Schools Cannot Do It Alone: Introduction

So, here’s what I’m going to do: As I read each chapter I’m going to summarize its main points and important quotes/ideas.  I think once you start reading you’re going to want to hear the rest. As we go through the book, I hope it sparks discussion and, at the very least, makes you feel more understood and appreciated like it has for me. Furthermore, I firmly believe that the message of this book needs to be our central mission as we go forward at the local, state, and federal level as we take the lead in the direction of education and its reform.

You can read the rest of Scott’s proposal here.

I emphasize public schools not because I have anything against private schools. They play an important role in America’s education establishment. If nothing else, they prove that parental involvement, smaller classes, minimal red tape, motivated students, and, sometimes, more money result in higher student achievement. Many private school leaders and their staffs do excellent work, and I hope that they find much within this book that is useful. But public education is the miracle.

Public schools broke the link between accidents of birth and access to education that determined the social order for centuries. Public schools unleashed the creative intelligence of tens of millions of children both privileged and disenfranchised. Public education made our democracy possible and powered our ascent to global preeminence. America is the first country on the planet to aggressively pursue publicly funded, equal educational opportunity for all, and the return on our investment has been glorious.

This book is unabashedly written in support of public education and its remarkable employees. It is not, however, a defense of the status quo. Our schools must change. They were designed to serve a society that no longer exists.

The two-tiered world of work has all but disappeared. Initiative, creative thinking, and problem solving are now encouraged if not required at every level of employment. Success now rests on our ability to continually learn and apply what we have learned to a constantly changing array of problems. Everyone must have the skills to sort fact from fiction, truth from lies, reality from hype.

America’s schools were not designed to do this. They were built to select and sort students into two groups: a small handful of thinkers and a great mass of obedient doers. They were created, as Thomas Jefferson said, “to rake the geniuses from the rubbish.” In the 220 years since, armies of ardent reformers have strengthened, streamlined, and standardized his basic design. Their cumulative efforts have produced the schools we have today. Schools in which we hold time constant, even though every teacher, administrator, and parent knows that some children take longer to learn than others. Schools in which we favor certain profiles of intelligence over those we deem less valuable. Schools where we sort the winners from losers not based on their capacity to learn, but on their ability to perform within the strictures of school. Schools where teachers and administrators are forced to become subversives in order to do their best work. Today, it is neither moral or practical. Our schools must change.

I want to be crystal clear. I am talking about a systems problem, not a people problem. Most teachers will admit that they can improve, and we must surround them with high quality programs of professional development. But the truth is that most of America’s Pre-K-12 educators are smart, dedicated professionals doing everything they can to ensure that their students succeed in school and in life. They are not the primary problem.

I did not always believe this. Once, I strongly believed that the “insiders” were the obstacles to change. But in the twenty years since I stumbled into the education arena from the world of business, I have watched them work in scores of schools, and the experience has changed my views. America’s teachers spend more hours per day in front of their classes than their peers anywhere in the industrialized world. They juggle their disparate tasks before audiences comprised of diverse, distracted, demanding children, many of whom are victims of pop culture that overstimulates their physiologies, fractures their attention spans, and promotes a bizarre sense of entitlement. Principals are asked to be both efficient branch managers and brilliant instructional leaders; they ahve become the shock absorbers of the system — squeezed by directives from above and demands from below. Superintendents and their administrative teams spend their days (and nights) attempting stretch insufficient resources to meet rising expectations. They struggle to balance competing public and private interests while being denounced for earning salaries that no private sector CEO managing a comparable organization would even consider. And everyone who works in our schools labors to respond to the consequences of “mandate creep”: the ever-expanding list of academic, social, medical, psychological, and nutritional responsibilities that has been crammed into the academic calendar that has not grown by a single minute in decades.

A forty-hour work week for these people is nothing. Fifty hours, sixty hours, is routine. But every teacher and administrator could work a hundred hours and we would still not produce the graduates we need. No matter how hard they work, no matter how often they are threatened, they cannot teach all children to high levels in a system designed to teach only some. The problem is not the people. It’s the system. Misidentifying the core problem has cost America’s taxpayers billions of dollars and America’s educators untold hours of wasted effort. Most troubling, it has cost millions of America’s young people the opportunity to succeed.

Public education must be aggressively supported if America is to remain great, but the system must be changed.

It cannot, however, change in isolation. You cannot touch a school without touching the culture of the surrounding town.

Over time, I was forced to accept an undeniable, albeit daunting fact: schools are shaped by the mores of their communities. If, therefore, we are to meet the challenges of the knowledge age, if we are to unfold the full creative potential of every child, we must do more than change our schools, we must change America, one community at a time. The question was, how?

I also became sensitive to the damage caused by the unrelenting stream of negativity directed at our schools. I am not talking about honest criticism. I refer to the practice of bashing public schools as a blood sport: a dangerous game in which self-serving politicians portray public schools as dismal failures that they alone can fix, and media pundits blame schools for social ills over which they have no control; where headlines broadcast half-truths, statistics are used out of context, and test results are reported in the worst possible light.

I realized that something was missing in the standard approach to reform. It wasn’t a lack of effort or conviction, standards or accountability. It was deeper. There was something missing in the community, specifically in the school/community relationship. There was a dearth of four intangible but essential resources: understanding, trust, permission, and support.

It was a great relief to identify the problem. But it was an even greater relief to realize that the Prerequisites of Progress could be obtained through a single course of action. I call it The Great Conversation.

A great opportunity lies before us. I know it can be hard to see from the trenches, where the challenges seem to multiply by the hour, but this is public education’s most hopeful time. Public schools have never been more important.

AMAZON SITE: If you want to get the book, you can go to http://www.amazon.com/Schools-Cannot-Do-Alone-ebook/dp/B0058JZDH8

BOOK WEBSITE: http://www.jamievollmer.com/book.html