Respect for what? For being good, decent, hard-working people? Or for preparing students for the 21st century? Because neither teachers nor administrators nor policymakers nor most folks involved in our K-12 education system right now deserve to be ‘respected’ for the latter. Sure, they’re extremely nice, caring, and usually thoughtful. But they’re working in a system that’s broken (in regards to adequate preparation for a digital, global society). Unless they and the systems in which they work change dramatically, they will become irrelevant. And all the ‘respect’ in the world isn’t going to change that, I don’t think.

We need to create some cognitive dissonance and we need to lend some real assistance and resources to the task of transitioning schools into the 21st century. Simply ‘respecting’ teachers more isn’t enough. You’re doing great work in the areas of reading, writing, and literacy. You know there’s a lot of difficult effort involved in that. Multiply that effort a hundred-fold and we might start to get close to the scale and scope of effort that’s going to be required…

We’ve got a lot of work ahead of us.

In the meantime, since you mentioned Alfie Kohn and much of this conversation is about skills, in an article on progressive education, he says,

“Facts and skills do matter, but only in a context and for a purpose. That’s why progressive education tends to be organized around problems, projects, and questions — rather than around lists of facts, skills, and separate disciplines. The teaching is typically interdisciplinary, the assessment rarely focuses on rote memorization, and excellence isn’t confused with “rigor.” The point is not merely to challenge students — after all, harder is not necessarily better — but to invite them to think deeply about issues that matter and help them understand ideas from the inside out.”

I think he is right on and I think that that philosophy (and practice) is sadly missing from most schools.

Alfie Kohn also wrote an article about a year ago called “Against Competitiveness.” This is an interesting piece in the whole conversation about education and the global economy.

http://www.alfiekohn.org/articles.htm#null

You touched on a major issue we are working with right now in Western North Carolina: shifting the focus from teaching skills to teaching concepts. Skills are generally related to specific subject areas and have the ability to turn into a laundry list of tasks to accomplish. Many educators focus so much on “skill training” because it makes for a very simple check off list in their planning.

By focusing education around major concepts, we invite our students into an integrated world where they can apply various skills and strategies in a multitude of ways.

We should never expect formal education system, such as a school, to teach all the skills a person need in life. First, beyond the basics, no one really knows what new skill is needed by a particular profession. Second, different jobs need different skill set. Organized mass-teaching can never customize the curriculum to the each student’s need, not to mention most kids don’t know what they want to do anyway. Third, by wasting time to teach them the actual skills, we are not teaching them what they really need: the skill to learn on their own for the next 80 years!

You would have LOVED the conversations my folks had with Alfie Kohn, Bob Tinker and Marvin Minsky over the past 24 hours at http://www.constructingmodernknowledge.com

There were no clichés used or concerns about achievement gaps or economic competitiveness to be found – except an occasional mention of how such concerns have little to do with the purpose of education.

How would you answer your own question?

Too bad you’re not up here in NH. There have been some mind-blowing experiences.

Will,
If you had to pinpoint the single most important answer to this two-part question, what would you say:
What needs to change about American schools and how should that change be made?

I know what you mean, but I would argue that globalisation is making for a less equitable world in a wide range of ways. Altbach & Knight (2006)have argued that,”Globalisation may be unalterable, but internationalism involves many choices”. They are talking about internationalism in the educational sense. As educators we need to respond to the challenges of globalisation and technology, by helping our students prepare as well as possible to contribute to the making of a better world. To do this they need to be able to use technology and have intercultural understanding.

I think there are three issues:

1. Better metrics
2. Changing target
3. Poor teacher preparation

Ten years ago, kids still took two weeks off to bring in the harvest, and a week off the first week of deer-hunting in our little town in SW New Hampshire. The kids and their folks thought this was just fine. We have variations of this kind of behavior today – athletes missing the last couple of periods a couple of days a week to make away games, for instance. Special Ed students qualifying by GPA for National Honor Society because ‘they’ do their assignments in the Resource Room. With the data collection ability we have today we can expose the fact that this emperor is mor than threadbare.

Twenty years ago, 60 percent of population was in farming or manufacturing. Now, it is 6 percent. The American public school system has not altered the target of education in all this time in a truly radical way. We’re still preparing people who would function best in manufacturing and farming.

We are still nurturing teachers to participate in this system. And, every generation of teachers coming forth into the classroom is just that much further out of step with where we should be heading.

That is why I keep reading your blog (and others in your part of the world) to pick up nuggets of wisdom!