Parents ‘n Schools

Broad schooling of the general public has enriched society for a century and more now. But to continue that enrichment, I believe schooling in North America will have to move away from monopoly government delivery to a model aimed at delivering optimum consumer value. The same model that has transformed public utilities in the increasingly non-regulated marketplace can transform public schooling.

As Matt Ridley in “The Rational Optimist” describes, falling consumer prices is what has enriched society generally in other areas of living (for example, as he describes, artificial lighting cost 20,000 times more in the year 1300 that it does today). Government needs to stop going to great lengths to prevent such enrichment by going as it does to such great lengths to preserve the monopoly of government schools. Liberating that environment will liberate schooling to keep pace with advancing society. In a government schooling world of 30% and more failure to graduate in a timely fashion, there is little reason to preserve that world.

GLO

gordotto@parentsnschools.com

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(GLO — August 2010 — Written early on in this journey, two summers ago.)

In the Oxford Book of Modern Science Writing, scientist Lewis Thomas describes a list of science’s “Seven Wonders” not in the usual sense, but along the lines of the things he “wondered about” the most. Number One on his list was our planet itself — “Of all celestial bodies within reach or view, as far as we can see, out to the edge, the most wonderful and marvelous and mysterious is turning out to be our own planet earth. There is nothing to match it anywhere, not yet anyway.”

Dr. Thomas’ approach got me thinking about what I would list as “The Seven Wonders of Government Schooling”… the things about government schooling that I wonder about the most.

Saving #1 for last, Number Two on my list of things I wonder about is why there is no duty of good faith among all who are at work in government schools. Why there is no fundamental professional duty to communicate what they believed the other person would want to know, if they were in their shoes — akin to the fiduciary duties governing lawyers, accountants, engineers and other professionals in their work with persons whose interests are entrusted to them. This is conspicuously absent from statutes and regulations governing government schools, and I wonder about that.

Number Three would be wondering why parents get next to nothing in government school budgets, while evidence (both anecdotal and analytic) strongly suggests parents can and do play a pivotal role in children’s schooling success. Why parents get no money, no training and no resources yet are expected to share responsibility for a child’s lack of success in a government school system they have no authority over (or Wonder Number 3-A — why professional schoolers get all the money, all the training and all the resources yet are WILLING to share responsibility for a child’s lack of success in a government school system they have all the authority over…)

Number Four on this list of things I wonder about government schooling is why so little is spent on incorporating and applying technology toward reducing labour costs and improving efficiency and effectiveness in the delivery of schooling. I don’t wonder about why this might not be happening. I wonder about how it can be put up with. We would be very reluctant to deliver our children to hospitals that have refused newfangled innovations like x-rays or anesthesia and still hold to the benefits of bloodletting, yet we contentedly deliver children up to schoolers who have somehow managed to stop time 50 years or so ago. Schooling should be where technology gets pushed to its limits, not pushed to the side.

Wonder Number Five for me is how one child out of every three that starts government schooling will not finish it with the other two… but nobody tells you that going in. If truth in advertising laws applied to government schooling, it could only admit to being a K-8 or 9 system, with the last few years being somewhat “iffy” as far as modern quality completion standards might apply. Yet it maintains a facade of full service and full reliability. With a one-third (or worse) probability of failure, shouldn’t government schooling be classed more as an “extreme sport”?

Number Six wonder for me is why there are no contracts in place between school and family. Why something as important as a 13 year course of learning can be conducted without so much as a receipt or a warranty, much less mutually agreed responsibilities and expectations. Delivery of natural gas and newspapers are facilitated by contract. Why are there no negotiated and mutually binding contracts in the delivery of government schooling?

Number Seven of my Seven Wonders of Government Schooling is a hard one to choose because you leave so many “wonders” out… but I shall choose to wonder why fundraising is encouraged, facilitated or even allowed. How can 30,000 professional schoolers have at their disposal the energy of 600,000 students and their 1,000,000 parents and choose to allow them to waste that energy on fundraising exercises that add barely 1% to government schooling’s available dollars? (Those numbers are for Alberta alone — multiply by 10 for Canada, and 10 times that for North America… but the 1% stays the same.) There are a myriad other ways to channel student and family energy than backfilling a sliver of massive government budgets.

And Number One on my list of things I wonder most about government schooling is why government delivers it. I can see why government might tax and fund it. Why government might regulate and oversee it. But I see no reason — from a student or family point of view — why government needs to deliver it. Anymore, at least (I can understand why government delivery may have been involved in public schooling’s beginnings, but I question whether that original necessity remains.) I wonder what learning might be like if government got out of the schooling delivery business. I imagine it as a future that I would like my children and grandchildren to see.

