Linda Dawson is an IASB director/editorial services and Journal editor.
S ome economists call it a free fall. To the 1.7 million people added to the jobless rolls in April and May, the U.S. economy may well seem to have toppled off a cliff or been sucked into a black hole. Whatever the metaphor, the numbers that came out last week left no doubt: not only has the long-feared recession begun but it is already shaping up as one of the worst slumps since the Great Depression of the 1930s.”
If you think this quote appeared in a recent financial publication, you would be wrong. It was the lead in an “Economy & Business” feature, “The Bad News Gets Worse,” written by Time editors for June 16, 1980.
That’s right. Thirty years ago, the nation’s economy was in a free fall. Unemployment was up 7.8 percent, sales of domestic cars was down 37 percent from the prior year and new factory orders were off by 5.5 percent from the month before. Even though the economy is still on everyone’s mind, the cover story for that issue hits close to home: “Help! Teacher Can’t Teach!”
In today’s era of accountability and student testing, teacher competency has become a hot topic. But it was a hot topic 30 years ago, too. If you’re feeling like as much as things change, everything stays the same, don’t feel alone. The current situation in education seems eerily like 30 years ago.
In the 1980 Time cover story, “politicians, educators and especially millions of parents” were certain that public schools were in perilous trouble. “Violence keeps making headlines,” the story read. “Test scores keep dropping. Debate rages over whether or not one-fifth or more adult Americans are functionally illiterate.”
Who was to blame in 1980? America’s teachers … along with the decline of American family life, the horrible influence of television and disruptive school busing orders. It’s all starting to sound very familiar. And just think … those who blamed television in 1980 were doing so with just a handful of channels available for most viewers, even on cable!
In the Time article, Professor J. Myron Atkin, dean of Stanford University’s School of Education, predicted the demise of “universal public, compulsory education as it has been pioneered in America.”
Often reported, so far untrue
In an often paraphrased quote, Mark Twain wrote the following note to Frank E. Bliss in May 1897: “James Ross Clemens, a cousin of mine, was seriously ill two or three weeks ago in London, but is well now. The report of my illness grew out of his illness; the report of my death was an exaggeration.”
Professor Atkin was not the first to exaggerate public education’s demise. Its demise has been predicted many times since compulsory public schooling took hold in the United States in the mid-19th century. Railing over the failings of youth dates back to the days of ancient Greece, with sometimes disputed quotes attributed to Socrates by his student, Plato.
The June 1980 Time article on the “multifaceted crisis of America’s public schools” predates the famous “A Nation at Risk” report by nearly three years. That report, which stood for years as an indictment of the entire U.S. public education system, quoted recent polls that proclaimed people were “steadfast in their belief that education is the major foundation for the future strength of this country.” And that “education is ‘extremely important’ to one’s future success.”
“Very clearly,” the report concluded, “the public understands the primary importance of education as the foundation for a satisfying life, an enlightened and civil society, a strong economy and a secure Nation.”
The most recent Phi Delta Kappan/Gallup Poll (2009) continued to show that Americans, parents in particular, give higher grades to their local schools than they do to the system as a whole. More than 50 percent gave either an A or a B to schools in their own communities, the highest percentage since 2001.
On the other hand, when asked to grade schools as a whole, 80 percent gave schools a grade of C or less, equal to the bad grades schools received in 2007. Both the 2009 and 2007 polls were preceded by years where less than 70 percent of respondents gave a grade of C or less. In fact, the percentage giving a “fail” rating has been climbing slightly for the past four years … from 3 percent up to 6 percent.
Additionally, only 48 percent of Americans currently think public schools “are moving on the right track … in terms of providing quality education.” The number was much higher for Democrats (56 percent) than for Republicans (44 percent) or independents (42 percent).
What is interesting in these comparisons, is that just two years before the Time article, “Quest for Better Schools,” a special report in U.S. News & World Report stated: “After a long decline in the quality of public education, signs now are pointing to a comeback of excellence in the classroom in many regions of the country.”
