Education Problems - Google Drive


1	Title	Elaboration
2	Monolithic View	Systems are embedded in all and every form of education. Yet there is a dearth of thinking about an Ecology of Education. Viewed from any perspective, it is clear that the education of any individual is an experience different from any other. Even the environment of a classroom cannon be identical for each student present. The simple physical scan of a classroom should readily suggest for any 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 undiversified. 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. Treating schools with a “one size fits all” paradigm has been a monumental, massive, undiversified mistake. The problem may well be monolithic. Solving this problem will not occur by continuing to do what we have always done. 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 time, short or longer, by responding to the conditions of which they are a part. 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 experiences provided with the best of intentions. Teachers plan activity for a group, a class, and not for individuals. Planning may be an enemy of diversification.
3	Child Diversity	No two children are alike; not even mono-zygotic twins. Biology and development (environment, an individual's ecosystem) establish individual personality and capacity that is largely incompatible with the school environment, which demands conformity and mandatory attendance regardless of readiness.
4	Too Many Demands from Society	Problems that are inherently societal are foisted off on schools with an expectation or demand that are fundamentally and functionally outside of the capacity of the school to ameliorate or control. The intent may be laudable, but too often the results are a mix of disaster. For instancer, birth defects are, for the most part, outside the role of the school. Since birth defects range across a monumental span, with extremes that are fuzzy at best, the societal response with that all children are to be treated equally by the schools. Main streaming is the call of the hour. Every child has an absolute "right" to attend school. Where special provisions for education "special education" are required, the school is obligated to make the provision. Along the way, state and federal funding has been provided to schools to support special education. Children are afforded an Individual Education Pland or IEP, that sets appropriate learning objectives consistent with the level of birth defect linked disability. Fitting these IEPs into the flow of the usual and customary classroom activities is fraught. Teachers are often detracted from the flow of planned lessons in order to accommodate an IEP student's behavior or special needs. When special needs are severe, the school district may front an assistant or paraprofessional to attend to the IEP student's need.
5	School ← → Society Incompatibilities	Schools are an instrument of society to assure continuity between generations and across ethnic and economic divisions of a nation, state, or tribe. In the United States, the Constitution is silent on the matter of education, leaving the conduct of education to the dictates of each state. The result has been a broad range of practices state-to-state. Accordingly the Federal Government established a burearcratic division – The Department of Education – that has across five decades, provided funding for states that comply with Federal dictates. The result has been a growing separation of schools from the society in which they are embedded. This separation is most evident when attempts are made to design new approaches for education and there is little or no room for innovation in a rigid array of constraints imposed on schooling.
6	Poor Teacher Quality*	The range of expectations for teachers far exceeds their educational preparation. Compare for example teacher-education v. physician education. 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 with standards that are relatively unambiguous. Each result is evaluated in the context of the patient's current situation and history of medical issues and problems. The physician is empowered by virture of certificaton to make judgments about next steps to support the patient's health.
7	Teacher Retention	Teacher loss in the first five-years is extremely high as compared with professionals in medicine, accounting, business management, dentistry, etc.
8	Teacher Recruitment	coherent recruitment of individuals into teaching is, at best, very uneven. It is rare for teacher-education institutions to recruit at all and even then the criteria are uneven.
9	Role(s) of the Teacher	Classroom management competes with teaching. Engagement of teachers with the community is almost non-existent as even elected school boards rarely engage teachers and teachers are, for the most part, prohibited from engaging in the electoral process.
10	Too little STEM	Teaching of Science, Technology, Engineering & Math is sequestered in STEM departments and the expectations are narrowly defined and rigidly defined by the curriculum imposed on schools by state mandates and industry expectations of graduates that are, at best, poorly defined. Commercial-Industrial demands often include soft-skills but are couched in the language of, or lodged in the language of, rigorous performance.
11	Too much STEM (not enough ART … )	neglect of performance (music, drama) and studio art (painting, sculpture, ceramics) as well as language skill development deprive students of the tools essential for personal growth and career success.
12	Low Vocational Education (v. College Prep)	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 enviromnet is uneven or completely neglected. It is not an unreasonable leap to consider that this may be related to a leap in asthma.
13	Student Retention	The drop out rate is only expressing 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 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.
