Education Trends: A Look Back
Once upon a time, a couple of decades ago, I took a stab at some predictive commentary about education. As you assess the credibility of my crystal ball, please keep in mind that my involvement in educational endeavors at that time was only a few years in duration, and, thank goodness, my awareness of all those education reform efforts which have come and gone was not first-hand.
“The overriding characteristic which I envision is a greater array of widely-accepted educational options. Through legislative, judicial, and attitudinal changes, parents at all income levels will have become empowered to choose among the full menu of possibilities: home schooling, parochial schools, apprenticeships, nonsectarian private schools, public and private voucher programs, charter schools and the traditional public school system, which itself will have changed in terms of its modus operandi.
Every city with at least 100,000 people (and regional areas where feasible) will have an Educational Choice Resource and Referral Center, equipped with a computerized data bank and a small, knowledgeable staff. Parents desiring a print-out of schools that fit their desired characteristics will access the “Choice Center” at no charge. Funding will be generated primarily by a combination of dues remitted by every school that provides data on its educational program and fees paid by every service provider whose information is in the computer.
An ancillary but significant benefit of the above will be a dwindling of conversations that focus on organizational labels (e.g., do you go to a “charter” or a “private” school), to be replaced by increased discussion about educational matters, particularly academic outcomes and parental/student satisfaction.
Schools rightly will be identified as places of learning rather than collections of bricks and mortar. The “Entrepreneur High School” may be located at the community center or college, in a church basement, in empty retail space downtown or at the mall, or even in the vacated wing of an elementary school with reduced population.
Thematic “schools within schools” will proliferate. These will have different mixes of conventional and unconventional offerings, a veritable New Jersey diner array of options, with each school designed to provide an education which both meets certain broad-based requirements and is tailored to the individual. Fiscal, staffing, and management responsibilities will be school-based, allowing individual school leaders to negotiate for use of shared facilities based on their respective curricula and the number of students who have chosen their program. Since said mini-schools will be within the mission of the overall school, there will not be the hierarchical turf wars which heretofore have prevented this concept from flourishing in heavily bureaucratic environments.
Islands of educational excellence created in the 1990’s will connect back to the mainland. These innovative schools needed first to be separate from the system that had stifled out-of-the-box thinking. With demonstrated success among the newer education providers and a fragmented overall “system”, structural antagonisms will decline in favor of cooperation. Proponents of the traditional school system will get their regulatory loads reduced, leading to more of the educational dollar being spent on and for the classroom, which in turn will give this sector a greater opportunity to emulate the above islands.
The educational legal battles over church-state relationships will be yesterday’s news, just as 1999 put the skids on counterproductive desegregation mandates. Minority and urban parents in particular will work hard to create strong neighborhood schools; busing will be left in the trash- bin of history’s failed social experiments. The U.S. Supreme Court will rule that when a parent uses his/her tax money to help his/her child obtain a non-religious education, even if that takes place in a sectarian setting, the federal government has not violated the church-state establishment clause of the U. S. Constitution.
More big-city mayors, actively recognizing the essential long-term linkage between education and sustainable community development, will support meaningful changes in the educational marketplace. They will not be seduced by either of the twin mirages that many people gravitate toward : the belief that incremental funding alone will elicit the objective of improved results and the thesis that educational reform can wring a substantial net cost reduction in the overall pre-K to grade 12 system.
Teacher tenure will be transformed into a contractual review system, with an increasingly lengthy job protection period as a teacher gains in competency, which no longer will be taken as synonymous with years of experience and degrees earned. There will be built-in professional development requirements emphasizing a master teacher concept, not attendance at workshops. These lead teachers will receive compensation significantly higher than at present. Bonus and other incentive plans will be more evident.
Teachers colleges will introduce more real-world exposure into their curricula. Their graduates will be required to demonstrate classroom management skills and in-depth knowledge in their subject areas prior to being certificated as teachers. At the same time as standards here will have been lifted, there will be more flexibility in the timing of when graduates must become certified to enter the classroom.