That article talked about new “competency testing in basic academic skills,” “an end to ‘social promotions’” and “borrowing techniques from private industry” for quality control. However, it also cautioned that most educators believed the “drilling in basics” necessary to improve test scores would not be enough to improve achievement and that the “back-to-basics” movement ignored “other necessary skills, such as learning to think critically and dealing with complex ideas.”
“Despite all the problems, many educators are convinced that the reforms already under way and in prospect have set the state for a turnaround in the schools,” the article concluded.
Unfortunately, the rhetoric in 2010 around education still continues to point to the need to improve test scores and at those “other necessary skills” as being at a crisis level. During the past two years, state and national conference sessions for teachers, board members and administrators have focused on the need for 21st Century skills for students. Critical thinking skills are always at the top of that list.
And public education in America, now prodded by the No Child Left Behind Act, keeps chugging along on a quest for improvement.
Cost of the quest
Concern about the cost of financing public education is a theme that has carried through the past 30 years as well, and that probably will continue. In 1978, the “Quest for Better Schools” article was accompanied by a graphic that showed annual outlays per pupil in public schools from 1960 through an unofficial estimate for 1978. In 1960, the average per-pupil expenditure was $397. Of course in 1960, you could also buy a three-bedroom house with an attached garage for $20,000 or less in many areas of the country.
By 1978, the estimate for per pupil spending was $1,786 ... a level that was spurring anti-tax sentiment. Voters in California had approved the controversial Proposition 13 just three months earlier. Prop 13, which still influences taxation in California, was a state constitutional amendment that rolled back property taxes to their 1975 levels and limited increases to an inflation factor that could not exceed 2 percent.
Comparing the 1960 and 1978 figures for spending with the 2009 edition of Quality Counts, a report by Education Week, shows the average per-pupil expense in the U.S. hovered near $10,000 in 2005-06, the most recent year for data. Researchers found 23 states plus the District of Columbia spent more than $10,000 per pupil with Vermont spending the most ($15,139) and Utah spending the least ($5,964). Illinois ranked 34th in the data, averaging $8,829, although some Illinois districts spend much more than $10,000 and many spend much less than the average.
While not aimed specifically at school spending, the current Tea Party movement that emerged in 2009 has its basis in protesting higher taxes and takes its original impetus from the famed Boston Tea Party, a precursor of the Revolutionary War. “Tea” as an acronym for the group also stands for “taxed enough already.” The fact that education funding comes almost exclusively from taxes could make it a target as well.
California is back in the news in 2010 with the California School Boards Association, in partnership with the state’s administrators and state Parent Teachers Association, filing a lawsuit to declare the state’s education finance system as unconstitutional and stating that “students should not continue to suffer from California’s irrational school finance system.”
Districts in Illinois currently find themselves at the mercy of the state’s financial woes. Because of late state payments and the possibility of more cuts to state funding, districts issued large numbers of “reduction in force” (RIF) notices for teachers and staff, and at least one district, Lovington CUSD 303, is considering annexation to neighboring Arthur CUSD 305 because the state is $200,000 behind in aid to the small district.
While school financial formulas continue to be debated, the Illinois legislature has not put school funding on a priority, need-to-reform track.
What was expected?
Prediction articles are an interesting lot. When first read, you wonder whether such things will really happen. When read in retrospect, you wonder how they could have gotten it so right … or so wrong.
In 1971, The Illinois School Board Journal asked a superintendent, an architect, a university professor and a school board member what they expected the future to hold for schools in 2000. Representatives of those same disciplines offer their views of education in 2040 following this article.
The superintendent in 1971 was predicting classes that would be determined not by room size, but “by ability achievement, interest, behavior, objectives.” He predicted that schools would operate “12 months a year, six days a week” and that the nation as a whole would see fewer, larger districts, “perhaps 1,000 districts to serve the entire nation.” He also added that independent study “may account for up to 50 percent of a pupil’s school time” in 2000.
While those predictions have fallen rather short of the mark, he was closer to the target on predicting more team teaching, the use of computers as an aid in decision making at all levels, and more federal money — “but not enough to adequately finance all needed programs.”
