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Illinois School Board Journal
September-October 1999

by Jack L. Edwards

Jack L. Edwards is retiring this year after 16 years as a member of the Board of Education of Zion Elementary District 6, in Lake County. He has served his board as president, vice-president, and secretary. He also is chairman of IASB's Lake Division, and has served as division member-at-large, communications chair, and vice chairman.

In 1946, Herman Hesse won a Nobel Prize for Literature for a novel about education, The Glass Bead Game. In the idealized society of Castallia that is the setting for this novel, the teachers are a separate class, and are cared for in order to benefit the whole society. But they are not a pampered class. Teachers face the highest qualification trials for any profession. They do not become rich by teaching, but they get to do the one thing that no one else gets, which is to spend their entire lives tending to the culture and the life of the mind of the Castallian society.

The "failures" in Castallia become engineers, doctors, industrialists, statesmen or soldiers. The greatest regard is reserved for the teachers. And those who get to play the "glass bead game" are the best of the best educators. Glass Bead Games, like the Olympics (pre-scandal) in our world, were times for celebration, and the individual games often set standards for all of society, as well as celebrating the best cultural and intellectual achievements of the participants. In this utopian society, the very highest regard is reserved for the Game Master, who is head of the highest school in Castallia. It is the Game Master who decides the theme of the quadrennial Glass Bead Game, and manages the march towards its fulfillment.

High honors

In the novel, the Game Master who achieved the best game of all, the Headmaster of the highest Castallian academy, leaves his post after his highest achievement in gamesmanship. He does not become president of his nation, or head of the League of Nations, although he could have had either of those posts, by popular acclaim. He does not leave to become the head of a think-tank or consulting firm, with mega-buck salary, although any such post he might have wanted would have been his for the asking. He leaves to teach kindergarten.

It might be said that we do not live in an ivory tower world such as Hesse's Castallia. Nor do we live in a time when we can stick with a known curriculum throughout generations. Change, in every part of education, is our only constant.

One of the more interesting changes that I have observed since coming onto the school board in 1983 is the relationship of technology to education. Going back to the 1950s and 1960s, technology was an adjunct to the curriculum -- something which added interest, perhaps, or speeded up the process of teaching subject areas like math or physics. But in the 1980s, and continuing through the 1990s, technology became the curriculum. Even the way we use the main instrument of technology, the computer, in our schools has changed. At first, we kept all the computers in one place and took the students to that room. At this level of integration, technology was not too far removed from its roots in typing. Students did not have individual typewriters, but went to the typing room to use them when work required it. "Keyboarding" was one of the main subjects students learned.

Then came the Internet, and everything changed. We now believe that kids are born knowing how to use keyboards, and not much time is wasted on that skill. And although labs with dozens of computers still exist in most junior and senior high schools, the real growth in the number of computers in schools has been in the individual classrooms. Projects in almost all subject areas are based around research that students do by contacting other students, and even the "real experts" in their fields, through the Net. One of the big growth areas in the last two years is in school or classroom-based web pages. And now, the kid who is quick with the mouse is probably more in demand than the fast typist, as keyboards give way to "point and click."

High schools are mirroring now what colleges did just a few years ago. As just one local example, Zion-Benton High School is starting a "Success Academy" this year. Entering freshmen in that program are required to have laptop computers and every class they attend has the requisite connections to network their laptops both within the classroom and from the classroom to the Net. All their work will be done on the laptops, and "papers" will be published digitally and "handed in" via modem, rather than on paper. Students take their laptops home every night, and can contact the classroom bulletin board for assignments, or their teacher for help, through e-mail and computer conferencing.

Medium = message

The goal of this approach is to finally produce graduates who come out of high school with the required skills to move right into the business world. The business world has been after educators for years to do this, and now it is beginning to happen. Marshal McLuhan's famous dictum from the 1960s -- "The medium is the message" -- is finally, unequivocally true. If this transformation continues along the lines so far laid down, Martin Trow will have to write a sequel to his book The Second Transformation of American Secondary Education. In that book, Trow says that sometime in the 1930s, the concept of high school as a "finishing school" changed to high school as a "holding tank," with the finishing touches of education added in college or trade school. The paradigm for the socially educated person is once again changing. If this trend continues, it will have a profound effect on American society, and on American higher education, as we move into the next century.

