US education model outdated: Researcher
A researcher is of the view that the current US academic system has become outdated.
The problem with the U.S. education system is not that the country doesn t invest enough money in it, or teachers don t care about students, or reformers hate teachers. It s that the model is outdated and the world has changed drastically.
That was the message a renowned education researcher shared with a Collier County audience during a lecture Monday afternoon.
"We ve got a model which was built perfectly reasonably for the world of, say, 1910," said Frederick Hess, director of education policy studies at the American Enterprise Institute, a conservative policy think tank. "It s not a bad model. It s just that if you actually had a car that your family had owned since 1910, you might think it needed more than a tune up."
Hess spoke during a Naples Council on World Affairs event held Monday at St. John s the Evangelist Church in North Naples. More than 200 people turned out to hear his speech on why the education system is outdated and how it can be reinvented.
Using General Motors and other companies as examples, Hess said organizations get accustomed to certain ways of doing business and when the world changes and the old way no longer works well, it s difficult for them to keep up. Because of that, he said, many companies don t survive: the average lifespan for a Fortune 500 company in the U.S. is 50 years.
"In much of the world, we don t figure out how to fix old organizations," Hess said. "We simply watch them fade away and get replaced by folks who start fresh. That s not what we get to do in education. So the challenge in education is actually harder than it is in many of these sectors because we want to take these old, established systems in schools and we want to help them think very differently."
Three major factors have changed in education, he said. People expect more from schools — rather than a minority of students graduating from high school, all students are expected to do so. The pool of teachers available has decreased. And the tools available have changed.
But rather than transforming schools to keep up with those changes, Hess said the country takes the new opportunities and "crams them in" with what they were doing before.
He detailed three ways the U.S. can update its educational system. Schools should spend money differently, use talent differently and use technology more smartly.
Potential changes, Hess said, could include looking into the amount of money lost when teachers are absent and rewarding schools with low absences; giving gifted teachers more opportunity, more prestige or higher pay; allowing teachers to focus on encouraging, mentoring and supporting students; and allowing technology to give consistent assessments.
"We spend a lot of time debating pedagogies, a lot of time blaming teachers, a lot of time saying that there s a war on schools," he said. "I want to suggest that a lot of it actually misses what matters."