14	Transportation Schedules	This is also called the “Yellow Bus” syndrome – 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 and there is essentially no capacity to make the needs of individual students a priority in this part of the schooling system. The operation of a transportation systems for exclusive use by schools is very likely wasteful of public money. Although there are admitedly 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 nineor ten a child could be capable of assuring their own safety if the transportation occurred after or before rush hours and the transportation device was also populated with monitors and, when necessary, enforcers of rules of decorum. Society should collectivel and unequivocally that adult molestation, in any form, with a child is so unacceptable that it will be punished quickly and decisively using the harshest means available. Society has no obligation, morally, ethically or practically to tolerate anyone that cannot or will not follow its rules for child safety. The use of video surveliance to protect child safety on public transportation must become a high priority.
15	Mandatory Attendance	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.
16	Finance based on Enrollments & Attendance	Formulaic allocation of fixed budgets for education are based on 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 variable is incomprehensible.
17	Chartered School Competition	Chartered Schools are public schools and were intended to foster innovation and teacher leadership. 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. 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.
18	Socialization Issues	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.
19	Civics Instruction & Democracy Engagement	The decline of civics in public schools may be nowhere more evident than in the decline in voter participation and the electoral successes of Trump. It is likely that an anti-democratic bias is built into the very fabric of our systems for schooling.
20	Undemocratic Administration	The management of schools is imposed from society without ongoing and intense practice of democratic principles. The only element of public schools that has a tnagent 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.
21	Administrative Bloat	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 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.
22	Learning Disabilities	The range of challenges for learning are excessive for the conditions present inside and outside of schools. Autism is now regarded as a “spectrum” of disorders that is completely out of whack when labeled with a single term. 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 who are unable to sustain basic practice of personal hygiene.
23	Cognitive Disabilities	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 and environments with establishment of a long-term memory sufficient to perform at an acceptable cognitive level requires coordinated functioning of multiple brain centers.
24	Social Emotional Disabilities	Schools are social engines for socialization. Capacity to control emotions inside and outside the school environment is highly variable and schools are now dictated deliverers of social emotional learning (SEL). Most of this is the result of classroom disruptions that cannot be adequately managed by the classroom teacher. While SEL teaching can be fostered through continuing education programs, the typical classroom teacher is poorly equipped by training and experience to find effective solutions for dealing with children who are socially and emotionally maladjusted in or out of the school environment.
25	Physical Disabilities	Birth defects and accidents are mostly unavoidable. The range of disabilities is enormous, yet all are expected to be accommodated by the school environment. This is because of factors outside the auspices 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.
26	Insufficient Funding	Sufficiency of funding is almost always relative to the choices and pressures to make choices that exist in a school's envornment. 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 attached to schools is a monster in the school space.
27	Incompetent Leadership	Superintendents, district administrators, and principles, as well as their assocted associates and assistants, are themselves schooled in the mechanincs of running a district, school or cluster of classrooms. Their schooling follows myriad paths leadeing to certification. What is not on the path is not seen with central vision and an acuity that can lead to productive application. Because so much of leadership is psychological and biased by personal choices, the leader may be locked into making sense in only a very narrow context of their responsiblities and defined role. This will 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.
28	Nutritional Issues	knowledge of individual nutritional needs is almost non-existent. We grow up with basic physiological reactions to food that are largely dictated by the parental choices made of a child. Yet it is abundantly clear that genetic differences among individuals are present. Science is catching up with developing disciplines of nutrogenomics and nutritional genetics. School-based and school-biased nutrition programs are almost totally unaware of these individual differences while they administer breakfasts and lunches. Food waste is ubiquitous and is exacerbated, not by student indifference, but by choices that are driven by both social and biological factors … all of which are essentially unknown and perhaps unknowable.
29	Drug Addictions – Substance Abuse	It is a rare individual that sets out to discover the effects of chemical substances. More often the effects or purported effects are passed from an individual or group of individuals to an individual. There is established to process of peer conformity that becomes the source of discovery. The result is a physiological alteration that takes on a permissive pleasure trip that is essentially ignorant of consequences. This physiology becomes a source of dependency through neurochemical alterations and leads to habitual use and consequence abuse.
30	Social insecurity and inequity	Bullying & Cliques – would be a good place to begin to consider the role of 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.
31	Lack of innovation opportunity	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.
32	Incompetent parenting**	Parents traumatize their children without realization of consequences. Adverse Childhood Experiences (ACEs) are now well known to continue with the child into adulthood with influences on health and behavior.