The integration of technology into education has been exciting to observe. Other changes have not been so positive. Schools are fighting for survival against both legislators and the unions. The educational mission is buried under the weight of social engineering that the legislature wants our schools to cheerfully accept. But the legislature is not so good at seeing that the mandates it brings to education strain overstretched budgets without providing educational benefits. The "soothing of the savage beast" now comes from counseling, which is mandated, and not from music or art, which schools too often can no longer afford. And the unions, whose mantra is "class size," are trying an end run around school boards and administrators, with a philosophy of legislate-by-lawsuit that bleeds budgets to support more dues-paying union teachers.

The System

As most school board members do, I started my career with high hopes for changing The System and leaving it better than I found it. And, as most school board members who stick with it for a while find out, The System has a way of protecting itself from change and perpetuating its own myths, do what you will.

One of the great myths of education in Illinois (and elsewhere) is that we have local control of the process of education. The reality is that both the state and the federal government tie us to the controls of their disbursements and their laws so that local control is very limited, if it even exists at all. Example: a quarter century ago, special education provided a valid service for children whose home schools couldn't afford to educate them to their full potential within the home-district setting. But now, the special education bureaucracy, and purse strings, have grown to the point that 25 percent of our district's education funds are spent fulfilling its needs -- as required by state and federal mandates. The definition of what constitutes the bailiwick of special education is so convoluted and twisted that it can, and on occasion does, cover any student that it wants, up to and including the class valedictorian.

Fads and mandates

The real kicker is that, if it wants, the special education district can vote to increase its taxes, a la referendum, without a referendum, and simply pass along the costs of building a brand new district to its constituent schools. Local school districts can't do anything about it except choose to opt out of the district -- and, if they do, they are legally required to provide all the services that the special education district provides, to all the students that special education defines as needing their services. This is local control?

As a leading-edge Baby Boomer, I have seen a great change in education affected by "fads" over the years. For instance, in the 1950s, teachers were still (or again?) teaching phonics as the basis for introducing written and oral language to students from the early grades onward. The scores of entering college students on nationally normed tests were at their highest during the 1960s, as this last generation of phonics students wound their way through the education system.

Then along came the fads -- like sight-reading and "whole language." The birth of these fads, like so many other educational fads, occurred in the education departments of universities that were losing budget as the Baby Boom turned bust and the number of teachers graduating declined, as did their prospects for employment in declining-enrollment districts. What is more, the university system requires professors to "publish or perish" -- which further puts them under pressure to come up with bright new theories about teaching and learning. Typically, these are untested and even, as with whole language, counterproductive. As we have seen over the years, the scores of students educated on whole language (and new math, new physics, et al.) declined on the national SAT and ACT tests of entering freshman college students so precipitously that these tests themselves were devalued by design twice in the 1970s, and once since, just to make it appear that the scores were equivalent to the high levels of the last educated generation, who entered college in the 1960s.

Feel good kids

A fad that has grown in parallel with whole language is student self-esteem. We now have the "feel good" generation of students, who may learn nothing, but who will nevertheless leave high school feeling good about themselves. One result of "feel good" is that we can no longer acknowledge excellence -- because honoring only one top student with the title valedictorian would tend to make lots of students feel bad that they didn't qualify for the honor. Have we forgotten that true self-esteem is the result of hard work on oneself, and hard effort at achieving a measure of objective excellence?

Another great battleground for local control in education is with the teacher unions. Districts no longer have the ability to balance budgets in the way that business has always done -- by cutting extraneous employees -- because the unions control who may be let go and the circumstances of letting go. The hue and cry over class size as an adjunct to excellence is largely a union-led movement. The theory proposed at the university level (and university professors are, of course, themselves unionized to the hilt) is that students learn better in smaller classes. So unions go to strike over class size, disrupting the educational process of the students in order, so their public relations people say, to help the students achieve in smaller classes. But small classes serve only one true purpose -- the union's drive to keep more teachers employed and therefore paying union dues. Numerous studies have shown that there is little relation between low class size and superior achievement. If that idea were true, then why did students in the 1950s, when classes were much larger -- not to mention parochial students to this day, who are often in larger classes -- achieve better grades and test scores on national tests?