GLO

gordotto@parentsnschools.com

P.S. Feel free to share anything you wonder about your child’s schooling. Maybe we could compile a list of 70 Things (or 700).

In Matt Ridley’s “The Rational Optimist”, he describes how IQ scores have been improving over time… or, significantly, the spread from high to low has been shrinking steadily, with the low scores catching up. It is part of a steady improvement in IQ scores that people achieve at any given age — at a rate of “3 per cent per decade”.

“It is a levelling-up caused by an equalisation of nutrition, stimulation or diversity of childhood experience.”

And those things are what parents ‘n community largely provide, and schooling benefits from.

Children are more ready to learn than they were decades ago, and that improves their schooling success.

GLO

P.S.   And that improvement in parents could be advanced even further via a dedicated “PD for Parents” curriculum organized parallel with schooling, delivered online, with incentives and recognition and certification.

gordotto@parentsnschools.com

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(GLO — August 2010 — From one year ago, when Mr. Webber published his book. This perspective underlies the argument for “PD for Parents”, as an engine for broadening education and facilitating learning around the clock and around the calendar.)

Alan Webber, in his book “Rules of Thumb”, articulates his Rule #11 as “We’ve moved from an either/or past to a both/and future.” In a world where once you had to pay a high price for a quality car, or accept poor quality for low price, Toyota began providing BOTH  a quality car at a low cost. Fast Company magazine provided both education and entertainment. Environment and business combine toward “green growth”.

It is what Mr. Webber calls “operating on the diagonal” (envisioning a chart or matrix where one variable is on one axis and another on the other… and rather than leaning toward one or the other your strategy follows “the diagonal”). In the formal education of a child up to age 18, we in our society don’t do this.

If you envision a field where down one side lie “things learned in government school” and down the other side lie “things learned at home and in the world”, resources for children aged 5 to 18 are devoted heavily to the “government school” side. We’re not even close to the diagonal. We maybe don’t even leave the axis.

When “schooling a child” encompasses the child’s whole learning experience… BOTH home AND school… then the notion of “public education” will be attained. Until then, it’s just government schooling.

GLO
gordotto@parentsnschools.com
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P.S.    Home-schoolers — or what I prefer to call “self-schoolers” — I think get this way better than government schoolers get it. The vastly lower labour costs help in the sharing toward the diagonal.

Got this broadcast, which invites sharing…

Dear [Parents ‘n Schools],

Many recent projects about education have involved discussions with Albertans of all ages and from all walks of life.  Thanks to the thousands of contributions of Inspiring Education: A Dialogue with Albertans, Speak Out and Setting the Direction, we have a solid foundation on which to make an informed transformation of our provincial education system.  However, transforming a complex system, such as education, requires careful thought, research, analysis, and above all, continued meaningful interaction with Albertans.

Inspiring Action on Education was launched in June and is the next phase of the ongoing dialogue about the future of education.  Inspiring Action is an opportunity for Albertans (community representatives, government, members of the public, parents, partners, stakeholders, teachers and students) to help refine and solidify high-level policy directions.  The discussion paper links the vision, principles and policy and governance shifts of Inspiring Education, Speak Out and Setting the Direction as well as the day-to-day work of teachers, school boards, Alberta Education, and other contributors to student success.  The objective of Inspiring Action is to explain why transformation of the education system is needed and to foster a greater understanding of key policy issues that need to be addressed as we move forward.  The information gained from the Inspiring Action initiative will also be used to inform the development of new education legislation.

Inspiring Action is not a detailed plan of what we will do or how we will do it.  Through the discussion paper and a series of six Transformation Guides, the dialogue with Albertans will continue over the next several months.  Each themed guide focuses on a specific topic and takes approximately 20 minutes to complete.  Currently three guides are available.  The Parental and Community Engagement Transformation Guide examines parent and local community involvement in education.  The Shared Governance and Collaboration Transformation Guide discusses school authorities and provincial priorities.  The Student-Centred Education Transformation Guide explores student engagement and the role of curriculum in helping students achieve success.  These guides are currently available on the Engage With Alberta Education website.

The Transformation Guides are followed by an online facilitated dialogue for people who wish to discuss some of the ideas presented in the Guides in greater depth.  Approximately 10 days later, the ideas generated by the participant in the dialogue are posted for everyone to view and further discuss.  To sign up for a dialogue or to see the new ideas, please check the site regularly.

