Education can learn a lot from its own history

Why is our public education system flailing in the world and what is the solution? We’re near the top of the world in education spending per child, but near the bottom of the modern world in results. During the 2007-08 academic school year, we spent a whopping $596.6 billion on primary and secondary education, yet our 12th-graders were recently ranked 14th in the world in math and 15th in science. Why such poor results and what is the solution?

Most people lay the blame on our massive Soviet-style education bureaucracy and a lack of parental involvement in their children’s education. Our parents definitely need to be more involved in their children’s education, but I find it hard to believe that our parent’s are only a 15th as involved as parents in the rest of the world. The problem therefore must be primarily institutional. In our brief history as a nation, our educational institutions have gone from worst to first, and then back to worst. It’s time to combine what worked best in the past, discard the bureaucratic shackles of the present and advance unfettered into the exciting, globally competitive sunrise of the future. We must first take a look at what made us great in the past so we can build on that foundation for the future.

When the original colonists arrived in the New World, it would be fair to say they had the least developed school system in the world. What came out of this colonial period was the one-room schoolhouse that lasted well into the 20th century. The vast majority of these schools housed kids of all grades, from kindergarten to the 12th grade. Most had no running water and no electricity with just a simple wood stove for heat. Often, a single teacher taught every grade from kindergarten through high school. Books were expensive and shared.

By our modern standards we would expect abysmal results from such a resource-challenged type of school — one that would only graduate barely literate farmers. However, schools exactly like that produced phenomenal educational results. These schools born out of necessity led our young nation to be the No. 1 industrial power on earth by 1900, and the greatest minter of entrepreneurs, inventors, intellectuals and academics on earth. But why were these schools so successful?

The three things I think made them succeed were teacher freedom, older and younger kids learning together and multiple years with a single teacher. Of these three I think teacher autonomy and flexibility was probably the sharpest arrow in the quiver.

Teachers had extremely comprehensive standards to meet with their students, but unparalleled flexibility on how to meet them. They weren’t shackled with today’s predefined lesson plans or curriculums. The result was the teacher could tailor each lesson to each student’s individual learning style and ability.

Having older and younger kids learning together was also very successful. Younger kids learn a tremendous amount from their older peers, while older peers benefit from the repetition involved in tutoring younger peers. They say you never really learn something well until you’ve had to teach it, which would really sharpen the material for older students helping younger ones. Both would learn from the other in a looped fashion.

Last, having the same teacher for theoretically 13 years established a tremendous personal bond with the teacher and made the teacher a personal stakeholder in the child’s future success. Most modern teachers only have the student for one year, making that type of personal bond much more difficult to achieve.

Thus, teacher autonomy, kids of different ages learning from each other and having a teacher for several years created two centuries of American academic luminance with very little financial resources.

Unfortunately, toward the end of the 20th century we managed to slip from first to worst amongst industrialized countries. We turned on the cash spigot and did some phenomenal infrastructure improvements. Unfortunately, the government showed up at the table with more than its checkbook — it also wanted some skin in the game. Out of the cash spigot grew a huge federal education bureaucracy with the inevitable results of bureaucratic inertia, inefficiency, inflexibility and universal mediocrity (or I should say substantially below average mediocrity when compared with the rest of the modern world).

Now we spend huge amounts of money on education that mostly seems to get absorbed by the bureaucracy with only a trickle dripping down to the teachers, the real foot soldiers. As a case in point, when I was in elementary school more than three decades ago, teachers where having to spend their own money on school supplies. Today, teachers are still spending their own money on classroom supplies even though money being spent per child has increased from $393 per child in 1961-62 to $10,297 per child in 2007-08. We don’t need more money for bureaucrats; we need more money for teachers and classrooms.

We should also adopt the best modern management practices of the business world. During the 1990s and following, many companies in corporate America flattened their management structures from the traditional pyramid to the flatter structure. For instance, instead of having several middle managers where decisions would take days or weeks to make it up and down the chain of command, you could have one person in charge of 30 engineers. That person had the authority and autonomy to make daily decisions. Productivity and efficiency soared as a result.

How do we combine the best of the past with the best of the present? We need a new breed of charter schools to supplement our overcrowded public schools. Imagine a cutting-edge charter school like this. The principal would act more like a business manager. He or she would recruit the best teachers, hire, fire and motivate. Teachers would be given standards equal to or better than the best countries of the world, but given freedom and financial resources (the same amount as other public schools, but what they want to buy, not what they are told to buy) on how to meet those standards. After all, teachers went to college for many years to learn how to teach. If they don’t want the flexibility to innovate and teach their own way, they can always teach in a traditional public school and be told exactly how and what to teach.

Next, we should have students matched with the same teacher for multiple years for peer learning and teacher bonding. Lastly, charter schools that have students who meet or exceed the standards should be given financial bonuses, just like the business world gets. We’re kidding ourselves if we think most people will increase the pain of effort in teaching harder without a commensurate increase in financial reward. One reason No Child Left Behind created such an uproar is that it tries to increase educational standards by only wielding the testing stick. We also need the motivation of the financial carrot for maximum results.

We need to combine the best of the old with the best of the new. We should fund and empower our teachers like modern business managers. We should hire the best teachers out there, give them the best equipment and financial resources available, give them unwavering support, hold them accountable to their objectives and get the heck out of their way.

Daniel Hamm lives in Palmer.