Education Experience Unlocked: Legislation and The Current Mess in Education

Recently I was travelling with an accomplished army colonel, and he proposed something I had not considered. His formal training, degrees and credentials were so different from mine, which is partially why I was instantly intrigued when he mentioned that he had recently taken an 8th grade assessment from back in the 1920s and couldn’t pass it. His question was, how is it possible with all the advancements made over the past century, that people in today’s time are less intelligent than people were in the 1920s?

Fair question sir. This made me wonder. With all that various groups have tried to do within the world of education, how are we still struggling with achievement gaps and low proficiency in our education system? How can it be that we are less able to apply the knowledge in a way that has meaning across time? In my view, we failed to legislate change, and we have actually legislated hoops that schools and their stakeholders must jump through. In some schools, if you were privy to what educators really thought, you’d hear this called the "bullshit bag". Over time educators find their list of demands growing and are faced with a feeling of disorientation. Nearly everything we were taught in school as “best practice” is slowly replaced with these new, monitored expectations. Do we have circle time with younger students anymore? No, there isn’t time for that. Implement hands on learning in early education classrooms? Nope. Are students inspired to participate in their studies because they have made connections to their passions? Another no. It’s more than high time that we go back to our roots!

Several initiatives aimed at improving education have been implemented in the last 15 to 20 years and yet the very situation they were supposed to fix remains the same. No Child Left Behind was aimed at educational equity. Educational equity is absolutely something that must improve in order for our education system to truly be at its best. Yet I am left feeling like we focused on the wrong angle. It’s not that the thought behind NCLB was bad. Leveling the playing field and having the federal government hold schools accountable should result in a higher quality system. Emphasis on should. Instead, with that accountability comes the need for a measurement tool…testing. A one size fits all (or fits few in my opinion) approach to determining if schools were doing a “good job” or not. We take a diverse population of learners, teach them via one method of presentation (sit and get), with one goal (passing a test so schools look good) and wonder why kids don’t buy into their educational experience. Imagine going to work and instead of individual performance reviews based on your skill set and your position, you were given the same test as every other employee and had to perform otherwise your next promotion opportunity was taken from you. Sounds terrible, doesn’t it? We have asked kids to participate in a system like this for far too long.

In case that construct isn’t enough to demonstrate how we’ve ended up in such a mess, let’s talk about Florida’s Class Size Reduction Amendment. Ask any teacher you know and they will tell you that the number of students in the class will impact the quality of education received within the classroom. When class size reduction was originally implemented about 20 years ago, schools were skeptical of the reality of this legislation. First, we are still carrying our bullshit bag around with no intention of setting it down. How could we when there is always some new idea (other than our ideas) as to how the problems in education should be addressed. Lowering the number of kids per classroom sounds good, right? It sure did. Then, reality sets in and schools quickly realized that the legislation came without funding necessary to truly keep class sizes low. So to circle back to our current situation of overcrowding, low teacher salaries, underfunded schools and continued achievement struggles, what was really accomplished here?

What’s missing in education is autonomy. We have sacrificed much on the altar of accountability. It’s so often said that what gets monitored gets done, and that’s true to an extent, but isn’t education to be about more than just checking a box off on our to do list and saying It’s done? Relationships between families and teachers are strained. Everyone feels stuck. Families want better for their children. Teachers want the freedom they once had to truly address student needs. Kids are right in the middle just wanting to be, well, kids. They want to try risky things. They want to play outside and get messy. They want to participate in activities they enjoy. The fun has been sucked out of their educational experiences. They are just expected to sit, learn and perform on tests. Is that what we were asking of kids in the 1920s? No! We were asking for real world application of knowledge. They were active participants in their family’s business. Kids were outside exploring and learning through experiences. Kids spent time investigating the world around them, and when it was time to show what they knew, its pretty clear that they’d outshine today’s generation of learners (as well as most generations between then and now).

That’s a tough pill to swallow. We’ve “improved” education to the detriment of the children it was meant to serve. And now, teachers and families are left fighting a system that is ignorant to their daily reality. The only question I have left to ponder is, what will it take for change to come and who will be willing to fight for it?