Rethinking Reform

Current education reform discussions revolve around modifications to the existing system of education delivery.  They rarely touch on what is being delivered. Though there is a big push to develop a set of "Common Standards" which would cover the "what", those standards still really on focus on creating efficiencies in the delivery of education. If everyone is learning the same things, from the same source materials, we get economies of scale and measurable production line improvements. This is why charter schools are under tremendous pressure to teach the same thing as public schools, so only the delivery method is modified. Efficiency. Even discussions like linking teacher pay to student performance still focus on evaluating how well a particular cog is working in an existing system and not evaluating whether the system itself is working to produce the best product.

If you have just under twelve minutes to spare, this video is a creative way to show the rut we are stuck in and a different way of looking at education.  It is worth the time to get your head out of the box the so called experts and bureaucrats want you to remain in when thinking about education. Even thought the video is two years old, the narrator covers many of the terms we use on MEW; school-to-work, standardized assessments, 21st century skills readiness, globalization. He also spends a bit of time looking at the increased incidence of ADHD and offers his own theory which does have some support in expert papers.



There is also a longer video of Sir Ken Robinson's speech on changing the paradigm in education.  See it here.

School has become an extension of business.  That's why the Clayton high school  principal who recently resigned over her creation of a fictitious Facebook page is receiving $140k in severance pay. She works in the business of education and had a business  contract.  What she did was not illegal and not covered in that contract, so she is still, under business rules, entitled to severance pay. Gates, Google, the DOEd all want to gather data about future consumers, (I mean students), because it is a valuable business tool. Using the school system to gather that data just makes good business sense.

The question no one is even asking now is, do we even have the right goal for education?  Is the business model the right one for education? After watching the video, what do you think?