Jonathan in an interesting response to my post last week about Humanistic vs. Technocratic Education suggests
that I might be surreptitiously introducing my own social engineering scheme. I
don't think so, but I'm willing to get more specific about the guiding
principles that I think will make easier–no guarantees–a more humanistic
approach. And always when it comes to policy, the devil is in the
details.
First–A bias toward de-centralization. Parents and teachers
know what their kids need; bureaucrats do not. Our first instinct should be to
trust concrete, living, local communities and to their capacity for decision
making. Does this guarantee that every school will deliver a quality education
to every kid? No, and I do think where there are egregious failures,
interventions will be required, but that's something that should be determined
within the framework defined by item 2.
Second–An insistence on democratic accountability. Democracy
means that an engaged citizenry deliberates and decides what is in the best
interest of the community. People decide, not markets. Charters are not
the answer. On the other hand. Elected school boards set local policies, not
mayors, governors, legislatures, or foundations. Decision making should be as
close as possible to the people who will be most affected by them.
Third–A commitment to equity, and this means developing and
funding aggressive, effective programs inside and outside the school building
that mitigate the negative consequences of child poverty. The market is not
going to solve this problem, and school alone cannot solve this problem. It
will be solved only when we as a society commit ourselves to solving
it. The funding part of this is the primary role for the state to play,
not in dictating programs, curriculum, and standards. There should be a bias toward
funding locally initiated programmatic solutions unless there is a history of
corruption and incompetence in a particular troubled community. I don't want to
make this sound easy. But no solution, humanistic or technocratic, is going to
deliver results quickly. It's more important that a realistic framework for a
solution be developed than just flailing and throwing money at these thorny,
deeply engrained historical and cultural problems.
Fourth–A long-term plan to improve teacher quality and
professionalism. We want to attract the best people and retain them. That means
paying them at a level commensurate with their education and professionalism,
but it also means, making fundamental changes in the way teachers are recruited
and trained for careers in the classroom. It means developing more effective
ways of enhancing professional development and collaborative support among
teachers. The current evaluation and accountability systems are useless and
counterproductive. They are doing more to chase good teachers out of our
classroom than to weed out the bad teachers who shouldn't be in them in the
first place.
You
can't make anything happen; you can only argue for and work for what you think
is best and trust that while in the short run people often make stupid, shortsighted
mistakes, in the long run they learn from those mistakes and choose what is
better. Right now we're in a kind of stupid stage. People have very little
sense for the big picture or the common good, and so are inclined to make,
parochial, shortsighted decisions. I think that this is in large degree due to
a lack of high-quality alternatives that most people can agree on. In the long
run that will change, but in the short run we can only do what we can do to
prepare the ground for something new to grow.
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