Last week Chad Aldeman, a reporter for The 74, posted an article titled “12 Truths and No Lies: Guiding Principles for the Future of American Education.” With some opinions added by ABPTL, here’s Part 2 of Aldeman’s article (Part 1 appeared last Thursday):
7. Public education can take many forms. The current system of delivering public K-12 education through residential school districts is a weird artifact of history. It’s not how pre-K or higher ed work, it leads to economic segregation and it distorts the housing market. Plus, as Johns Hopkins researcher Ashley Rogers-Berner has pointed out, it makes the U.S. an outlier internationally.
ABPTL: Spot on! If you’re 4-year-old learner, you can go anywhere in a city to find a pre-K center to help you learn. If you’re a 20-year-old learner, you can attend a higher education main campus, satellites, or online options. But if you fall into the category of a K-12 learners, there is one location for you to report to for learning – the public school house. This needs to change – and fast.
8. Choice is good, but it doesn’t guarantee better results. Within education, choice makes people happier with their schools and helps students (and teachers) find the right fit. Charter schools, within-district choice programs, voluntary desegregation programs and open enrollment can all boost outcomes for kids. There should be fewer wait lists and more options.
Still, choice is no guarantee of quality, and a well-functioning market requires oversight. As economist Doug Harris and others have noted, the logic of the free market doesn’t apply neatly in the K-12 context, given the lack of information parents have about their choices and the limited options they may have available depending on where they live. In other words, policymakers can’t just assume parents voting with their feet will automatically lead to systemwide improvements.
ABPTL: We need to move the conversation from school choice to learner choice. We now can design individualized learning plans for every young learner in America. So, why aren’t we doing it?
9. Beginners need to be explicitly taught to master the basics. In basically every human endeavor, beginners need to follow carefully sequenced steps to learn the fundamentals and make progress. For example, kids won’t learn to read well unless they can decode letters into words. That requires teachers to patiently break down the 44 distinct phonemes used in the English language, and that can feel boring or unimportant to adults who don’t remember how they learned to read. Too many education fads suffer from this ‘expert’s curse’ and assume that kids will just figure things out on their own.
ABPTL: Based on testing data, our elementary schools do a pretty good job teaching basic skills to our kids. True, black, brown, and poor kids could use more support, but even those groups demonstrate success in their formative learning years. The problem with the American education system is that those foundational skills aren’t exercised as kids move into their middle school and high school years. Because of this, kids who learned foundational skills, but not to the extent needed to handle advanced learning tasks, begin to struggle and fail.
10. Knowledge is specific to particular domains. We all want kids to be creative, and to be able to read with comprehension. But these are not generic skills. Instead, they are tied up with what someone already knows and can do. For example, the most creative people in any field are those who have mastered the basics and can apply those in new ways. Similarly, people’s ability to read and understand something new depends on what they already know. People don’t retain knowledge they don’t continue to refresh, and there is very little transferability across skills and subjects. Learning chess won’t make you smarter, and most adults have forgotten much of what they learned in school. As such, schools should seek to help students develop deep knowledge in specific content areas, rather than taking a skills-based approach.
ABPTL: Foundational skills matter. Learning to read, write, and solve problems makes the difference when it comes to building an effective learning plan for yourself. The problem with traditional schools is they don’t personalize learning tasks enough. Traditional schools don’t allow struggling readers enough time to improve. Traditional schools don’t offer additional time to kids who need to improve their problem-solving skills, whether that be in math, science, or social studies. Instead, traditional schools pack the day with a multitude of learning tasks, while knowing full well they have young learners who can’t read, write, and solve problems effectively.
11. Practice is good. Educators sometimes speak derogatorily about ‘rote’ memorization or ‘drill and kill.’ No one talks like that in sports or the arts, even though, in those fields, it’s obvious that deliberate practice leads to improvement. Within education, kids need to master their times tables before they can handle more advanced math, and they need to spend plenty of time immersed in books to build up their vocabulary and reading stamina. It doesn’t all need to happen during the school day, but kids need lots of time to practice academic skills.
ABPTL: Every effective learning plan contains the element of scaffolding, or in other words, building today on what one learned yesterday. Spending time on reading, writing, and problem-solving improvement builds learners who can handle challenging tasks, no matter how difficult.
12. Individual policies matter, but they are not a guaranteed recipe. Researchers have documented a number of variables associated with improvements in student outcomes. For example, it’s true that more money generally helps schools produce better results and that smaller classes are easier to work with than bigger ones. But sometimes, advocates take these lessons too far. They assume there are no trade-offs to these policies or lose sight of the ultimate goal of education. For example, states like California and Florida spent billions of dollars reducing class sizes to little effect, perhaps in part because it led to a decline in teacher quality. Maine spends about twice as much per pupil as Mississippi does, yet students in Mississippi outperform those in Maine, once you factor in demographics.
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ABPTL: The guaranteed recipe for learning success involves an adult learning leader who supports a young person while they define, plan, execute, and evaluate their own learning. This doesn’t happen enough in our current traditional K-12 system. Our current K-12 system has become too challenging for too many kids and their families to find success.
Til tomorrow. SVB
A Better Path to Learning 
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