Alternative routes to•teaching and school leadership roles will be made easier. Representatives of the creative arts and scientific communities, refugees from corporate America and Wall Street, and plumbers and carpenters alike will be in the classrooms, sharing their expertise. Grandparents and other senior citizens will be omnipresent as they tell their “stories”, the ones not found on any computer chip, to students at every age level. In similar fashion, students will gain valuable insights by leaving their classrooms to go to diverse outside environments, e.g., as interns or community service volunteers.
More people will again realize and remind themselves that education truly does begin in the home and that television sets and computers are more properly perceived as potential supplemental aids to education than as substitute delivery mechanisms. There will be renewed emphasis on the combination of parents and books necessary to foster the single most critical educational capability: reading.
Computers will be even more ubiquitous. However, when no documentation is forthcoming to show that widespread computer access is furthering either the educational progress of young people in core subject areas or the development of critical thinking skills, there will be a renewed emphasis on original research and more time spent on developing the ability to write and speak well. Students will be required first to scour their libraries, those rooms with “real” books, and make inquisitive telephone calls to sources of background information and insight, before browsing the web.
There are undoubtedly some fearless predictions which have been overlooked and there has not been the space available to reiterate the compelling logic behind current buzz phrases like “higher standards” or “greater accountability,” but here’s hoping that a good fraction of the above ideas is converted from wish list to reality in the coming years.”
A look back: not too bad, maybe a solid B. As a non-techie, obviously I underestimated the “disruption” of iDevices. And edupolitics has continued to rear its ugly head.
USA in 21st Century
DEMOGRAPHICS
In the world of predictive metrics, demographics is far and away the leader. Most one year-olds will become two, most seventeen year-olds will become eighteen, and so forth. Therefore, there is a high degree of confidence behind the forecast that the USA will relatively soon (2040-45) have no ethnic majority. Not only will we be a nation of multiple minorities, but “all” will have the right to vote. Historically, this is a highly unusual combination.
Note that in looking at data, whether demographic or otherwise, percentages normally follow absolutes — i.e., the former are typically derivative, not determinative. Equally true is that the more interesting percentage often is related to the composition of change, not the absolute numbers. For example, for the past 25 years, all the growth in the K-12 student population has been minorities.
Will white America need heavy therapy to avoid becoming totally stressed out? How will the country’s inevitable demographic transition dictate a changing of the guard with respect to political power? Will struggles in this regard become inflammatory to the point of violence? The 2015-16 campus uprisings and the incendiary presidential campaign are not comforting with respect to the outlook for civilized debate.
Will the USA become even more balkanized than it is at present? Reportedly, from a geographical and socioeconomic standpoint, “likes” increasingly are marrying and living with “likes.” This spills over to political homogeneity as well.
Accompanying the demographic evolution is a lessening of the bonds of English as the national language. Not only will the cost structure of governance have to rise to accommodate multiple tongues, but in some areas the mere existence of such diversity will coincide with expressed irritation. With multiple minorities, there will be a greater mixing of marriages from an ethnic standpoint, creative arts, food. There will be a declining appreciation or knowledge of what heretofore was considered the standard narrative of American history.
Overall, there might be more ethnic identification when it comes to identifying who is employed, who pays which taxes, who reaps social security benefits in retirement, who receives welfare payments — i.e., which group is earning and gaining wealth and which is receiving government benefits not directly linked to what they have contributed. It would not be surprising if bottom line economic factors relating to generational and ethnic gaps become connected to heightened ethnic tensions.
DIGITIZATION
*Simply put, the penetration and implementation of iDevices will continue until your every breath is calibrated 24/7, accompanied by instructional to-dos relevant to each second of your work or leisure day. More people may be attracted to “must be good” labels like gluten-free, organic, fair-traded, vegan, but few will chuck their tablet or smart phone even as they advocate for the “natural” life. In fact, few are connecting the dots that suggest being “on” 24/7 because of those iDevices is tied to the feeling that something is amiss emotionally, that personal control is increasingly elusive.
Ironically, the economic benefits of the inventors/implementers of iDevices directly accrue to a relatively small group of people, thus accentuating inequality, often despite the professed political preferences of those involved.
