Education Overhaul, Pt 1

Student loan forgiveness is just one step that's needed in a massive overhaul of the US educational system. Currently, we have educators burning themselves out trying to teach children to pass tests. How many tests do you have to pass in your day-to-day job? Unless you're a developer, it's probably only in those nightmares where you need to take a final for a class you never attended in a room you cannot find.

The current education system was designed in a time when people were expected to have the same career for their entire lives. You went to school, learned what you needed to, and then went and worked at the same thing until you retired. Changing careers was rare. Now, people can change multiple times, in large part due to the impact of technology on the workplace, as some jobs become obsolete. We need an education system that teaches children to cope with this new reality and that helps support career changes at any age.

Teach Learning

Bear with me here. Isn't education learning? Nope. Our current education system isn't focused on teaching students how to learn. It's teaching them how to pass tests. The information learned isn't important once the test is over. There is no time to nurture creativity. There's no time to teach a child how to research a topic for themselves. Yet we as human beings are naturally curious, and we are also born with the ability to learn new skills. Self-education is a critical skill, whether it be learning to navigate the new software your company just rolled out or learning to do an entirely different job. One potential model here is the Montessori method, which appeals to me as it is based on our growing understanding of human development -- what humans actually do, as opposed to what adults think children "should" do.

This may be considered to attack the whole idea of teacher accountability that the current testing regime is supposed to provide. I do think teachers need to be accountable for results. I've had my share of bad teachers that really had no business being in a classroom. But the ability of children to mindlessly regurgitate facts has nothing to do with their ability to learn. Instead of look at results against an arbitrarily-set bar, we should be looking at improvement over time. If a class begins the year behind where their age-group is on average, but they start to catch up as the result of a stellar teacher, that teacher should not be punished because the students didn't reach the average. Instead, the degree of improvement should be rewarded. Additionally, schools who are behind the averages should not have their funding cut. This isn't a business. This is the future of our country. Those schools need interventions, not just with the educators and administrators, but also likely additional help for parents and children.

This does make me think about those teachers in schools already meeting outcomes, such as reading at grade level. Those teachers should also be rewarded if their students end by exceeding the expected outcomes. But that may not solve some of the inequities between schools in tough areas, where parents may be largely absent, learning may be looked down on, etc., and schools in areas where parents are engaged in their kids' learning, encourage them to learn, and can afford to provide additional resources. I wonder if there are natural caps, so that you might get a kid to advance a couple of grades to get them closer to where the average is, but that it might be harder, once they're at grade level, to improve it. If so, I think that this should be a self-policing process, where the best teachers are given an incentive to seek out the lowest-performing students in order to raise their performance. If there are not natural caps, I think we need to make incentives larger for getting to the average than getting over it. Otherwise, we'll have the same situation now, where teachers want to teach at high-performing schools, given the upside-down incentives the current test-driven approach has made.