Focus of Public Education

[alterin]

I’m noticing that my titles are a bit vague and nonspecific when it comes to what I’m going to be talking about. Partly because, the nature of these are very much unplanned, very much stream of thought. I’m not aiming for a well-researched essay. I’m just trying to put the thoughts I’m having about the state of education into mini-essays that are just a little more specific than a tweet. And partly because, these topics are very metonymic (okay, maybe I’m stretching that) towards what I’m thinking about. They’re very much small portions of much larger ideas, and I’d like to think they’re well-suited for a blog.

---

We’ve had one good big “brand new” idea in education this millennium, and it wasn’t even new. It was just a wide expansion of existing pedagogical arenas. Ever since, we’ve mostly lost the plot about the purpose of public education. Anything that strays from making students “college and career ready” is a distraction, and the only way to make a student “college and career” ready is to focus on the foundational skills that will get them there.

It all started with the Bush era “No Child Left Behind” which is a mix of well-intentioned and dastardly ideas towards the destruction of public education. It’s always been hard to argue against, and so we’ve seen it strengthened in some cases and moved into a more positive direction in others. Ultimately, the idea is way too flawed. One of its key tenets is the idea that all children regardless of socioeconomic status can be successful, and that it is the job of a school to make all students successful.

Now if you’re liberal (and I like to think I’m very very strongly liberal), you might not see anything wrong with this statement. And if you’re conservative, you might disagree, but you probably can’t state why in a way that won’t get you labeled in one of those ways you really really really hate. But this combination statement will never ever be successful, and I would argue that not only have we made absolutely zero strides towards this outcome, we’ve done nothing but give the conservative right ammunition in their fight against public schools.

 

Let me fix it: All children regardless of socioeconomic status can be successful if they’re given the tools to overcome even half of the roadblocks that socioeconomic status puts in their way, and schools are not and cannot be responsible for the existence of those very society based roadblocks.

Public schools are held to very unreasonable and unrealistic standards. We’re required to be mental health institutions, restaurants, hospitals, motels, and everything else. It’s similar to what people have been trying to do with police reform. Police are not mental health providers. The first response to someone having a mental health emergency shouldn’t be someone with a badge and a license to kill. We’re focusing on the final product we’re making the world a better place without asking for whom.

Oops. I semi-sorta left the plot of this post about three paragraphs ago (woah, just like education?! Bonkers.) The issue is that because of No Child Left Behind success is mostly measured by standardized tests that don’t actually measure what they’re supposed to measure, and we really need to focus in on what the actual point of public education is: to give students, regardless of their socioeconomic backgrounds, the tools to close the gap between the haves and the have-nots.

When I, or another teacher assigns an essay or any task, there is this belief (and it’s a reasonable one) that the purpose of that assignment is to finish the essay or the task and to present a finished product. There are some very few times that that is true, but for the vast majority of the time, the final product is not the goal.

If the final product was the goal, then it would make sense, and in fact, it might even be prudent for students to just use AI. It’ll be boring, and it won’t have much of a voice, but honestly, it’s going to be better than what the student actually is capable of doing. Spoiler alert: the vast vast vast majority of student work is objectively crap. I mean it’s not objectively crap for their age or for their skill level or for my expectations and my hopes and dreams, but it’s ultimately crap. And there’s nothing wrong with that because the final product was never the goal of the assignment.

Traditional grading systems have a tendency to deemphasize this point. I’ve been guilty of this in the past, and I’ll probably be guilty of this in the future. And worse, the systems in place overemphasize this type of system. But, again, I’m starting to get less focused on my overarching point.

The final product is not the point of the essay. The process to create that essay is the point. Using AI at any point in the process defeats the entire purpose. The task may be to write an essay, but my learning objectives could be a few of these things or multiple ones of these things or maybe even subsection of these larger things:

1. Gathering your initial thoughts


2. Planning your approach to research and your outputs


3. Reading, synthesizing, evaluating your research


4. Organizing your thoughts and research


5. Communicating your ideas


6. Evaluating your outputs


7. Rethinking and fixing your outputs

The fun thing is that a lot of these skills don’t even require a full final draft. Sometimes, there is value in creating an outline or a rough draft, then abandoning the project altogether. And the beauty of all of these things (and ELA specifically covers multiple domains), they aren’t exactly specific to an ELA class or even school. These are things that can just as easily be expanded to cover just basic life skills in our increasingly digital age.

When people suggest that we teach how to use AI, my initial response is, wait, why should we? But honestly, we already do. All of those skills are necessary to properly use AI. If you can’t do those things, and you can’t do those things well, you have no business evaluating what an AI has done and whether it’s appropriate for your use case. How to use AI (especially while it’s rapidly growing and changing) is not a new skill. It’s a conglomeration of existing skills that we already cover. It’s basic literacy, and we can’t impair a child’s cognitive development by letting AI do the work of the brain that we’re trying to develop.

And I’m aware that using AI is quickly becoming a basic skill, but it seems to me that it’s both domain specific (good for upperclassmen undergrads) and top of the common core skill chain. Public education does not need to keep up with the latest trends. The core goal has never changed. AI is a distraction just like calculators were and then computers were and then 1:1 Chromebooks are (it’s probably going to be past tense soon; next year at my site). These are nice skillsets to have, but they aren’t necessary for the product of the system.

There was one good thing about No Child Left Behind, and it’s the part that is most often maligned for what it does. And it’s also the part that many states have abandoned by now (although, really, they just rebranded and renamed). Common Core was the best part of No Child Left Behind, or more appropriately the method by which they designed Common Core is the most important relic of that law.

It works through a method, backwards planning, that has gone through many name changes. It’s been a buzzword in education for forever, but the basic concept is this: start with the end point, start with what you want a student to know at the end, and you work your way backwards to figure out all of the skills that go into it. This idea predated common core, but what common core did is it took that idea and it applied it throughout the entirety of k-12 education. What skills does a student need by the end of their education? What skills do they need to know those skills? And go all the way down to kindergarten (and now, there’s a push to expand to pre-k).

These skills are general life skills that are considered necessary for “college and career” readiness. Coincidentally, they’re the 100 and 200 level college courses. (There might be an argument to be made that the only real change between 100/200 courses and high school is the mindset and behavioral change, but that’s not quite my field.) And although, administrators, parents, and the legislatures that fund public education, might want their pet skills to be focused on, it’s a mistake. Public education should be broad. It should be intentionally unfocused because the strength is that all of those unfocused, sometimes disconnected ideas, all come together into someone who is ready for the next stage. Public k-12 education shouldn’t produce a fully capable adult. It needs to produce someone with the necessary foundational skills to be ready to succeed or fail at what they think they want to do at the time.

Don’t get me wrong; I don’t think AI is evil or that we need to ban it or try to stop it. I just know that if the goal is to develop someone with critical thinking skills, and it is the goal; offloading the basic foundation of those skills to our computer overlords won’t allow children to develop those skills.

The ultimate goal is that by the end of their k-12 journey, every student, regardless of their socioeconomic status, will have the same foundational skills. The kids with more status will still have those same benefits on their stage, but the hope is that for at least one sparkling beautiful moment, we can provide some equity.

---

Semi-side note: I’m not saying we shouldn’t have vocational type high schools. I work at one, but I think the value and the success in our programs isn’t necessarily those that are succeed and are able to go into that field, perfectly capable and ready. Those are nice added bonuses. I think it’s beautiful and amazing to be able to celebrate those kids who exit our programs, and they might not know what the rest of their life will be, but they know what it won’t be. And they still have all of the foundational skills to do something else.