Please share the information about the ongoing engagement process and contact information with your family, friends, colleagues and associates – and encourage them to share with their networks, too.  (See the link below.)

Thank you once again for your participation in Inspiring Education.  You continue to have an important role to play in the transformation of education in Alberta by continuing to contribute your thoughts, ideas and insights.  We look forward to your involvement.  Visit www.education.alberta.ca/engage to participate!

+++++++++++++++

GLO

gordotto@parentsnschools.com

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Rule #7 in Alan Webber’s “Rules of Thumb” reads: The System is the Solution. It describes a magazine “system” as like a three-legged stool (editorial, reader, advertiser).

Government schooling is a three-legged-stool-like system, too. I think it is a stool that a child stands on to reach their success in learning. The legs of that stool are government, teacher and parent.

Mr. Webber writes that in a system, “everything matters”.

In the government school system, parents don’t really matter. If they did really matter, much would be different. They would get much more credit for the funds they raise, and much more concern for the magnitude of that fundraising effort and possibly be excused from it by budget recognition, in turn, for the things parents repeatedly and increasingly are left to fund. And parents, if they really mattered, would be allocated a fair share of resources to aid them in their leg of the home-school marathon learning relay that is a child’s learning. Parents are presently allocated next-to-nothing. That just doesn’t seem fair.

Mr. Webber writes that “Systems thinkers see the relationships, not the functions.” The relationship between parents ‘n schools is busted. And that makes the system busted. And that relationship is busted because parents don’t really matter to that government school system. And that government school system doesn’t, in turn, matter very much to parents.

And every child is left to reach for learning success while standing on a three-legged government school system that, in reality, only has two legs. Maybe fewer.

And people think riding a unicycle is hard…

GLO
gordotto@parentsnschools.com
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P.S.   Neglect (and take advantage of) the parents long enough, and you’ll eventually wonder where they all went. And you’ll be challenged to succeed within a paradigm of public indifference, amid another paradigm of non-fiduciary professionalism. And tossed about in that stormy sea are children, mostly wondering how they got there and happy to get out and onto something that for them resembles dry land.

Not neglecting (or taking advantage of) the parents is hard. And mostly untried and untested. But I think it’s increasingly important. Not losing the parents seems the first step in not losing the kids.

P.P.S.  “The nice thing about reducing class size is that it makes teachers happy in their own right and it’s the one thing that we know how to do.” – Diane Whitmore Schanzenbach, education policy professor at the University of Chicago. (As quoted on the Education Intelligence Agency’s website.)

Presently reading a book titled “When China Rules the World” by Martin Jacques, which presents the author’s view that unlike prior communist regimes (ie., Russia), over the next 40 years China will not assimilate into Western and capitalist and democratic culture, but rather will maintain and preserve its own 5000 year old culture and become a dominant world force of its own nature.

“The dominant Western view has been that globalization is a process by which the rest of the world becomes — and should become — increasingly Westernized, with the adoption of free markets, the import of Western capital, privatization, the rule of law, human rights regimes and democratic norms.”

So far things have worked that way. But it won’t happen with China.

China will stay China. Just bigger. More influential. More assured. More dominant. More powerful. And not like the West much at all, really.

At good ol’ PnS, a recurring theme/dream/wish/plaintive hope is that public education will evolve to resemble enterprises more like the capitalist society within which it operates. Assimilate. Become part of the actual community… embracing its enterprise values… competition… outputs… genuine accountability… fiduciary-based professionalism… consumer dynamics.

But maybe not.

Maybe it’ll just stay its own middle kingdom. And just grow… and grow… and grow… until it also rules the world.

Gee I hope not…

… because Chinese schooling, I believe, is becoming more entrepreneurial and student-centred and flexible and dynamic… and it would be very hard for our Western society to keep pace if we keep holding to government schooling’s collective model.

Ironic.

GLO

gordotto@parentsnschools.com

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(GLO — August 2010 — From two summers ago… public education is not like public securities… there are no bond rating agencies providing independent, objective analysis. It is an abundance of apples comparing to an abundance of oranges. Ralph Nader would have a field day. Where is education’s Ralph Nader?)

Occasionally government schools in Alberta and Canada will announce with a degree of fanfare how they are doing in international rankings (eg., PISA). Generally they are doing pretty well.

But being the best in the world in schooling rankings isn’t like being the best at the Olympics. Such rankings are generally not a measure of higher, stronger or faster. They are rankings, generally speaking, in relation to each other — not against time, distance or other objective criteria or benchmarks.

