a commonly defined liberal arts curriculum delivered by highly quality teachers in public K-12 schools operated by locally centralized school districts.


In achieving excellence, we must be much clearer about what we want our students to study, from Grade K through Grade 12. We must work for the impartation of great amounts of material from the key liberal arts subject areas of mathematics, natural science, social science, history, literature, the fine arts, foreign languages, and various practical trades from the industrial arts. All students, at each grade level, should acquire the same information in a given year and at similar junctures throughout the year.


Economically poor students are residentially mobile and may change schools one or more times during a single academic year. We must serve these students properly by making their transitions to new schools easier by ensuring that they will be presented with similar information, delivered with comparable pedagogical skill, as they had come to expect at the previous school.


At the local school district level, we will have to retrain teachers who have almost all matriculated at colleges and universities wherein misguided concepts prevail in departments, colleges, and schools of education.


Teacher training programs in the latter promote “constructivist” and so-called “progressive” approaches to knowledge and pedagogy. The notions from these approaches erroneously maintain that systematically acquired skill and knowledge sets are not important and that rather, somehow, without solid knowledge and skill bases, students will “learn how to learn” and “critically think” about those subjects that they identify as interesting, with instructors serving as “facilitators,” rather than true teachers.


Such teacher training programs lack academic rigor, and they ill-prepare prospective teachers for delivering broad and deep knowledge sets and the requisite math and reading skills that all students deserve as their intellectual and cultural inheritance.




Central school district officials must embrace, therefore, the responsibility to give teachers the subject area knowledge and the pedagogical skills necessary for providing an excellent education to their students. Change agents operating at the local school district level will have to impress upon central school district officials the importance of a strong liberal arts curriculum, well-defined and implemented throughout the district.


School district superintendents must passionately embrace all of those changes necessary to impart a broad and deep liberal arts curriculum throughout the K-12 years, making this the key commitment of their professional lives, staying at their current jobs as a matter of permanent dedication. These superintendents will have to ensure that all central school district officials and building principals understand the nature of an excellent education and recognize the qualities of a truly excellent teacher.


In the revolutionized central school district, teachers will become true professionals, rewarded for seeking master’s and doctoral degrees in legitimate disciplines (e. g., chemistry, mathematics, economics, history, English and world literature, French language, music composition, automotive repair)--- rather than in departments, schools, or colleges of education. Teachers will be paid on the basis of skill in delivering rigorous subject area content. The step and lane system rewarding teachers for years of service and the acquisition of flimsy degrees in education will be abandoned.


This is the sort of education that all people need to become active citizens, to have satisfying professional lives, and to have appreciation for the great, exciting world of the intellect and culture that makes life fascinating and worthwhile.


Observations on the Key Impediments to Achieving Educational Excellence


Implied in the above account of the nature of the necessary revolution in K-12 education are numerous impediments that activists for such an education will have to overcome. These impediments are stated succinctly below.


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First, teacher training programs are inadequate and should be overhauled to emphasize training of broadly and deeply knowledgeable professionals skilled in imparting their knowledge and their love of the worlds of the intellect and culture to students of all ethnic and economic descriptors.


Overhauling teacher training programs will be a long and arduous task. Such programs are huge revenue generators for universities. The vested interests in conventional teacher preparation programs are legion and entrenched. Therefore, central school district officials will have to recognize frankly the deficiency of traditional teacher preparation programs and retrain teachers at the local school district level.


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Second, most central school district officials are not permanently committed to their posts, ever ready to move on when professional opportunity and higher pay are offered.
 
In the revolutionized central school district, the superintendent will have to realize the enormous legacy that she or he will leave by superintending the needed overhaul of K-12 education, so that that superintendent makes the enduring commitment to oversee necessary change and ensure that change in the direction of educational excellence endures.


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Third, most building principals are remote figures who are not fully engaged in the life of the classroom and not properly attentive to the quality of curriculum and teaching that should prevail.


The permanently committed school superintendent will have to change the culture that has prevailed for building principals, who will become respecters of knowledge and promoters of excellent teachers.


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Fourth, mediocre and poor teachers who have been protected by unions such as local affiliates of the American Federation of Teachers (AFT) and the National Education Association (NEA) will oppose the necessary change toward remuneration based on knowledge and skill in imparting the needed information base to students.


