I’m not talking about this here blog. This is not a movement–trust me.  I eagerly tuned into Oprah on Friday to hear the continued conversation on public education.  I was happy that the content of the show was not overshadowed by Mark Zukerberg’s amazing announcement.  Not that his donation to Newark Public Schools isn’t amazing; it is.  But money cannot fix everything that is wrong in education.  Newark already spends $22000 a year per student–more than any district in the country.  Am I cynical?  Yes.  Money isn’t what is wrong in education.  Granted some districts desperately need money.  What I am saying is that money alone isn’t going to solve the problem in education.

I will admit I tuned in because I knew someone in the audience and because Geoffrey Canada was going to be on the show.  Let me just say that I think Geoffrey Canada is amazing and is the type of leader we need in education.  No one who has been reading here for any length of time will be surprised by my passion for education.  I have long spoken of how our educational system is broken.  The entire system not just parts of it are broken.  One of the things pointed out by Canada and others is that if our educational system was a business, it would have gone out of business a long time ago.  You can’t produce “products” that are inferior (I hate to talk about students this way–but for the sake of the analogy bear with me) and stay in business.  But in education that is what we have.  We have more and more students who need to take remedial classes in college–even in the Ivy league.  This generation is the first generation that is going to be less literate than their parents (on a side note it’s also the first generation to have shorter life expectancy than their parents).  We can’t just keep with the status quo otherwise we are failing our children and theirs.

Our educational system is the definition of insanity–doing the same thing over and over again and hoping for a different result.  We are still educating kids the way we were educated and the way our parents were educated.  Education has lagged in innovation–Canada said on Oprah, “we wouldn’t think of putting our kids in cars without seatbelts [as our parents did]” so why do we continue to send them to schools that are still educating kids in the same way?  Education is the only industry where someone can go to work and fail everyday and still keep going to work.  Why don’t we demand more?

I am not blaming all teachers, but I know some teachers who are using the same lesson plans from day to day, year to year.  If it didn’t work last year it isn’t going to work this year.  Teaching is hard work and it is a job that needs to be treated with more respect–from those in the profession.  No one outside of education is going to take teachers seriously until we start to take ourselves more seriously.  Teaching is a “real” job/profession.  It has real demands.  Our jobs aren’t done until our students have learned what they need to know (how to think).  We have to be willing to put in the time and I really don’t want to hear (sorry teacher friends) that you don’t get paid enough.  In some cases this is true, but in many cases it isn’t.  Teaching is a profession, like medicine and/or law, that doesn’t end at 3pm or 4pm.  It is a job we do until the student has been served.  Does this make it hard on families?  Yes.  Does this mean we need to work extra hours?  Yes.  We need to spend time planning our curriculum.  The textbook is not the curriculum.  If your textbook is your curriculum, then you aren’t doing your job.

Parents you aren’t blameless in this.  If you aren’t teaching your kids to study, you aren’t doing your job.  You can’t just make sure they do their homework–although that is a start.  You need to encourage your kids to study and to think.  It takes a village to raise children and it is time we all come together to make a change.  To demand excellence from ourselves.  If you are teaching because you like summers off, then it is time to leave education.  If you aren’t asking your students to think in real ways, it is time to leave education.  If you think it isn’t your responsibility to ensure that your students succeed and have the skills to do so, it is time to leave education.  I’m sorry but that is the truth.  Our kids deserve the best and we shouldn’t have to abandon public education to get the best.  All kids deserve it.  Where one is born (zip code and economic status) shouldn’t determine whether a kids goes to college or to jail.  This is America in the 21st century. Our children deserve better.