The success of unions in obtaining lifelong employment for their members is one of the great negative influences on education throughout the nation. Once a teacher achieves tenure, he or she has a job until retirement. Districts find out that, barring extreme moral turpitude, the cost of removing a teacher is so great as to be totally impractical.

Perhaps the greatest negative influence on education during my 16 years on the board comes from an amorphous but all-encompassing fad that has come to be called "political correctness." This fad could not have ingrained itself in our national and local consciousness without the simultaneous growth of the other fads mentioned here. Political correctness is a sort of national-level feel good philosophy that offers appeasement to all and truth to none. History can no longer be taught, because it might make some groups or individuals feel bad about themselves or the racial, ethnic, or other groups with which they identify. We no longer honor the founders of this country because they were white males. But we have to honor groups and ideas that perhaps no one in the local constituency actually honors or even agrees with, because every group and idea is "important." Thus, many schools have to teach about the lifestyles of anti-family groups (abortion rights) and individuals with alternative lifestyles ("Why Johnny has two dads"), but are prevented from teaching literature (most writers are white), history or philosophy (same problem), and higher math and physics (too tough for most students to achieve good scores).

It would be better to tell all the truths than to suppress most of them. It would make more sense to say that, although it is true that the founding fathers were predominantly white males, the truths they established came from people of many races and nationalities, and have led, slowly but surely, to more freedom for all. It would be truer to say that, although there was slavery, it has been disavowed and abandoned, and the fight to accomplish its dissolution was the largest and most important war this country fought -- up until that time -- and that subsequent wars this country fought have been related to carrying on the principles of freedom that single Civil War established in our national psyche. It would be better to say to say that prejudice is always wrong, whether it is white prejudice against black, or black prejudice against white, or everyone's prejudice against the original inhabitants, or the heterosexual's prejudice against the homosexual. It would be better to say that the ideas we honor are honored because of their beauty, their universal essence, their truth -- and not because of the ethnic origin of their authors.

It would be better to say that each student should achieve to his or her best potential, measured against stiff standards, than to keep lowering the standards to meet the performance of students. We are part of a global economy, and the nations that are most likely to compete with us are not going to lower their educational standards so that the worst-performing students won't have to feel bad about their performance. They are going to reward the best-performing students with the responsibilities of leadership for the next generation, and set the standard against which all their nation's students should measure themselves. How can we continue to compete if we do not do the same?

It would be dishonest, though, to say that these 16 years on the board of education of my local school district have been an exercise in losing ground gracefully. There are many positive elements to those years on the board. I have worked with upwards of 40 of my fellow townspeople to ensure that the concerns we all share about the education of our young people have always been addressed. Many of these fellow board members have become personal friends -- and a few have become personal enemies. But there is an old Shawnee notion that one is judged by the strength of his enemies, so even that is mostly positive, insofar as it allowed us to debate fully the ideas that would best serve the ends of educating our young people.

Funding

The issues that remain for local school boards, and the state of Illinois, to solve are many. Most importantly is the issue of funding -- how will we pay for the education of all those children?

In our district, this issue is urgent because of the legislated devaluation of our major taxpayer, a nuclear power station. We have one of the oldest, and therefore least costly, nuke plants in the state. Local taxpayers have always paid a higher rate than neighboring non-nuclear plant districts, even during the best years of nuke-plant tax income. And now, when the income of our legislatively devalued (and subsequently closed) nuclear plant to the district will fall from $6.8 million to $750,000 in just three years, those legislators want us, as a condition of their help, to "voluntarily" increase our school taxes five percent per year, and reduce our budget by three percent per year, just to qualify for financial help.

Of course, the problem is not just ours -- it belongs to everyone. Within Lake County, we have both the lowest and highest income-per-student in the state of Illinois. How can situations like this be fair to all students? One district gets less than $5,000 to educate each of its students -- another district gets more than $14,000 to educate each of its students. And they are neighbors.

In the idealized world that Hesse created in The Glass Bead Game, the Headmaster was ahead of history in realizing the education system would fail if it was not bolstered at its most basic level, the point-of-entry to the educational system, by having the best people, the highest achievers, use all their training and experience to educate the beginning students. I've always thought that sacrifice showed the proper perspective on education. Every political candidate and office-holder gives lip service to the importance of education, but that lip service does not translate into the kind of support our schools need. If education is not our highest priority, it is nothing but a political football. And, in Illinois, we surely do love our football.