Education's Ecology

Why Teaching, Textbooks, Testing & Technology are Not Enough.

Chapter I

Don;t tell me the moon is shining; show me the glint of light on broken glass.

Anton Chekhov

Schools Have Massive Problems

The problems of schools are intrinsic, to be sure, but then extrinsic problems are piled on by a society that has no other place to turn. The result is that dysfunction of schools expands. The result is social injustices that are beyond societies capacities to remedy. To make schools a source of solutions is to denigrate the role of schools.

While schools certainly play an important social role or roles in enabling individuals to achieve qualification for a place in the economic sectors of society, schools are much less fit to secure a broad pattern of socialization that fits with the grand intentions of democracy as a social experiment. Schools could be places for the practice of democracy but they are not and perhaps never could be democratic places because of an intrinsic hierarchy and ubiquitous authority that too often resembles an autocracy or even a severe dictatorship. The trickle down is a disaster for democracy, not to mention any aim of adjusting inequality across broad swaths of society.

Schools are organized around premises that are poorly defined and were probably never subjected to rigorous definition or debate. The basic notion of a school is to accommodate the social, family and individual needs of children. Its earliest form involved private (parochial) schools with religious support. The secularization of schools emerged with publicly supported schooling with broad egalitarian aspirations and citizenship. The result is schooling organizations, based on age and readiness for participation in a school environment. The school as we know it is mostly defined by age; readiness is a secondary factor; even an afterthought. From this starting point children pass at annual intervals from grade to grade until they reach a arbitrary point of emancipation as functional individuals in a community and society. There is little in the way of persuasive argument that age 16, 17, 18 is a defensible universal standard for turning a person loose from mandatory schooling to join the military, take a job or begin raising children of their own inside or outside of marriage.

College? Although this book and this chapter will focus on K-12 there is at least another book needed to deal with the ecologies of two-year, four-year and research institutions. The K-12 system from beginning to end is a selective exercise, a filter, leaving way too many lost and behind for life. Community colleges are a transition tool for social adjustments needed for job qualification or more education for better job qualification. College entrance examinations serve to select admission from the ranks of high school graduates. Aspirants to so-called elite colleges may be welcomed or rejected, yet many find other opportunities for “higher education” in a vast array of state and church supported institutions.

A few states are entertaining legislation to make school attendance mandatory until age 18. The arguments of an association of school principals tend to make sense if the whole premise of schools and schooling is accepted without question. What has happened to arguments to lower the age of emancipation, perhaps to 14 or even 12? It was certainly not that long ago that completion of the 8th grade at about age 13-14 was considered enough to be liberated to support the family or one's self if the family didn't require more labor to make subsistence possible. Leaving school at age 13-14 was common across much of America just a little over a century ago. The one-room school was even a stretch for the last year or two when teachers were often eighth graders themselves when they left for additional schooling on how to become a teacher at a “normal”: school, which was not too far from home, perhaps a day’s ride by horse or buggy. After normal schooling, the teacher aspirant often returned to their own community or to a community close by to pass on to younger children the basic skills of reading, writing and arithmetic. This path most commonly involved young wormen.

Some communities asked more of their teachers such as lessons in history, a new, unfamiliar (foreign) language: native languages of the community spoken by parents, preachers or priests. Topics like hygiene were expected to be developed at home. Literacy often was measured by the recitation skills following religious texts or available sectarian books.

Music more often was rudimentary in these small rural one-room schools unless the teacher was able to play a piano that may or may not have been available. Teachers may carry with them musical skills including singing, guitar, banjo, harmonica or other instrument that was more easily portable. A school day might start and end with music much of which was considered appropriate across all ages and may carry religious themes or nationally adopted lyrics. The national alliance or identity may have been American but not infrequently another ethnic link from the community. Sometimes the religious music substituted for or accompanied other religious rituals including prayer or readings.

