Skip to Content, Navigation, or Footer.
Support the IDS in College Media Madness! Donate here March 24 - April 8.
Friday, March 29
The Indiana Daily Student

letters

Why education reform cannot work

Think of our schools as a horse and buggy — it worked well in a different time, but times have changed.

Educational needs have changed as much as transportation needs.

Retrofitting a horse and buggy will not give us an airplane, and yet we seem to expect that reforms to our schools will meet our new educational needs.

And why shouldn’t we?

We’ve never experienced a paradigm change in American education. All we know is piecemeal reforms.

But there has been a paradigm change.

But there has been a paradigm change.

In the mid 1800s, as our communities transformed from agrarian to industrial societies, the one-room schoolhouse no longer met our educational needs and was gradually replaced by the current, factory model of schools.

This was a paradigm change because the fundamental structure of the one-room schoolhouse was different — it had no grade levels, no courses, no standardized norm-referenced tests.

Could it be that once again our educational needs have changed so dramatically that only paradigm change will be effective?

To answer this question, we should first determine whether our current educational systems are meeting our needs.

Consider the following.

Our communities are increasingly segregated by socio-economic status, resulting in greater disadvantages for many students.

In 2012, American boys and girls ranked 16th and 17th, respectively, in the reading portion of the International Student Assessment.

Clearly, our schools are not performing as well as we would like and need them to in an increasingly competitive global economy.

The primary reasons have to do with fundamental changes in society — its educational needs and tools.

To understand this, it is helpful to consider a truth about learning: Students learn at different rates.

Yet, our current paradigm of education tries to teach a fixed amount of content in a fixed amount of time.

A system designed to not leave children behind would have each student move on only when he or she has learned the current material, and as soon as she or he has learned the current material.

Until schools make this fundamental structural change, they will continue to leave children behind, no matter what educational reforms we make — be it more high-stakes testing, more teacher professional development, smaller class sizes, more focus on basic skills, longer school day or year, or whatever the latest fad.

But in the Information Age, knowledge work is becoming predominant.

We need a system that is focused on maximizing every student’s learning, which is evidenced by our talk about “no child left behind.”

This requires a system in which student progress is based on learning, not time.

As for education tools, information technologies make it much easier and less expensive to customize student progress and other aspects of instruction, enhance intrinsic motivation, integrate criterion-referenced testing with teaching and keep track of what each individual student has learned.

In contrast to piecemeal reforms, paradigm change entails fundamental changes throughout the entire system: instructional subsystem, assessment subsystem, record-keeping sub system, etc.

The United States espouses the goal of leaving no child behind, but it is clear that our system is designed to leave children behind, and no educational reforms within that paradigm can change that dismal fact.

Get stories like this in your inbox
Subscribe