School daze

Nelson Mandela once said, "education is the most powerful weapon which you can use to change the world." If that's true, the United States is heading forward into the future unarmed. The Program for International Student Assessment (PISA) recently released annual test results and the news remains bad for the United States. Overall, the US ranked 36th. Certainly the results could have been better, but before you think 36th isn't too bad for a world with nearly 200 countries, understand that the PISA scores only compare 64 countries. That means we didn't even finish in the top half of the results. Woo hoo–USA, USA, U..s..um...yeah.

Just about every country you can think of in Asia–China, Japan, Korea, etc.–and Europe–Finland, France, Germany, etc.–ranked ahead of us. There are reasons people can cite as to why. The education systems in many Asian countries, for instance, are more stringent, with a longer school day and a longer school year. And in Europe there's perhaps not as much poverty or racial diversity, which is a challenge we face in the US that other countries don't. But in the sports world, we like to call all of these things excuses. Cite whatever you want. We suck. Period. And notice I didn't say our education system sucks. We suck. It's our responsibility. Part of the problem is we collectively blame a group of professionals in the industry without owning any of the utter shame and embarrassment we should all feel by these results.

What's worse is our ability to fix the problem. Every elementary school in my town has a Smart Board in every classroom. Google it if you don't know what I mean. They're pretty cool. We've made class sizes smaller. Built in API standards to measure progress. We've tried not to leave any child behind. We've given ourselves a head start and gotten ourselves hooked on phonics. Through all of this, our PISA scores have not improved AT ALL in the last decade. That's who we are now? The TV, the computer, the airplane, the light bulb and the Post-It note... we came up with all of that; the Miracle on Ice, won the war to end all wars, put a man on the moon–and are still the only country to do so–transplanted a mechanical heart into a dude...who lived afterward...and yet we can't figure out how to improve our education system. Amazing.

As a reporter, I covered schools and school issues extensively. I don't know what the exact cause of the problem is but I know in large part what it's not. The problem doesn't generally exist in the classroom. I know, you've seen Stand and Deliver and Dangerous Minds, but most classrooms in most schools in most places aren't F-bombs and knife fights. The students are reasonably engaged and generally pretty smart. And the teachers are not the problem, either. The number of "bad" teachers is pretty low. So, smart kids and good teachers–what's the problem then?

The kids learn what they are taught. And the teachers teach what they're told to. The process of education, overall, is "here are the things you're expected to know, so know them." Albert Einstein once said, "education isn't the learning of facts, it is the training of the mind to think." The US education system is a "learning of facts" model. In places like Finland, for instance, theirs is a "training of the mind" model.

Our system–Smart Boards not withstanding–is also out of date. Teacher in front of a chalk board, students in desks, lecture, scribble notes. That's how it is today, when I was in school, when my parents were in school and how they taught the kids on the wholesome family-drama Little House on the Prairie. The seven-year old in my house can do Google searches and play videos on Hulu. But he goes to school and learns in the same way Aristotle's students did. It's not what we teach in the classrooms that needs to change, but how we teach. One of the news stories about these results featured a photo with school kids in a classroom, framed by a globe in the foreground. A globe! Kids can view the Earth on a computer using pictures derived from a satellite in space. A globe? Honestly!

And one more area to look at is administration. I don't mean principals and vice principals. I mean people that get elected and appointed to "fix" the mess. The process of administration of education in this country is a total example of "too many cooks spoil the broth." And administrators are expensive. Really expensive. Picketing teachers demanding a pay raise aren't the cause of educational expense. The ten-fold overkill of administrators making six-figure salaries is. Chop costs there and you can raise salaries, buy more technology for classrooms and still save taxpayer money. Except the people making those decisions are the administrators themselves. But if "We, the People," want better test results, we're the ones that need to fix the problem, not them. Of course, it's possible we just enjoy being in 36th place. Hmm, gold, silver, bronze...what is the medal for 36th made of anyway? Balsa wood? Hooray us!