The problems of education are huge and the list is long. While differentiating extrinsic and intrinsic problems may be useful it is often not easy to do since there are fuzzy borders between schools and society. The very processes of schools can make for or exacerbate social problems and vice versa. Every listing of “school problems” is fraught and open to criticism. Criticism is good when it leads to additional conversation to clarify the nature and details of any articulation or expression of a problem. What follows is not exhaustive but hopefully will open conversational threads inside and ourside of communities. I'll put some labels on each of the problems as athey are listed below, but other labels may be substituted.

Monolithic View

There are almost pervasive monolithic views of education as a system apart from society. Systems are embedded in all forms of education. Yet there is a dearth of thinking about how systems inside and outside of education interact and drive relationships across an ecology of education. Operating schools as “one size fits all” has been a monumental, undifferentiated mistake. The problem may well be monolithic. Solving this problem will not occur by continuing to do what we have always done.

Viewed from many perspectives, it is clear that the education of any individual is an experience different from any other individual. Even the environment of a classroom cannot be identical for each student present. The simple physical scan of a classroom should readily suggest for an observer, that the child in the front of the room has a different, even very different, experience than the student in the middle or back of the room. The unquestioned view that a child's experience in a classroom is monolithic is a serious myth leading to a multitude of problems for the entirety of education. Education is massive and not at all diversified. That is the very definition of monolithic; made of only one type of stone, comprising of one piece, solid and unbroken, total uniformity, rigidity, invulnerable.

Yet paradoxically a characteristic of all systems is that they are anything but monolithic. They are complex and responsive to the conditions for which they have evolved across time. As they operate across short or longer time-frames, by responding to the conditions of which they are a part, the systems change or adapt. This is not to say that schools are unresponsive, but responses are consistent with a framework or paradigm that schools are satisfactory even good for everyone who enters. It is abundantly obvious that everyone does not enter the school door each day with an identical capacity to be involved in the series of programmed experiences (aka, lessons, curriculum) provided, top down, with the best of intentions. Teachers plan activity for a group, a class, and not for individuals. In a monolithic environment, diversity is an enemy of planning.

Child Diversity

No two children are alike, not even mono-zygotic twins. An individual's ecosystem establishes individual personality and capacity that is largely incompatible with a monolithic school environment. The school environment demands conformity and mandatory attendance regardless of readiness for some externally defined schedule of events hour-by-hour, day-by-day, … year-by-year. Even within an hour attention may wax and wane. Each child in a classroom experiences the teacher, room, other children from a perspective that is not personally controlled or controllable. Child diversity is a fact that is beyond even the most well intentioned and optimistic practitioner of education in a classroom setting.

The range of challenges for personalizing education are excessive for the conditions present inside and outside of schools. As one important instance, consider autism, which is estimated to be frankly diagnosed or diagnosable in 3-5% of children. Autism is now regarded as a “spectrum” of disorders, and this is completely out of whack when labeled with a single term—autism. The Autism Spectrum Disorder (ASD) embraces such a broad range that it requires an army of specialists to distinguish high-functioning adults with autism bordering on characteristic genius to fully non-communicating children, unable to socialize and with repetitious behaviors, some of whom are unable to sustain basic practices of personal hygiene. And that is just one identified condition standing in the way of personalized education. The lessons delivered in a classroom by a teacher—with or without assistance—are daunting even before more subtle diversities among a class of students are contemplated.

Paying attention is a pretty essential prerequisite to development of skills requiring memory and good choice. Handling the demands of studying content across a span of academic subjects, requires ability to concentrate across time periods ranging from minutes to months. Processing complex relationships between objects, subjects in different environments and establishing a long-term memory sufficient to perform at an acceptable cognitive level requires coordinated functioning of multiple brain centers. Children with diverse attention spans are expected to easily handle the differences in the classroom environments they encounter.

Social and emotional differences and disabilities are poorly addressed. Schools are social engines for socialization. Capacity to control emotions inside and outside the school environment is highly variable and schools are now dictated to add delivery systems (lessons) for social emotional learning (SEL). A part of this mandate is the result of classroom disruptions that cannot be adequately managed by the classroom teacher. Skills for SEL teaching can be fostered through continuing education (professional development) programs, the typical classroom teacher likely remains poorly equipped by training and experience to find effective solutions for dealing with a diverse array of children, including those who are socially and emotionally maladjusted in or out of the school environment.

