The Violent Implications of the Dominant Motif In K-12 Education--- And the Much Better Future Awaiting

There is a dominant motif in K-12 Education that has violent impact on the lives of our children.


For thirty-five years, at minimum, there has been recognition that young people enrolled in the public schools are receiving a low-quality education. By 1982, a federally-commissioned study drew the conclusion that our system of public education was performing at such a low level that we, as asserted in the title, are A Nation at Risk.


And so we remain:


The dominant motif in K-12 education since 1980 goes as follows:


A substantial number of people get upset about student performance as measured by such highly respected instruments as PISA (Programme for International Student Assessment) and NAEP (National Assessment of Educational Progress).


People call for reforms.


Programs such as Outcome-Based Education (in vogue during the 1980s) are promulgated upon the principle that if teaching is actually occurring, the results in student achievement should be observable.


Reformers proffer varying strategies for boosting student achievement:


Some argue the case for charter schools, institutions that receive public funding but are given great freedom to innovate in exchange for the expectation of better academic results.


Others maintain that a voucher system, providing government subsidies for low-income youth to attend private schools would result in better academic performance.


Some parents opt to home-school their children, and over the years they do so according to legally prescribed performance criteria.


Some reformers insist on accountability across measures from disaggregated data, whereby standardized test results are reviewed for an indication of the level of success that individual schools are having with the education of students of all demographic descriptors.


Others put their faith in the selection or redesign of buildings. Some of these argue that small schools provide a better sense of community. People working within the reality of large buildings argue for adapting this idea by dividing the student population into groups that go to classes together in the same area of the building. Others advocate the construction of schools with more fluid spaces for engaging activities that capture the technological fascination of students who putatively need visual stimulation and quickly paced activities.


Among these proposed redresses for the poor quality of public education in the United States, those arguing for charter schools have been rewarded with the appearance of many of these institutions, with Minnesota taking the lead from the early 1990s. The home schooling idea has become a movement with increasing parent and child participants. Those arguing for a voucher system have gotten considerable press but little materialization for their ideas, getting a negative response from the education establishment and limited interest among the general public; the call of voucher system advocates for increased parental options, though, has been incorporated into both the charter school and home-school movements. In recent years, building designs and programming emphasizing fluid spaces, technological engagement, and fast-paced activities have materialized in a few school districts. Many charter schools operate on the small-school notion; and quite a few public school districts have tried the small community concept, especially at the middle school level.


On a national level, No Child Left Behind, Common Core, and Race to the Top have incorporated the demand for measurable results issued during the 1980s by those advocating for Outcome-Based Education. During the years 2000-2008, the George W. Bush administration secured bipartisan support and implementation of No Child Left Behind, which called for federal approval of state-by-state academic standards, measured by objective testing with data thereupon disaggregated, and thereafter putting a harsh spotlight on schools wherein any demographic population was underperforming. Common Core is an effort sponsored by the National Governors Association (CCSSO) and the Council of Chief State School Officers endeavoring to establish educational standards for consideration of legislators and officials in each state in the interest of strong academic content. During the years from 2008 until the present year of 2015, the Barack Obama administration has promoted its Race to the Top initiative that allows states to gain waivers from many of the requirements of No Child Left Behind in exchange for achieving similarly sought results via increased innovation.


And what do we have from this diversity of activity in the interests of education reform?


Very little.


Here is the dominant motif that may be discerned:


The call for education reform is received by many as a chance to advocate for innovation that challenges the structure and the competency of the traditional school framework. But most charter schools are worse than the regular public schools, home schooling has as variable success as there is competency of parents to be teachers, and aside from putting in play the notion of increased parental options, the voucher system has gained little traction. The notion that measurable results can be achieved with a shift to smaller schools or school communities; and the idea that designing buildings for fluid spaces offering high-technology and fast-paced activities as a means for boosting student achievement; have as yet yielded no measurable results. National programs such as No Child Left Behind, Common Core, and Race to the Top are inevitably destroyed by a combination of political forces from the political left (under the sway of teachers unions and others within the education establishment) and the political right (who object to any federal or national level policy as an assault on local control).


This dominant motif that calls for better results, gives rein to many disparate groups for the achievement of student progress, and induces federal government action with the intent to improve student performance has resulted in little progress for our students. The repetition of a whirlwind of mostly ineffective reformist action amidst competing political forces that vitiate any promising initiatives within the whirlwind --- has violent consequences for our youth and for the citizenry of United States.


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We fail because very few advocating for reform have a clear conception of an excellent education and little understanding of the quality of teachers needed to impart an excellent education.


We fail because people of the United States have a fixation on local control that vitiates any national-level effort.


We fail because we have a low level of civic participation in our society, with few people involving themselves in those activities that will be necessary to overhaul K-12 education.


This failure has violent consequences:


Our young people are knowledge-starved; even if they graduate, they lack the comprehensive understanding of economics, history, literature, the fine arts, math, and natural science that would give them the opportunity for lives of cultural enrichment, civic preparation, and professional satisfaction. Children from homes of poverty and familial dysfunction suffer from a system that never produces a way to educate them. The African American segment of that population has never been given justice in this society because never in the years since the 1960s, the decade in which black people attained affirmation of basic citizenship rights, have K-12 systems offered them anything remotely resembling an adequate education.


The result for too many of our youth is a life in which there is dysfunction at home and unsatisfactory experiences at school, which is a terrible place to be: These prevailing circumstances lead many young people to the life of the street, teenage pregnancy, gang affiliation, violent behavior, and a fast track to prison.


The American populace as a whole wanders through life on the basis of a very low cultural aesthetic and limited understanding of the ethical precepts that undergird the wisest among history’s philosophers and theologians. Lives lived in ignorance and illusion are lives given to violent behavior in Florida, South Carolina, Missouri, everywhere in these United States.


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There is a better way.


There is a better life.


There awaits for us a less violent society.


In education there is personal fulfillment.


In education there is personal control.


In education there is altruistic inclination.


In the United States, where the populace has a fixation on local control, we must not reform but revolutionize education at the level of the locally centralized school district:


We must define excellent education as a matter of excellent teachers imparting broad and deep knowledge-intensive education in both the liberal and technical arts in grade-by-grade sequence to all students throughout the K-12 years.


We must define an excellent teacher as a professional of broad and deep knowledge with the pedagogical ability to impart that knowledge to all students.


We must show our students a sure pathway to lives of cultural enrichment, civic preparation, and professional satisfaction upon the skill and knowledge that they have acquired in the institutions of the locally centralized school district.


We must do this first in the Minneapolis Public Schools and then show personnel in other locally centralized school districts the way to an excellent education for all students.


When we gather ourselves for the effort that will be needed to overhaul curriculum and retrain teachers at the level of the locally centralized school district, we will have committed ourselves to a course of action that will produce better people who will have much less reason to engage in violent and destructive behavior.


There is no other way.


We must circumvent the forces that produce the recurring motif of whirlwind action promising better educational results but yielding none.


We must take a stand for knowledge-intensive education imparted by intellectually astute and pedagogically skilled teachers retrained at the central school district level. There is no other way. We can depend on no one else to do this work.


To induce central school district staff to define excellent education and train the teachers necessary to impart that education, we must act.


Failure to do so will leave us with the violent and dissatisfied society that we now have.


Success in doing so will yield people who are culturally enriched, civically engaged, and professionally prepared, and who have little reason to want a violent and desultory life; rather, they will have every reason to want to live as fulfilled individuals and community participants for whom violence is abhorrent and life is a magnificent gift to be treasured, honored, perfected.