The permanently committed centralized school superintendent will have to persist and prevail in jettisoning the old step and lane system, in favor of attracting, rewarding, and retaining teachers on the basis of excellence.


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Fifth, school boards too often are dominated by teacher union-supported members who resist changes that would benefit students.


Local school district activists will have to work to elect school board members who support the needed overhaul of K-2 education.


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Sixth, agents purportedly acting for change in K-12 education too often operate at a distance from the real world of schools, superintendents, principals, teachers, and students. These agents tend to use the language of “reform,” and they emphasize peripherally important or insignificant issues in state capitols and think tanks.


Real change will occur when change agents at the local level embrace the need for revolution--- a complete overhaul rather than mere adjustment--- and mobilize people at the community level who will agitate en masse for the quality of educational excellence that we must have for all students.


Summary Comment


We must be clear what we mean when we discuss “excellent education” and the “excellent teacher.” We must know that achieving excellence in the classrooms of our public K-12 institutions will be a time-consuming and difficult endeavor. We must give the time and embrace the difficulty in committing ourselves to educational excellence for all of our precious children, regardless of descriptors of ethnic identity and economic status, in order to act effectively at the Second Stage of the Civil Rights Movement and achieve that national democracy that we imagine ourselves to be.

Constructivist Ideology in Teacher Preparation Programs Results in K-12 Mediocrity

Mediocrity of K-12 education in the United States originates in departments, colleges, and schools of education wherein professors do not believe that systematically acquired and mentally stored knowledge of the liberal arts is important. They believe, instead, in so-called “constructivist” approaches that begin with the knowledge base and life experiences of the student as a foundation for seeking information that is relevant to the particular young person.


This so-called “progressive” approach to education is implemented upon the assumption that the systematic, sequential accumulation of knowledge in math, natural science, social science, history, literature, and the fine arts is not important. Only those topics that passionately drive a given student, for which a teacher serves as “facilitator” in accumulating this particularistic information, are important. As to accumulated knowledge from the human inheritance, one can always “look it up.”


But this view of education and the teacher is deeply flawed. Imagine going to a cardiologist with complaints about chest pains and being told that the doctor would have to take a moment to look up what is known about arterial blockage, because this was not covered in medical school. Consider describing to an attorney an experience whereby police officers broke into one’s home without a search warrant and being told by this lawyer that the predicament sounds interesting but would require research, because such instances were not part of the law school curriculum.


Taught by such professors promulgating the “constructivist,“ “progressive” approach to knowledge and pedagogy, our K-5 teachers, especially, enter our classrooms woefully underprepared. Those who teach at the grades 6-12 level are a bit better trained, because most get bachelor’s degrees in legitimate disciplines (e. g., physics, math, history, economics, English literature, fine arts). But low licensure requirements mean that those who enter our middle schools and high schools are frequently not truly masters of their fields. Graduate programs for teachers, in the meantime, provide programs for easily attained master’s degrees that are financial spigots for universities.


Teachers unions act in ways to protect such unprepared teachers. Most central school district and school building administrators are too busy protecting their sinecures of substantial remuneration to contest teacher union power, and thus the status quo prevails. Our children walk across stages to receive diplomas in name only.


Most graduating seniors could not tell you the difference between debt and deficit; the Roman and Byzantine Empires; Newtonian and Einstein’s physics; Ego and Superego; or the literary styles of Fitzgerald and Hemingway. And they could not tell you the essential differences, as we recall our nominal focus on Black History in February, in the approaches to the African American dilemma in the early 20th century as espoused by Booker T. Washington, W. E. B. Dubois, and Marcus Garvey.


Constructivist ideology and systemic flaws operate in highly similar ways from state to state, so that teacher preparation programs and institutions of K-12 education maintain the status quo of mediocrity in Minnesota and throughout the nation. But we cannot afford to wait for the needed overhaul of teacher preparation programs on college campuses, nor can we depend on action taken mainly at the state level to produce the needed institutional change.


The needed overhaul of K-12 education will ride the waves of energy emitted by local school district activists who take seriously the great accumulated wealth of knowledge that defines the human experience, working to retrain teachers and revamp curriculum to ensure that children of all ethnic and economic descriptors receive this knowledge as their rightful inheritance.