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.