Have you heard something like this before? "Schools are so inefficient. They are so poorly run," the complaint goes. And then, "if only schools were run like private businesses, things would improve." No! Public schools are not businesses. Nor should they be. And the model of private business is not appropriate for improving public education. There are lots of reasons for this, but let me just mention two of the most important: First, private business and public schools have fundamentally different goals. Businesses exist for the purpose of making a profit for their owners. Public education, on the other hand, exists for the purpose of providing a public good; something that everyone benefits from. Students benefit of course, but so do private businesses (through employees with job skills), homeowners (through higher property values), taxpayers (through lower criminal justice and social welfare costs) and society in general (through an educated citizenry). Second, private business owners do not face the same set of constraints that public schools do. For example, businesses can decide on their suppliers; they can determine the quality and quantity of the things they buy to go into their business. Not so in public education. A key "input" in public schools are children, and the schools must take as many children as there are in the community, with whatever skills or limitations they bring with them. Jamie Vollmer, a former businessman and attorney, makes this second point powerfully in a well-known essay entitled The Blueberry Story. Please read it if you haven't before (the story isn't much longer than this post). There are lots of things we can do to improve public education in our community. But trying to run the district as if it were a Wal-Mart, or Exxon, or even a local small business, is misguided and will do little to solve the problems the schools face.
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One of the ironies of the information revolution is that finding relevant and accurate information can be more difficult than ever before. We are in fact buried by news, blogs, Twitter feeds, and other internet content; magazines and newspapers and newsletters; 24-hour news channels in every time zone; and books, increasingly self-published, on every possible topic. How do we figure out what is useful in this inexhaustible supply of information? How do you think critically about the accuracy and reliability of these sources? Fortunately we have experts in answering these kinds of questions: librarians! Librarian's are trained experts in the many ways of finding information. They can teach a set of skills that are seldom central in "regular" courses but increasingly indispensable in today's economy and society. Librarians, however, are often some of the first educational staff put on the chopping block by budget cuts. For many, librarians are just people who shelve books, or perhaps "extras" that we might do without. Maureen Sullivan, the president of the American Library Association, helpfully dispels this belief in an op-ed this past Monday. Her view reinforces the need to more aggressively transform education from the industrial model with which public schools were first developed to a model rooted in the new information economy (see posts on this subject here and here). The Atlantic has an interesting article on the Finish education system in its latest issue. No standardized tests, no school choice, and no teacher 'accountability', yet one of the best systems in the world. Yes, Finland has a much different population than the U.S., but the article addresses that issue too: "What Americans Keep Ignoring About Finland's School Success" |
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