Can Public Education Change?
I’ve spent the last couple of months participating in a committee that is reviewing what recommendations can/should be made to NCLB to make it “better.” As these meetings have gone on, I keep thinking about Peter Drucker’s comment, “We should stop trying to do better what we shouldn’t be doing at all.”
I think it is important to understand that our current eduction system is modeled after the early 1900’s factory model (i.e., standarization in mass quantity or in other words you can have any car/education you want as long as it’s black.) This effort has led to unionized labor, large inefficient bureaucracies, little or no innovation and the inability to make quick adjustments to changing demographic and workplace readiness needs. Then you add the small problem that children are not inatimate objects where a certain set of inputs will always result in the same set of outputs.
So now we have this lovely sounding law “no child left behind” be sold to us by an organization type that simply is not capable of delivering upon the promise. This is not because teachers don’t want to see all children succeed. The reason why failure is assured is that the business model around which the public ed system is structured means that it simply cannot account for each child, because education is a batch system, and if it tried to be a specialized system the costs would be astronomical (given the current system, labor relations, dept. of education, capital asset structure, etc.)
The only way for us to have real transformational change in education is for a ‘disruptive technology’ (Clayton Christensen, Harvard) to come along in education, which will eventually completely replace the system we have today. In a large way this is a key reason to fund vouchers. Vouchers can now act as an investment in education innovation and experimentation, where the best can rise to the top and provide new means, methods, and models for the 21st century education of our children.
