Same product, but less packaging

Consolidation is now a work in progress in Maine. Some school districts are fully embracing the legislated mandate, and others are dismissing it completely.

Between these two extremes there are districts that are plodding along while secretly hoping that the Legislature reverses this law, districts that are mired in controversy and confusion, and districts that are making a good-faith effort to follow the letter of this law. And then there are the handful of districts statewide that do not have to comply with this law.

In any case, there have been countless hours spent on attempting to implement a law with quick deadlines, confusing directives, and financial and community consequences.

Don’t get me wrong. I understand the need to have school organizations function more efficiently and effectively. All of us should be able to agree with the concept of getting more value for our dollars. However, I’m not convinced that consolidation is the key to making education valuable and effective for the 21st century.

What I think will help our schools and our students more than consolidation is something the Democratic presidential candidates have been talking about: change. Despite the activism of the 1960s our schools are still designed to teach students to follow directions without question, read and respond to mainstream literature, communicate primarily through paper and pencil with some word processing, and memorize very basic facts in science and math.

In fact, in the Sunday, Dec. 10, 2006, issue of Time magazine, Claudia Wallis and Sonja Steptoe (www.time.com/time/magazine/article/0,9171,1568480,00.html) speculated that if a Rip van Winkle-type character went to sleep 100 years ago and woke up recently, he would recognize few things in today’s society but would immediately recognize schools since so little has changed in their physical format and the teaching methods employed inside.

Will Richardson, a practitioner of effective education, sums up the article in Time with four talking points:

1. Teach kids more about the world.

2. Think outside the box.

3. Become smarter about new sources of information.

4. Develop good people skills (communicate, collaborate).

Sounds simple when boiled down to four talking points. You’d think that educators could manage this. Isolated educators are managing this. However, they are few and far between because the current school system does not facilitate or even encourage forward-thinking educators.

So, what would a new model of public education look like? We all have ideas. What are your ideas for a new model of public education?

Richardson wrote of his dream for public schools in his last blog entry of 2007 (http://weblogg-ed.com/). It talks of real change that will be difficult to accomplish but well worth the effort. If we change how we deliver education, Richardson said, we could see “a different model, one that is built on really small groups of students that meet in physical space studying and learning about the topics they are passionate about and who are also connected to other small groups of students with like-minded passions from anywhere in the world via the Live Web, where long-term collaborations and research and learning can happen over extended periods, all of it real work for real audiences, published and reviewed by engaged readers with participants acting as mentors from global audiences.

“The adults in the room are co-learners with the students,” Richardson says, “but are also educators who can model and navigate the skills and competencies, the ‘network literacies’ that the kids in the room need to have to leverage the connections they help facilitate. And there might be some high-level, virtual administration in there somewhere, to make sure the connections and logistics are working. And there might be parents learning alongside their students, and others who are involved at different levels of the process. Regardless, it’s a place where learning is at the heart of everything. Not grades. Not tests. Not college acceptances.”

We’re spending a lot of resources in Maine on consolidation, both human and monetary, and we won’t see a return on that investment in increased learning for our students or better preparation for living in the 21st century. If we take the resources dedicated to consolidation and invest them in changing the content and delivery of education, we can end up with a model for education that delivers what our students need rather than the same product with less packaging.

What is your dream for public schools? How can we educate all of our students for the 21st century? What can we do to make Maine’s education system one that allows us to adopt the saying, “As Maine goes, so goes the nation”? E-mail me at conversationswithateacher@gmail.com Let’s continue this conversation.