Birth defects and accidents are, regrettably, mostly unavoidable. The range of disabilities is enormous even as the absolute numbers are small, yet disabled children are expected to be accommodated by the school environment. This is because of factors outside the auspices or control of the institution of schooling in society. Put another way, what cannot be dealt with by parents and society at large, is referred to the schools and reasonable accommodation is required politically and by extension, legally. Much of this is driven by the inherent role of schools to provide for socialization. By and large, society has no other alternative. Yet any and all pejorative considerations of alternative consideration for these children is socially, ethically, morally unacceptable. The operating label of special education, has almost never been adequately, let alone fully, supported.

Knowledge of individual nutritional diversity is almost non-existent. We all grew up with basic physiological reactions to food that are largely dictated by the parental choices made for a young child. Yet it is abundantly clear that genetic differences among individuals are present, perhaps beginning with sensitivity of our taste-buds. Science is catching up with developing disciplines of nutrogenomics and nutritional genetics but those early studies are not yet particularly enlightening about deep nutritional diversity. School-based and school-biased nutrition programs are almost totally unaware of these individual differences while they administer breakfasts and lunches. Little wonder that food waste is ubiquitous and is exacerbated, not by student indifference, but by choices that are driven by economic, social and biological factors—all of which are essentially unknown and perhaps in any practical sense unknowable. Nevertheless individual nutritional differences are diverse and massive; and, for the most part, almost totally unattended.

Incompetent Leadership

The principal drivers of education are ostensibly parents; the voices seeking and demanding where necessary their vision for what is best for their child. Unfortunately too many parents are simply incompetent in dealing with the challenges of raising a child. Yet all parents are ostensibly afforded autonomy their child’s welfare. Over compensation by a single parent or a parental coalition can take many forms. Little to nothing is done to differentiate among parents regarding their competence for influence and leadership. Belligerence on behalf of a child is not uncommon. Parents may or may not show up for conferences, meetings and voting. Being clever rhetorically and when necessary, loud and belligerent may pass for leadership. That may occasionally be true of even parents with the best, most laudable of intentions. There is a thick dogma that parents are always right for their own child. Leadership should be more than a loud mouth.

Unfortunately too many parents struggle with the challenges of parenting and the result can be devastating when they inadvertently or intentionally, but incompetently traumatize their children without knowing potential consequences. Neglect, humiliation or other abuses, certainly including corporeal punishment, whether occasional or frequent can have important consequences. These consequences are now identified as Adverse Childhood Experiences (ACEs) and well known to have immediate as well as long term affect. ACEs continue with the child into adulthood with influences on health and behavior. How many parents were themselves abused as children We'll leave the topic of parenting for another chapter because it may well be too far beyond anything that schools can do anything about. Yet parents are important political drivers of leadership in communities. This cannot be excluded or exonerated from the conditions in which they, themselves grew into adulthood. Nothing protects schools or children from parents who may act dangerously incompetent even with the best of intentions.

Into this mix or morass, superintendents, district administrators, and principles, as well as their associates and assistants, are themselves schooled in the mechanics of running a district, school or cluster of classrooms. Their schooling follows myriad paths leading to certification. What is not on the path and is not seen with good visual acuity is what may or may not lead to productive application in a particular, complex school situation. Because so much of leadership is psychological and biased by personal choices, the so-called school leader may be locked into making sense in only a very narrow context of their responsibilities and defined role. This will potentially and perhaps inevitably preclude relationships with both colleagues and subordinates that are able to follow a common vision for operations, innovations or further advancement of a broad mission. As with parents, these school leaders are often, even mostly, well intentioned even as they are guided poorly from training and experience to keep the school running smoothly. Competence is so hard to define and can almost never be comprehensive, that virtually everything is or can become, in some way or another, incompetent. Judging the quality of teachers is critically important, yet rarely handled with skill, knowledge and an attitude consistent with positive outcomes.

