Today, NH Commissioner of Education Frank Edelblut published an insightful editorial, in which he argued that the education establishment seems more interested in promoting the illusion of change, than in making actual substantive changes. In support of that, he mentioned some of the changes that he’s tried to make during his time at the Department of Education, and how they have been torpedoed by those vested in continuing with the current system.
On the one hand, he’s exactly right. But on the other hand, he’s a guy who’s made a career out of getting things done, and the changes we need to be making don’t really fit that mold. That is, the changes we need aren’t so much to start doing new things, as to stop doing old things.
Here’s just one example. It would take one sentence in the NH Ed Rules to allow students to take the GED or HiSET test at any age, rather than waiting until they’ve reached an arbitrary minimum age.
Why would this matter? What would it accomplish?
It would allow students who are ready to leave school to get on with their lives; which would encourage other students to follow that path; which would shift the entire emphasis of the current system from accumulating credits (also known as ‘seat time’) to demonstrating competence. It would accomplish the most important aims of Learn Everywhere, without the mountains of paperwork (and the bureaucratic and political resistance that come along with it) required to make LE a credit-based system. And it would relieve taxpayers of the burden of paying to babysit students who are being segregated from society, when they could be productively participating in it instead.
It would take just one more sentence to prohibit schools from discriminating on the basis of age. Ideally, a school wouldn’t even be allowed to know the age of a student.
Why would this matter? What would it accomplish?
It would free schools from following the astrological model (‘We know when you were born, so we know what you should be doing today’), shifting to a model where students are grouped by what they know, and are ready to learn, regardless of age. It would require schools to actually keep track of what students are learning, and not learning — something they should be doing anyway, but something they don’t really have to bother with if they can rely on age-based promotion.
And so on.
These don’t require creating new infrastructure, programs, curricula, assessments, or technology. They don’t require creating anything. They’re just in the nature removing fallen trees from a path, of removing roadblocks or piles of debris from a highway. They just require us to acknowledge one of the most basic truths about human beings: that people develop at different rates, and what one person is able to do at one age has absolutely no bearing on what another person can do at the same age.
The alternative is to continue to deny this obvious truth, perpetuating a system based on something we know to be a lie, and hope that introducing ‘the next new thing’ can keep that system from collapsing under the strain of keeping up the pretense for just a little while longer.
To paraphrase Will Rogers, it’s not the things we don’t know how to do that are crippling our educational system. It’s the things we’re already doing, that cause us to get in our own way.