*The philosophical free market requirement of complete information being available to all participants is closer to being met, which, among other impacts (example, outside the USA, the isolated farmer with a smartphone now knows the true market prices for his products) has led to more negotiating of prices than ever in the USA, something which has long been true in much of the rest of the world. Products being sold by many physical retailers will be perpetually on sale.
Whether digitization and globalization are a net plus to the world seems obvious; do not a billion people go on Facebook every day? However, considering the growth of ISIS, the decimation of many commodity dependent countries/currencies, the widening of inequality in many areas, the dramatic change in the impact of China on the world’s economy, the expressed irritation over free trade agreements — maybe there should be a more nuanced view about the brave new world.
\EDUCATION AND INEQUALITY
*The education system is mostly dysfunctional, from preschool through college. The good news is that its defects are on the front page and more people are recognizing that those negatively affected by reform are kicking and screaming about a list of red herrings that have nothing to do with the real issue: ensuring that a quality education is available to all children, from birth through receipt of a diploma or equivalent certificate.
Only through a complete re-examination of education, at every age level, will it be possible to assess the reality of opportunity inequality and its consequences for income and wealth inequality.
*While it might seem contradictory to the logic of higher education — defined as college, there should be increased messaging about the opportunities in the marketable skills area that can lift more families economically. To do so, there must be a politically acceptable way to convey the message that college, while attractive financially on average (even after associated debt), is not the automatically appropriate path for everyone.
SOCIETY
*Single parenthood has become completely acceptable, despite its documentable negative outcomes: below-average household income, absence of a father figure – especially impacting boys, depressed educational aspirations, and the necessity for large amounts of remedial expenditures as government agencies and non-profit organizations attempt to offset the situational negatives.
*There is a reexamination finally taking place about the relationship between non-productive drug laws and the numbers incarcerated, with the latter having a deleterious impact on family formations. Maybe the USA will give up its world leadership in prison population.
*Children are being employed to peddle every product and service imaginable. This marketing practice is both obscene and absurd and cannot possibly be tied to the healthy emotional growth of a young person.
FEDERAL RESERVE and the ECONOMY
*By any conventional measurement of money supply growth or federal debt compared with the size of the economy, the current approach to financing the American economy, namely having the Federal Reserve continuously creating money, is not sustainable. The “excuse” for the Fed being the de facto economic mastermind is that Congress has totally failed in its role, inclusive of fiscal measures which would have reduced the burden that has fallen almost entirely to the Fed since the Great Recession of 2007-08. An offshoot of this same political paralysis in the nation’s capital is that corporations have little confidence in their forecasts for economic growth, even as the USA outperforms the majority of developed countries. Reflecting this cautious, even skeptical, attitude, which is heightened by reduced growth in China, American companies have paid off high-cost debt and piled up cash to record levels.
*With globalization, there is little possibility of governments regulating capital flows in a manner which restrains economic inequality (although a wealth tax would be beneficial). Other changes which can be made to address inequality — higher marginal tax rates, fixing the carried interest rule pertinent to hedge funds — will not appreciably narrow the income gap unless the opportunity gap is fixed.People do not object to others making more money; they object to uneven playing fields. For example, Wall Street players right now are paid handsomely to simply participate in the financial world lottery, even though it is Other Peoples’ Money (OPM) which is the source of the funds for the ticket. To add to the insanity, Wall Street gets a substantial piece of the lottery winnings as well. As defined, the industry overall cannot really lose, even when the same cannot be said of the clients. The bankruptcies associated with the 2007-08 financial debacle do not contradict this observation
*Meanwhile, to those on Main Street America, the perception of corporations is that they will do whatever they will in pursuit of profit. The recognition of their essential amorality is now entrenched. We are simply human capital ingredients in a stew where a very few eat more than heartily and the very many get sustenance and little more.
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The majority of Americans tell pollsters that they are unhappy. Which of the above situations drives this characterization? Or is it the overall impact of change, uncertainty, a nagging feeling that something is not right with the picture previously implicitly in the mind of the average head of household?
Is the appeal of extremist politicians a psychological transference; people want to believe that there are “answers,” solutions which would reinstate what they thought to be the American way. They do not want to confront the necessity for the attitudinal adjustments which will be mandatory as the demographic evolution of the USA unfolds in unrelenting fashion.