Poor Teacher Quality

The range of expectations for teachers far exceeds their educational preparation. Compare for example teacher-education to that of a physician. A physician masters the structures and functions of around ten (10) body systems and learns to perform tests or read the results of testing to ascertain whether function is normal or abnormal. Years of use of these tests has provided the entire profession, not simply individual physicians, with standards that are relatively unambiguous. Each result is evaluated in the context of a patient's current situation and history of medical issues and problems. The physician is empowered by virtue of certification to make judgments about next steps to support the patient's health always shaddowed by peer expectations of high standards drilled and enforced in medical school.

Yet we ask teachers to apply untested methods according to their personal judgment. Peer review is largely absent for most teachers most of the time. The whole notion of empirical evidence for the application of methods is fraught, to say the least. These limitations are built into the system(s) of schooling. Accordingly teachers cannot achieve a level of quality in supporting the range of diversity represented by the children placed, arbitrarily, in their classroom.

Given that teachers are expected to accomplish tasks for which they are poorly prepared, we should not be surprised that teacher loss in the first five-years is extremely high as compared with professionals in medicine, accounting, business management, dentistry, etc. There is little if any coherent recruitment of individuals into teaching. At best, recruitment is very uneven. It is rare for teacher-education institutions to recruit at all and even then the criteria are uneven. Teacher selection is mostly self-selection.

Engagement of teachers with the community is almost non-existent. Teachers are, for the most part, prohibited from engaging in the electoral process. Elected school boards rarely engage teachers in decisions as the board hires managers to provide leadership. While a few of these leaders have a history of outstanding performance in the classrooms of a school, many seek their leadership positions, or are selected for leadership positions, for reasons that are unrelated or weakly related to education.

Classroom management competes with education at the level of teaching. It is widely assumed that in the absence of good classroom management any worthwhile teaching is impossible. Behavior of children assigned to a classroom has to be controlled. In the absence of control, there may be remedial measures taken by school leaders; principals, curriculum specialists, superintendents, or even school board members. Remedial action may add resources in the form of special education staff or, at an extreme, firing of a teacher who is unable to sufficinetly manage behavior of children assigned to a classroom. Teachers are too often asked to manage what is not manegeable.

Teachers may be better positioned to improve the quality of what they do with young people in schools if there was greater opportunity for innovation. This may likely entail potential for flexibility in planning and management of the classroom, not to neglect the importance of adequate resourcs and the numbers of children assigned. The rigidity of the school environment has now become so entrenched and fossilized that the space for innovation is blocked form access by teachers and the few administrators who are sensitive to the problems inherent in public education and want to find different paths. When these alternative paths are blocked by externalities, it is a huge challenge for a teacher to feel any sense of mastery.

Curriculum Confusion

STEM is on the minds of many as our schools are charged with supplying the workforce of the future for commerce and industry. Schools are criticized for offering too little Science Technology Engineering and Math; while at the same time there is criticism for too much STEM and exclusion of the arts. STEM gets STEAM-rolled. Lately STEM and STEAM have morphed toward the addition of computer science, STEM-CS. The lack of racial, ethnic, gender diversity in commerce and industry is blamed on schools. Teaching STEM is sequestered in departments with narrowly defined expectations and confusing, poorly defined standards for diversity. The STEM curriculum is imposed on schools by state mandates and industry expectations for graduates. Adding to the confusion are frequently articulated needs by industry and commerce for so-called soft skills; socially defined as empathy, teamwork, or leadership. Confusion is exacerbated through actual or perceived neglect of performance (music, drama) and studio art (painting, sculpture, ceramics) as well as language skill development. Any of the above will potentially or actually deprive students of the tools essential for personal growth and career success.

