Peter E. Pflaum - Golden Globe -

The Synergy Network

Wiredbrain Pflaump@wiredbrain.com

PROBLEM:

10% or less High School graduates ready for college

(N.A.E.P. 1). It is clear we have an educational problem on

our hands involving all students. As Jack Bowsher, the

former educational director at IBM said;

if 25% of production is broken during manufacture and

if 90% don't work 80% of the time (72% defect rate) the

company would have to rethink the entire production

process.. (2)

This is the 30-40% "drop-outs" and the disfunctional

(less than 5th grade) reading and math skills of the public

high schools.

The way we see the problem is the problem (See

Stephen Covey in Seven Habits of Effective People). We have

created a group of young people 14 -18 without effective

alternatives. Many could benefit from apprenticeships, co-op

education, or just drop the leaving age to 14 as the

traditional age of becoming a young adult. Social creations

such as the comprehensive high-school become social

problems, then new social creations such as Youth Services

and Corrections are developed to take care of the problem

caused by the original institution.

The AWDA

(Disabilities Act) has vastly expanded the learning

disables, ADD, etc because the children that haven't learned

then become the problem not the system that help create

them. (Association for Direct Instruction). It also pays.

Our students lack cognitive skills and practical thinking

abilities.

They have not been asked or put in situations

where they think in extended ways (3).

The educational

process needs to change as much as General Motors did in the

creation of the SATURN plant.

The message is largely in the

process and methods. If we expect Z type students we must

create a new system.

(William G. Ouchi,

Theory Z How American Business can meet

the Japanese Challenge) 1981.

The survival of the nation as a competitive culture is

seriously questioned. For example a recent want-ad for a

production worker at Motorola uses the following job

description; (Fortune, Dec 17, 1990)

The worker is expected to understand the process

involved in production. (What is going on here)

Think of alternatives -collect information

Design and conduct experiments;

Analyze data from small scale research -

try changes - check for consequences - (Deming p 4)

" On most days fewer than 10 students will be working

hard, the rest do little more that sit there (if they

bother to come). If you ask the idle students why they

are not working, they will tell you that work is

boring, they don't need it, and no one cares what they

think. (5)

Public schools grew up with the factory system.

Scientific managerial practice suggested division of labor

into separate units; division of time marked by bells. Rows

of desks were attached to floors. Textbooks were divided

into units. One reason for compulsary education was to make

American out of immigrant children.

Teachers, standing before the class, covered material in

specified segments of time. Students, seated in fixed

desks, all "learned" in standard fashion.

The advent of school busses -- "with comfortable seats,

heaters, windows, and front and rear doors" (Covert, 1928,

p. 2) -- and paved roads encouraged consolidation of small

schools into larger factory-like buildings. Scientific

management encouraged standardized testing as an accurate

measure of educational effectiveness. Because of lack of

documentation, we will never know if or how effective one-

room nongraded schools were. During the early part of the

twentieth century a prejudice evolved-- one-room schools

lacked the latest in fashion and the latest in facilities.

There was much local control of one-room schools.

Consolidation reflected political power as well as

educational and managerial theory of the times.

Education concerns character and thinking. Many educators

have long been uncomfortable with the factory system of

schooling and its large impersonal bureaucratic

organization. Education is personal and moral. With the

economy moving away from factories into information

processing, old style industry is disappearing. Eighty

percent of employment today is in small business and

information processing. Schooling has always followed the

leading economic institutions of the period. Education now

is dealing with down-sizing, decentralizing, school-based

management, and other ideas currently fashionable in the

industrial world.

As Dewey was the prophet of post-industrial management

styles, he was keenly aware of human and moral dimensions of

education.

The connection of thinking with doing, of

learning with practice is critical in modern information-

processing businesses. It is equally critical in education.

Small is beautiful. Less is more. Fix the System

American schooling faces a serious systems problem.

Deming urges business and industrial management to fix the

system, not the blame. Students must be viewed as workers,

not products to be processed. "

The traditional model of

schooling is . . . incompatible with the idea that students

are workers, that learning must be active, and that children

learn in different ways and at different rates" (Shanker,

1990, p. 350). Too many American schools today remain based

on the factory model where employees produce piecework and

scientific managerial principles are administrative

guidelines. Small Schools and Educational Quality

In a small school quality is easier to accomplish. With

fewer students and fewer disruptions, teachers can focus on

children. With teacher cycling and multiage nongraded

grouping a learning community evolves. Students cannot

merely lean on their shovels.

They must be involved in

their own learning. Good or great education can happen

anywhere.

Smaller school size is not the entire answer to America's

present educational dilemma, but it is a viable place to

start. For size to help significantly, schools must become

small enough for people to know each other well. Small

schools offer

opportunities for development of stable, caring learning

communities.

Today America has about 8500 small nonpublic schools and

about 1000 one-room public schools. Evidence suggests these

schools are interesting and worthy of further study.

Small schools and small sailboats are reminders of our

simpler past. Small schools involve a human connection of

teachers and children. Small sailboats involve a spiritual

connection of sailors and surroundings. Supertankers on

autopilot involve a disconnection of thinking and doing.

Edward B. Fiske argues . . . the time for tinkering with

the current system of public education is over. After a

decade of trying to make the system work better by such

means as more testing, higher salaries, and tighter

curriculums, we must now face up to the fact that anything

short of fundamental structural change is futile. . . . .

American public schools grew up around an early industrial

model that has outlived its usefulness in education as well

as in the industry that created it.

The renewal of public

education in this country requires nothing less than a

frontal assault on every aspect of schooling -- the way we

run districts, organize classrooms, use time, measure

achievement, assign students, relate schools to their

surroundings, and hold people accountable. Trying to get

more learning out of the current system is like trying to

get the Pony Express to compete with the telegraph by

breeding faster ponies (Fiske, 1991, p. 14-15). A major

helpful educational reform is simply making schools smaller

--

MUCH smaller.