Such rankings don’t really tell you if you’ve gotten measurably better, or even stayed as good. They mostly tell you how you stand in relation to everyone else. They are like a snapshot of everyone’s position on an escalator… but you don’t know for sure if the escalator is going up, or going down.

Given the daily challenges of schools around the world to keep their heads above water, rankings of this nature are more likely an international treading water competition, and other countries are going under for the third time.  Schooling seems to have very few fixed benchmarks. Very few “world records”. It is difficult to know what schooling’s “sea level” may be at any point in time, or what altitude you may have attained.

Take little comfort in rankings, Gentle Parent. Measuring how high you are in relation to other climbers is not the same thing as measuring how high you are in relation to “up”. (”How high is up, Mommy?”)

GLO

gordotto@parentsnschools.com

P.S.    Under the category of “It’s the Things They Don’t Tell You That Speak Volumes”, when government schools announce with fanfare their placings on PISA international rankings, they generally neglect to mention that Canadian non-government schools may be doing better (see Fraser Institute reports).

P.P.S.   International rankings can also be something of a “weight” competition, measuring how “big” you are, not necessarily how “good” you are — how big your budget was per capita, not how efficient or effective you were with each dollar. Be leery of getting drawn into spending contests, particularly in an industry that approaches 90% labour costs.

P.P.P.S.    One thing about Fraser Institute annual report cards is that they strive to find a manner of helpful benchmark by measuring schools against themselves — against their performance in prior years.

In the bargain bin at Chapters I came across a book by the unlikely author Danica McKellar, the actress who starred in “The Wonder Years”, and who happens to have a degree in Mathematics. When www.youtheducationservices.ca was created by Essentialtalk here in Calgary a few years ago, its graphics and formatting was designed to capture the eye and interest of girls. Not that it would deter boys, but more that it would appeal to girls. Because girls and math don’t go together enough.

And they should. Because math doesn’t suck.

From the introduction:

“Let’s get a few things straight: Acne sucks. Mean people suck. Finding out that your boyfriend kissed another girl? That would totally suck. Too much homework, broken promises, detention, divorce, insecurities: suck, suck, suck, suck.

But MATH is actually a good thing. Here are a few reasons why: Math builds confidence, keeps you from getting ripped off, makes you better at adjusting cookie recipes, understanding sports scores, budgeting and planning parties and vacations, interpreting how good a sale really is, and spending your allowance. It makes you feel smart when you walk into a room, prepares you for better-paying jobs, and helps you to think more logically.

Most of all, working on math sharpens your brain, actually making you smarter in all areas. Intelligence is real, it’s lasting, and no one can take it away from you. Ever.”

GLO

gordotto@parentsnschools.com

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[GLO — August 2010 — Got an iPad for my birthday… what I called “iSchool” when it was announced… it totally is… like, totally, dude.]

Budgets in government schooling are presently a nickel out of every $100 for parents and the rest for schools. But I have looked into the not-too-distant future of schooling and it is not 99.95% schools and one-half of one-tenth of 1% parents.

It already isn’t.

Under the 80/20 rule of life, 80% of everything 80% of children learn can be, and will be, delivered via technology (at, at least, 80% less cost). And technology is advancing rapidly in that regard.

That’s 64% of schooling… disappeared. (And booksellers and newspapers thought the internet changed THEIR businesses…)

Internet technology can deliver for about $10 what “live learning” schooling delivers for $1,000. The future of sustainability in schooling… reducing transportation costs… reducing infrastructure and operating costs… reducing labour costs… the future of managing all of that while still delivering learning… is internet-based technology.

Schoolers would not necessarily want you to believe that. Budgets (and jobs) depend more than somewhat on taking the 80% of the 20% (and 20% of the 80%) that genuinely requires their physical daily attention and live learning, and scale it up to everybody (and employ, and pay, accordingly).

But that is neither necessary or affordable into the future.

Society simply can’t afford to keep delivering schooling in a live-learning, congregated fashion that is incredibly expensive relative to technology-based, dispersed, flexible distance learning.

If you were designing a telephone system from scratch today, you would not use land lines or rotary dials. If you were designing an education system today, you would not use bricks, humans or live learning. You would use SOME. But not nearly as much.

The next generation of schooling will look very different from this one.

Welcome those changes.

Hasten them along.

Future prosperity and sustainability depends on it.

GLO

gordotto@parentsnschools.com

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