Direct instruction for vocations not requiring a 2- or 4-year degree have been systematically excluded from the school curriculum. Another related issue is that Home Economics classes and courses have been dropped and is only rarely available as an educational option. One important result is that junior and senior high students are less able to cook and sew, wash and iron clothes. Even maintaining basic standards of hygiene in a home environment is uneven or completely neglected. It is not an unreasonable leap to consider that this may be related to a leap in asthma. Sooo, should some asthma prevention instruction now be added to the curriculum?

Schedules

The “Yellow Bus Syndrome” is a serious problem, which stems from the collection of students from neighborhoods to assure that they are able to attend and that they are required to attend. The bus sets the schedule for the school day. There is essentially no capacity to make the needs of individual students a priority in this part of a schooling system. Tweaking the system to make a start time a half hour later and extending hte school day by a half hour is nonsense. The adjusted schedule only serves poorly a slightly different cohort. Better schedules to serve students may well require a thorough relook at school schedules including the ubiquitous school-associated Yellow Bus. Much more is needed than a different color of paint.

The operation of transportation systems for exclusive use by schools is considered necessary but at the same time is likely wasteful of public money that could be spent much more directly on learning and teaching. Consideration could involve a comprehensive assessment of public transportation in a community. Yet the inflexible Yellow Bus Syndrome is clearly unresponsive to individual needs of students. Egalitarian development of public transportation with all of education—not just schools—in a high priority position could be a win-win for cities and communities. Digital technologies are making workplaces much more flexible and schools should also be benefited. The day of driverless, autonomous, on-demand transport is coming, perhaps none too soon.

Safety is a central concern. There are admittedly worthy concerns about child safety if they are riding buses with adult patrons who may be of questionable moral character, it seems that at least after the age of nine or ten a child could be capable of assuring their own safety if the critical transportation occurred after or before rush hours and the transportation device was also populated with monitors and, when necessary, enforcers of rules of decorum. As for the years before ten, we will forge new ways of thinking about education that is above and beyond the realm of transportation.

Schedules and scheduling within education is, of course, not all about transportation. The school day is driven by schedules of many sorts. None of it is characteristically flexible and emblematic of prioritizing student;s freedom and the dignity of choices. The array of factors determining schedules are too many to be elaborated on here. Nevertheless as we consider other aspects of education’s ecology, schedules will loom large.

Schedules also call attention to vast underutilization of public-owned property. Schools closed in the summer and virtually unavailable before and after a six to seven hour workday for teachers is deplorable. Extra-curricular activities notwithstanding, school buildings are egregiously underutillized because of school schedules.

Retention

The drop out rate is only counting the students who stop attending school on a regular and required basis. It is entirely likely that within the cohort of regularly attending young people there exists a notable cluster who are going through the motions of attending because of legal or parental expectations. These “virtual dropouts” may be the “students” who account for poor scores on mandatory standardized testing and constitute the “gap” for which schools are held accountable. Yet schools are only one part of a multi-variable problem. If a child is in school they are counted as enrolled even though they really don't want to be there and are far from being attentive and engaged. Retention becomes a multi-edged instrument that cuts both ways; for and against the best intents of the school as well as the individuals ensnared in the web of schooling.

The rationale for mandatory attendance has historical roots that may no longer apply. The age-based criteria certainly are incompatible with known variables of physical and psychological development. Raising or lowering the age of mandatory attendance is fraught when the choice is a state enforced mandate rather than a response to individual human needs. Getting at those needs for individuals is a complicated and expensive undertaking that usually seems to lie outside of a school's capacity. Retention is mostly meaningless and only a number, when attendance is mandatory.

Finance

Fincncing of schools is largely based on enrollments and attendance. Formulaic allocation of fixed budgets for education are a function of enrollment and attendance. The formulas are increasingly arcane and attempt to include line items for all manner of variables, yet fail to enable schooling systems to meet the needs of individuals. This is largely because the number of variables is so incomprehensible that assigning numbers is fraught, unreliable and, for the most part, utterly mindless.

