Why Do We Have Schools?

Every year, Virginia's General Assembly is flooded with bills designed to tweak our public school system.  A quick glace through the list of this year's proposals - easily located at www.richmondsunlight.com/ - would persuade any teacher, and most other adults with a modicum of common sense, that our legislators don't know much about today's kids, their teachers, or the workings of their schools. 

Certainly, they don't seem to have a vision of what public education could be, or should be.

2013 is an election year in Virginia.   In November, we'll choose a new Governor, who will  bear responsibility for shaping educational policy.  We'll also elect one hundred members of the House of Delegates, who - given their track record - won't be able to resist the temptation of proposing legislation to tweak our public schools. 

As we start yet another election cycle, it's important for Virginians to start thinking about educational reforms that might actually accomplish something.

And the place to start is by asking ourselves why we have schools at all.

This might seem like an obvious question, but it's not.  Twenty years ago, I spent three years at UVA's Curry School of Education, earning an M.Ed. and doing all the coursework for a Ph.D.   As ed schools go, Curry is top-notch.  And I assure you, the question of why we have schools almost never came up.

The truth is that, for almost five decades now, America's public schools have been operating without anything remotely like a clear mission statement.

Indeed, it's possible to fix the expiration date of America's last clear educational mission statement with great precision.  When Neil Armstrong stepped onto the surface of the Moon, on July 20, 1969, America achieved the goal of a twelve-year educational ramp-up which began in response to the 1957 launch of the Soviet Union's Sputnik.  

During that twelve-year period, there was genuine consensus about the mission of our schools.  They were to produce the leaders and scientists we needed to beat the Soviets in the Space Race.

This mission might have been lacking in many respects.  Certainly, it left out a lot of kids who were never going to become scientists, astronauts, or leaders.  But at least the mission was clear and results-oriented, and most Americans could get behind it. 

Since 1969, several generations of educators have come and gone without any serious effort to devise a new mission statement.  Our schools have been adrift for so long that few educators even think to pose the question.

Which is why today's schools are forced to deal with mindless, wasteful "reforms" such as SOL testing.  Because the fact is that, even if our political and educational leaders don't know what our schools are for, they must at least pretend they do.  Which explains expensive boondoggles such as SOLs.

Nearly all teachers know that end-of-year, multiple-choice tests are an enormous waste of time - but these tests produce the illusion that our schools are doing something. 

Which they are - if their actual mission is to produce graduates who are reasonably competent at memorizing selected "facts" and demonstrating that achievement by taking bubble-tests.

But this can't really be their mission, can it?  If so, Americans are spending trillions of dollars annually to achieve something utterly pointless.  If not, then the question remains - what is the mission?

No one - or at least, no one in charge - seems to know.

Seriously.

Just ask any politician or educational higher-up to define the mission of our schools.  You'll get fine-sounding verbiage about "excellence" and "opportunity" and "all students".  What you won't get is the sort of mission statement any private-sector enterprise would need, simply to function.

In the absence of a clearly-defined mission, a proliferating collection of individuals and groups - each with its own narrow agenda - have spent the past several decades seeking to wrest control of the schools for their own ends.

Parents and parent groups; teachers and teacher organizations; religious factions; prospective employers; colleges and universities; minority communities; majority communities; advocates for the disabled and differently-abled; boosters of the arts; and countless other vested interests - all have battled for control of the public school agenda.

Most of these interests have some claim to consideration, but none can provide the whole answer.  Historically, our public schools were created to serve the general welfare - what our Founders called "the commonwealth".

Presumably, this is still true.  We know this because all citizens pay taxes to support the schools.  All citizens are entitled to vote for the public officials who set educational policy.  In principle, the public schools were established to contribute significantly to the welfare of our communities, our state, and the entire nation.

But of course, our schools cannot - except accidentally - serve a purpose which has not been defined.  If we, and the people running our schools, don't know what those schools are for, it is impossible to evaluate how well they are doing.

Thus, in the ABCs of school reform, A is this:  We must define the purpose of our schools, and we must do so in terms of outcomes.  

A simple task to define, but not an easy one to accomplish.

Yet this becomes the first test for our political leaders, and the educational leaders whom they employ to run our schools.  For until we know what we want our public schools to produce, we cannot possibly expect them to produce it.