There was recently an article titled Five Ways to Fix America’s Schools by Harold Levy in The New York Times. Having taught at the college level (for a brief time) and spent a fair amount of time as a student (a lot of time), this caught my attention. I would generally agree that our school system could be better, but how to go about doing it is of course the tricky question. So I read over the article and thought I’d pull out the 5 ways that Levy suggests and add some comments.

Raise the age of compulsory education. Twenty-six states require children to attend school until age 16, the rest until 17 or 18, but we should ensure that all children stay in school until age 19. Simply completing high school no longer provides students with an education sufficient for them to compete in the 21st-century economy. So every child should receive a year of post-secondary education.

While I agree with the idea here, I am not so sure it will have the intended outcome. For instance, getting a degree is often just a formality. It’s a hoop through which you have to jump to get more money. I have seen lots of people (and have felt myself this way at times) that have not been prepared by their education to actually perform their job function. It is not always true that a person coming out of college is more prepared to do a job than someone who left high school and worked for a couple of years. Yet the hoop is a college degree and you’re out of luck if you don’t have it. So if everyone starts getting a bit of a college level education, I don’t see the money automatically following. That being said, I really don’t see more education as a bad thing.

I do like the idea of having some sort of mandatory ‘extra year.’ Make the options for what’s done during this year varied, but I especially like the volunteer idea. Everyone is able to help out in some way and I think volunteering strengthens one’s character and one’s community. Hopefully this can come to fruition in the near future.

Use high-pressure sales tactics to curb truancy. Casual truancy is epidemic; in many cities, including New York, roughly 30 percent of public school students are absent a total of a month each year. Not surprisingly, truants become dropouts.

Growing up the way I did and going to the school I did (high school), I couldn’t imagine skipping school. If you weren’t in homeroom at the time the bell rang, the nuns would start calling your house. I did skip school, but never without my father knowing (someone had to write a note…). I never even considered faking a note. I wouldn’t say that I was an especially great student or really wanted to be in school, but the system prevented me from getting around that. Why? I guess it’s because my parents wanted me to be in school. This gets back to one of the points Levy brings up, and I feel is really important, family. There needs to be a structure in place to help the school system. In many cases, I think that structure is the family.

If there is no one at home to make you get up in the morning and get to school, why do you do it? Because you want to? Not even I am that naive. Sometimes you do things because you have to and because it’s what is expected of you. If your support system is not setting that expectation, it’s easy to just let it go by the wayside.

It seems obvious to me that if you are not in school, you are not learning. From what I understand, schools spend a lot of resources trying to track down students that aren’t in the classroom. These are resources that could be better spent trying to actually educate students. But at the end of the day, even if you catch a student one day, you can not make him show up the next. Ultimately, it’s the student’s decision and I think that really needs to be helped along through an interesting in learning and an inferred consequence (from the support system) if they do not go.

Advertise creatively and aggressively to encourage college enrollment. The University of Phoenix, a private, for-profit institution, spent $278 million on advertising, most of it online, in 2007. It was one of the principal sponsors of Super Bowl XLII, which was held at University of Phoenix Stadium (not bad for an institution that doesn’t even have a football team). The University of Phoenix’s enrollment has clearly benefited from its advertising budget: with more than 350,000 students, its enrollment is surpassed by only a few state universities.

Well this point is really geared toward universities. And even then, I don’t know if I really agree. Advertising is generally misleading and I don’t think that’s what we need in our university system. School has become such a big business that it’s sometimes hard to tell if they are doing what is good for the university or what is good for the student. There does need to be interest from students to attend university, but I don’t know that you need to generate that through glitzy advertising.

Unseal college accreditation reports so that the Department of Education can take over the business of ranking colleges and universities. Accreditation reports — rigorous evaluations, prepared by representatives of peer institutions — include everything students need to know when making decisions about schools, yet the specifics of most reports remain secret.

This certainly sounds like a good idea. Why not let the consumers (students) see an honest accounting of the institutions in which they are interested? Every school has problems, that’s ok. But give the consumers the best set of facts available and let them make the decision that is right for them. I am generally a pro-honesty person (and I’ll give you no examples of when I am anti-honesty!).

The biggest improvement we can make in higher education is to produce more qualified applicants. Half of the freshmen at community colleges and a third of freshmen at four-year colleges matriculate with academic skills in at least one subject too weak to allow them to do college work. Unsurprisingly, the average college graduation rates even at four-year institutions are less than 60 percent.

So to improve our education system, we need to educate more effectively? Well, I guess it couldn’t hurt. I can certainly second this sentiment. When teaching at the college level, I often had to teach remedial topics instead of teaching the actual stated material for the class. Students just hadn’t learned it previously or if they did, they were unable to use any of it. This is of course not all students, but you can’t just leave half the class behind because they don’t know ’something they should have already learned.’ And leaving it up to the student to learn in their free time and catch up is not really a viable option. And so it snowballs. The next course they take they may not know some of the material that they were supposed to learn in my class.

I generally agree with Levy on most of his points but I think that he missed a couple of big things. Among them I’d say the following three are probably tops on my list: student responsibility, rekindling an interest in learning and bringing a greater level of respect to the teaching profession.

I don’t think any of these are novel ideas so I’ll just try and briefly explain what I mean. Teachers are often treated like crap. They are often not respected by the students or the students’ parents. Teachers generally aren’t paid well and are sometimes made to teach subjects in which they are unfamiliar. This sounds like a recipe for a great job huh? I think it’s a marvel and a credit to the teachers that we currently have that they take such pride in their work and do such a good job. I would like to see a raising of the status of teachers so that we can attract more of them and help the ones we currently have do a better job.

I think there also needs to be a rekindling of the interest in learning. Like I said before, you can’t make anyone go to school and even if you can, you can’t force someone to learn. We need to make learning fun. Now that’s obviously not always going to be the case. Some things we talk about in school just isn’t that interesting, that’s to be expected. However, the entirety of an education doesn’t need to be that way. Student run discussions, student dictated lessons and things like that could certainly help bring more students in the fold. This is starting to sound like one of those ‘bad students make good’ TV shows, but I think it can really happen. But I think you need institutional support to make it happen. One example of this would be a lessening of emphasis on testing students. When teachers teach a student to pass a test, that’s all he knows. But if you can take the focus off of a test and put it on learning, I think there could be a benefit.

But above all, I think what we need is a cultural focus on student responsibility. The students need be willing to learn and need to want to learn. Showing up for a class is not enough to guarantee that you will be successful. I saw many students at the college level expect to pass because they paid money to be in the class. What the student is paying for is the opportunity to learn. Teachers can help the students as best they can to learn, but at the end of the day, the ultimate effort rests with the student. If we let our students pass just because they showed up, we are doing the whole system a disservice. And the next group of students that come through will know that they can just slide through. I sometimes wonder if this is my ‘back when I was a kid…’ moment, but I can’t stress enough how much I think we have culturally gotten away from an ethic of student responsibility.

Is our education system great? Well it has its good points and its bad points. While I think it does a good job for educating certain groups, I think it fails other groups and overall, I think we could do better. Obviously there are no easy fixes or else it’d probably already be fixed. But hopefully with the above I’ve laid out some of my ideas. Now I need to spellcheck 20 times so I don’t make a mistake in the ‘education post.’ :)

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