Public school finance has become more complicated by the good intentions of the Chartered School movement which now competes for limited school funding. Chartered Schools are public schools and were intended to foster innovation and an enhanced role for teacher's as leaders. The result has been market-based commercialization of public schools and transfer of funding from the more traditional approaches of public education to corporate for-profit management schemes that have little or no obvious connection to the original aims of innovation and teacher control and innovation. Though putting Chartered School money back into the traditional public support for education would not likely make any substantial difference regarding the original aims of chartering schools, it would improve the overall funding of school districts.

Sufficiency of funding is almost always relative to the choices and pressures to make choices that exist in a school's environment. Allocations of available funding are choices and budgets reflect both values and pressures. Schools have accumulated a broad range of curricular and extra-curricular obligations that have extended well beyond the original justification. While physical education is a worthy element of education and a part of public schooling, the rise of athletics as an embedded part of the public school mission is now almost locked into the environment of the school. Choice for funding based on these self-locked enterprises, and athletics is only the big visible one, we have attached to schools is a monster eating at the public trough in the school space. The notion of “full funding” has become a shibboleth that cries out for debate, discussion, dialogue—anything that will make spending on schools display better sanity. Yet schools keep spending more and promising better results.

Socialization

That socialization has become a part of public education cannot be denied. What may be worthy of reconsideration is whether there is any neighborhood or community opportunities that are being missed for lack of institutional engagement. Religious institutions have been instruments of socialization but have carried the serious liabilities of adherence to practice, tradition and dogma. Unfortunately some vestiges of these liabilities are carried (back) into the school environments.

Bullying & Cliques – would be a good place to begin to consider the role of social insecurity and inequity in public schools. Children (and adults) placed in a classroom setting will somewhat naturally find others to associate with and develop relationships that foster their feelings of belonging. Exclusion is an almost inherent condition for the existence of these groups. Intergroup and intragroup dynamics are factors in the advancement of antagonisms that challenge group coherence. In a school setting these antagonisms may become sources of esteem. Pushed toward extremes a group may engage individuals and other groups in physical and psychological combat or competition. Physical violence and psychological violence can be a highly disruptive result.

The decline of civics in public schools may be nowhere more evident than in the decline in voter participation and the electoral successes and failures of a recent presidency. It is likely that an anti-democratic bias is built into the very fabric of our systems for schooling. Yet few would argue against the basic notion that supporting democacy is an inherent function of schools. When have you heard that maybe the last place civic education should be attempted is in schools as they are presently formulated and operated? Socialization carries enormous weight for democracy.

Democracy & Management

The management of schools is imposed from society without ongoing and intense practice of democratic principles. About the only element of public schools having a tangent with the bubble of societal democracy is in the election of school boards. While there are board members who are sensitive to the public, there are also members who are essentially devoid of a democratic focus as they push any of a huge variety of special interests.

The raw imbalance of managers of the myriad array of mandated requirements for schools far outstrips the employees assigned and committed to the delivery of content and practice of sound pedagogy. Every administrative position in a district organizational chart seems to have associates and assistants paid to prepare deliverables (aka, reports) for district and state mandates. When the ratio of teachers to administrators exceeds 1:1 it is past time to examine the bureaucracy of public education from the local to the national level.

We'll next turn attention to the social structures that are pervasive in schools. Myths and dogma are embedded in the history of schooling for education. The needs of society in the past are of marginal value when schools are expected to fix problems that are a modern expression of societal developments that could have never been anticipated even as little as three decades ago.

Sources and Recommended Reading

The problems outlined in this chapter are sourced from many of the same publications listed in the Introduction so I won’t repeat them here.

For those with access, I recommend the Teacher’s College Record for a host of articles providing insight into the problems with schools and the challenges of management.

The US Department of Education and its Institute for Education Science supports the public database called ERIC. Any of the headings in this chapter may unearth articles and books worthy of providing additional insights defending and challenging schools and schooling.

These Descriptors (aka, key words) will get you started and you can add many others. Simply adding problem, issue or controversy to a descriptor will narrow your search.

monolithic view; child diversity; special education; leadership; teacher quality; teacher preparation; curriculum; standards; stem; schedules; retention; gaps; finance; school finance; socialization; democracy & management

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