Programs Will Not Fix Education – The Structures Built Around Our Teachers and Our Idea of College Need to Change
I love youth programs: arts programs, leadership programs, theater programs, tutoring programs, college access programs, internship programs, mentorship programs, empowerment programs, I’ve worked in them all in some shape or form. For a long time, I believed that it was the people on the ground, the ones actually executing and managing these programs who were doing the most important work. I could see the ways the programs I worked in fundamentally changed the lives of children, and I have seen many of those children go on to become successful adults. I still believe in the power of good programs, but my thinking has evolved.
When you work at the program level for any length of time you feel a great joy, but you also get tired. You get tired because your work is essentially swimming against a much larger current, and no matter how long you swim against a current, or how many people you get swimming with you, the current is not going to change. The river will flow the way it flows, and in American education, the direction of the current is a dangerous one.
I have come to believe that for America to continue to be the center of innovation and progress in the next generation, a plethora of good programs being taken to scale will not be enough. Some fundamental aspects of our education system will need to change. I will write more on the particulars of these changes in future posts, but for now I will at least introduce them.
1) Teachers – It should be uncontroversial to say that for education to excel we need quality teachers. But why would anyone want to be a teacher today? Across the country teachers are striking and protesting for better pay and more resources for their students. In many schools, the creative autonomy that used to balance out low pay has been replaced with strictly mandated curriculum, and the spirit of molding young people’s character has been crowded out by an emphasis on the narrow set of skills required for standardized tests. Morale is at an all-time low and enrollment in teacher preparation programs is down double-digit percentages. And by the way, population is increasing, baby boomers are retiring, and our schools have more low-income children than ever before. If we don’t make teaching a more desirable profession we’re going to be in trouble.
2) College & Career – Our education system is very focused on four-year colleges, to the extent that any other path is seen as a failure or consolation prize. But the reality is that, in many parts of the country, most good jobs don’t require a four-year degree. They require something between a high-school diploma and a bachelor’s degree. Combine this reality with the skyrocketing cost of higher education, the serious debt obligations most students incur, and the proliferation of ‘general studies’ degrees and other diplomas that bring no clear economic advantage, and we find ourselves in a situation where we need to seriously reconsider the life paths we are promoting to young people. The data we’ve been using to emphasize college, where we show how much more people with four-year degrees make over the course of their lives, that data is not going to look the same for this generation.
I used to believe that the most important work was done at the program level because I didn’t see real evidence of how policy makers or the leaders of large institutions were actually influencing the lives of my students. To a large extent that observation was true. But now I see the dangerous power of their inaction. Today the real work to change the fate of education is being done at the program level. But I’ve come to realize that it shouldn’t be that way. Structures need to change. It’s time for our institutions and policy makers to work as hard as our program managers.
