A Little About A Lot

This past Sunday, Josh Shapiro, Governor of Pennsylvania, wrote an interesting opinion piece for The Washington Post. This past June, Interstate 95 – one of the nation’s busiest highways – collapsed in Philadelphia. The highway reopened in 12 days.

When asked how that was accomplished, Governor Shapiro offered four reasons:

Empower strong leadership.

Speed up the bureaucracy.

Encourage creativity.

Work together.

I looked at these four reasons why I-95 was repaired as fast as it was and started to think that the opposite of these might be the reasons why public education is in such a desperate state:

Lack of strong leadership.

The inability to speed up the bureaucracy.

Stifling creativity.

Working in silos.

One of the problems facing public education these days is its inability to connect policy with data. For example, take the recent work in reading improvement across the states. The 74 online reported recently that,

“In the past five years, 30 states around the country, with leaders from both political parties, have passed laws requiring educators to teach young children how to read based on what educators now know from science about effective literacy instruction.”

“Yet passing state legislation is only the first step. The challenge now is to translate these policies into effective classroom practices, expanding instruction based on the science of reading in the nation’s vast, decentralized system of more than 13,000 school districts.”

The problem here is that, even though 30 states have enacted new laws based on the “science of reading,” there is little data to show whether these laws and policies are making a difference when it comes to getting kids smarter and stronger.

Our former President is making education headlines again, this time saying that parents should elect principals. According to EducationWeek online,

“Former President Donald Trump thinks parents should have the ability to fire their children’s school principal.”

“’If you have a bad principal that’s not getting the job done, the parents will – under the Trump administration – be allowed to vote to fire that principal,’ Trump said during a June 30 speech at the Moms for Liberty Joyful Warriors Summit in Philadelphia. ‘This will be the ultimate form of local control.’”

I don’t see eye to eye with much of what the former President says, but the idea that parents, and their young learners, should have a say in who their learning leaders are deserves consideration. Parents hiring and firing principals could present a problem of scale, since most schools are big enough to have several different types of parent factions within the campus. But, if the former President is talking about a learning pod or micro school, then I could see the merits of those families having decision-making power over who their adult learning leader would be and who it would not be.

Finally, a few words about the importance of community – especially when it comes to learning. The Atlantic recently released a podcast titled “How to Talk to People: The Infrastructure of Community.” Here are some highlights:

“The design of physical spaces can either encourage or discourage relationships. But people also have to be willing to slow down and take the opportunity to connect.”

“Efficiency is the enemy of social life. What kind of place would allow us to enjoy our lives and enjoy each other more than we do today? What kinds of things would we need to reorient our society around?”

“If you want to have a transit system like a train, you need an infrastructure to carry the train, right? The rails, for instance. There is also an infrastructure that supports social life: social infrastructure. And when I say social infrastructure, I’m referring to physical places. These can be organizations; they can also be parks. Physical places that shape our capacity to interact.”

Building a community of learners makes the difference between a young learner believing in learning or not. Building a community of learners makes the difference between a young learner belonging to a movement or not.

We need to stop defining learning through places called schools. There is a huge world out there, waiting for communities of young learners to be in it and learn from it.

Friday News Roundup tomorrow. SVB