The architect was definitely more of a dreamer, predicting “air buses” that would serve classrooms in the sky, classroom environmental systems that would be controlled by a “nerve center” the teacher would carry in his or her pocket, and the replacement of traditional desks with “a variety of fixtures with built-in equipment to supplement the learning process.”
In 1999, The School Administrator, the educational journal of the American Association of School Administrators, ran a series or articles in which they also asked numerous authors to describe education of the future.
Authors Kimberley and Marvin Cetron predicted: “By 2010, almost every classroom in the country will be tied to the Internet. In the most distant rural areas, students routinely will attend school by communicating over the Internet through wireless modems.” At the time, she was a teacher in Fairfax County, Virginia, schools and he was president of Forecasting International.
John M. McLaughlin, president of The Education Industry Group in Sioux Falls, South Dakota, wrote, “The greatest change for K-12 education in the coming quarter century will be a shift in emphasis from schooling to learning.” And he predicted that more people would be taking advantage of alternative education options, such as charter schools, vouchers and home schooling, adding that by 2025, public schools’ market share of children will have slipped from 89 percent (1999 figures) to 65 or 70 percent.
In 2007, John I. Wilson, executive director of the National Education Association, was quoted in “Educating Generation Z” in American School Board Journal as saying, “Students today expect all the information in the world to be one mouse click away on a 24/7 basis. They expect to phone or instant message their peers and family easily whether they are across the street or across the continent. They expect information resources to be dynamic, not static.”
As Generation Z students (those born since 2000) fill America’s classrooms, they will create a need for a “different approach,” he said, one that focuses more on mastering how to analyze, interpret and use information rather than just collecting it. As information bombards students at greater rates than ever before, information that changes very rapidly, students will need to develop adaptive skills to cope with those rapid changes.
Where we’re headed
As the dates of the predictions move increasingly closer, it’s easier to see where prognosticators are hitting the mark … and where they’re missing it.
Most classrooms have not evolved to the levels expected by the predictions of air buses, but technology is playing an increasingly larger role in design and renovation. Promethean boards and students using laptops in class are becoming more common, although not always used to their fullest potential.
School finance still looms as the elephant in the room that everyone acknowledges is there but no one wants to tame.
Charter schools and home schooling are growing, but not at the rapid rate that some predicted.
And most will acknowledge that change is one of the most difficult things to accomplish, when examined in the here and now and when looking for a new path. But looking through a lens from the past, we can see that education has changed. And change will need to keep occurring as education adapts to new technology, more diverse student populations and cyclical economics.
In the January/February 2010 issue of The Futurist magazine, communications scholar Janna Anderson was interviewed about creating a new path for education outside the classroom. In “Remaking Education for a New Century,” Anderson had this to say about classrooms of the future:
“We need to move away from the format of school time and non-school time, which is no longer necessary. It was invented to facilitate the agrarian and industrial economies.
“Faculty, teachers and principals could inform students that they expect them to learn outside of the classroom and beyond homework assignments. The Internet plays a key role in that. …
“More importantly, we need to teach kids to value self-directed learning, teach them how to learn on their own terms, and how to create an individual time schedule. We need to combine face time and learning online. And we can’t be afraid to use the popular platforms like text-messaging and social networks.”
In one of her final observations, Anderson said, “Economics is generally the force that pushes leaders of stagnating institutions to adopt new paradigms.”
School finances are currently exerting a great force on school districts in Illinois. How the state’s budget crisis plays out may have a heavy hand in shaping the schools and district of the future.
But whatever the impetus is for changes to education, at least one quote from the past will remain true. The Prince, written by Niccolo Machiavelli and published five years after his death (1532) contained this:
“There is nothing more difficult to take in hand, more perilous to conduct or more uncertain in its success than to take the lead in the introduction of a new order of things.”
The difficult task of changing education in the future is in the hands of current school board members and administrators. The decisions they make will either allow predictions made now to come to fruition, or they will impede the process of change.