Just to warn you–this is a post about education.

The debate about public education is infuriating. Not just because the only voices being heard or those of big corporate money, but because the emphasis is on the “magic bullet,” the “quick fix,” “the answer.”  Education is not something that can be fixed over night–even though it appears that we have totally screwed it up in record time.  There has been a steady decline in the quality of public educations since the passage of NCLB and the flood gates were open to create a free-for-all for textbook and testing companies.

I work in the charter school sector and I see the same problems in this sector that plague our traditional public schools.  There is a great deal of talk, focus, energy and money being thrown at replication of successful models.  This idea of replication screams “corporate” to me.  It screams outputs.  It operates based on the idea that teachers, students and communities are interchangeable.  It looks only at the structure and not at the substance.  No one asks the why or how something works–just what is it that works and lets do that.

That doesn’t work.

I was listening to NPR this morning and on Radio Times they were having a discussion or debate around single-sex schools and classrooms.  And there are some who feel this is beneficial because girls learn different than boys.  But what about the research that supports heterogeneous is better than homogenous.  Yes, the catholic high schools are almost entirely single-sex schools and their students do well–often extremely well.  But what are we missing in this simplification of examining only structure and what we can see?  We miss the how it works and the why it works.  Having a good idea is not enough.  Trying to copy someone else’s success often does not work.    It’s not enough to know the results.  It’s not enough to know the structure or even the culture.  Just because an all girls high school works for some students doesn’t mean it works for all female students.

This is one of the problems with the scale of our educational system and our own countries lack of imagination and innovation.  There is innovation.  But most aren’t willing to take the risk.  Corporate philanthropists aren’t willing to fund innovation.  They want to fund something that has produced results, with little consideration to how those results are achieved.

It is much the same with the rhetoric around teacher training, etc.  We look at outputs.  We look at results with very little consideration as to how the results are achieved.  We look at number and not at what happens in the classroom.  This problem is evident when education reformers cannot list the qualities of a good teacher.  The qualities of a good teacher are as varied as teachers themselves.

There isn’t cookie cutter answer to this problem and as long as we keep looking for one, students lose.  We must stop looking at the surface–we can only see 10% that way.  We need to look under the surface at the other 90%–because that is what really matters.  Until we do that–we’ll keep crashing and sinking.