Now might be the time to rethink education - again.

Our national rationale for educating children has changed greatly over time. Massachusetts was first to compel education of children 1642; they did so as a way to mandate religious instruction. During the Industrial Age many adults went to work in factories and their children went to school in order to learn English and be assimilated into a collective culture. In 1958, Congress passed the National Defense Education Act in response to Cold War anxiety and a perceived need for more technologists to compete with the Soviet Union.

In 1972 a group of 300 CEOs formed the Business Roundtable to focus on public policy, and in 1989 they influenced states to focus on outcome-based school reform with standardized testing as a primary tool for assessing students and teachers in order to apply rewards and punishment.

We no longer believe the function of public education is to enhance the number of religious adherents, and we are no longer desperate to create a workforce capable of defeating the Red Scare, but we are still taken by the argument that schools should focus solely on delivering workers for business interests and the national economy.

Even as we call the continued outgrowth of these various school movements “reform” we continue to miss the point. Children are not born to serve the purpose of the church, the state, or commerce. The most compelling and natural instinct of every human being in the formative years is to grow, learn, and thrive.

In a perfect world all children would have the proper provisions to achieve their natural rights. They all would benefit from a healthy mother that breastfeeds, enforces a healthy sleep schedule, provides a healthy diet, and rears the child in a low-stress, low-noise environment that stimulates imaginative play and vocabulary expanding conversations.

Unfortunately we do not live in a perfect world.

As we obsess over the so-called “achievement gap” we ignore the fact that most of the children at the wrong end of that gap are living in conditions that are far from optimal for positive child development. We stubbornly assert that schools should be the place where massive social inequities are corrected, which is a cheap way of letting ourselves off the hook while we channel our frustrations toward supposedly failing schools. Somehow, children born of poor prenatal care, high-stress conditioning, and all of the attendant negative factors of social injustice are supposed to keep pace with children that have every advantage in life; and teachers are the ones assigned to make it so.

If the aim of education is to develop fully actualized human beings that can think critically, solve problems, and successfully navigate complex social systems, then the prevailing education wisdom – born of industrialist theory - is failing us.

Over 6 million students between age 16 and 24 dropped out of high school in 2007. 63 percent of 2-year colleges and 38 percent of public 4-year colleges report that students require a year or more of remedial courses. Half of college students will not earn a degree or credential.

None of the basic issues with education will be addressed by proffering more fuzzy notions about early childhood education, K-12 “reform,” or “college-ready” programming. Gains made by Head Start are quickly lost in the early grades of elementary education; the K-12 system remains a patchwork of disjointed initiatives; and successful college completion continues to elude the majority of Americans.

If there is any hope at truly “fixing” education it will come in the form of a coherent system of child development that attends to all their proven developmental needs. We are not without successful examples. In 1972, the Carolina Abecedarian Project successfully showed the benefits of providing full family health care and full-time educational support from birth through age 5.

Today, the well-funded and highly celebrated Harlem Children’s Zone initiative furthers the previous work by connecting early childhood education with social services and community building.

Children’s Aid Society operates public community schools that combine “best educational practices with a wide range of vital in-house health and social services to ensure that children are physically, emotionally and socially prepared to learn. “ These schools are open extended hours year round and they provide health care and a range of extra-curricular activities that promote an attachment to community for at-risk students.

What these efforts prove is that child success is dependent upon a confluence of factors and supports, and that reversing social inequity likely will be expensive. To focus narrowly on classroom-based factors to the exclusion of whole life conditions, while also using market-based metrics in order to do so, only continues the problem of unequal results.
However, as we focus there for improvements, it would be best to focus in the one place that research suggests is key. Teachers. Well-trained, supported, and talented teachers are the critical lever for making progress. Knowing this should inspire us all to raise the level of the teacher profession in a way that Finland has done.

As we embark on yet another costly national school reform journey we should not be naïve enough to believe that doing more of what hasn’t worked before will produce better global results. The solutions will not be any easier than the problem, but we cannot expect to solve the great “failing” of public education until we are at least mature enough to start the real conversation.