The Better Way to Improve Education: Invest and Trust
Current debate about education policy is dominated by several zombie ideas. One idea that should have been dead, but keeps coming back to life is the "government is the problem"-inspired commitment to public disinvestment. The other better left for idea is to distrust educators, but trust tests and markets to improve education. There is a better, third way to improve education: invest and trust.
Some in congress appear determined to abandon any federal role in ensuring equity or quality in education by cutting funds, supporting portability of federal education funds to public or charter schools and underspecifying use of funds through block grants to states. Put into action, these policies will reinvigorate and perpetuate the ugly history of opposing equity under the guise of local control.
Others legislators remain enamored with destructive, evidence-free ideas: Test-driven accountability, competition between public and charter schools, and rewards and sanctions will force teachers and schools to "step up their game," and produce more equitable student performance.
The Better, Third Way
One feature of a better invest and trust improvement strategy is what education scholars Michael Fullan and Andy Hargreaves call investing in professional capital. That means investing in developing the professional capacity and expertise of the people who teach and operate schools. It also means investing in developing leaders who support success through vision and support, creating learning organizations rather than hierarchical monitoring and compliance regimes.
Another feature of the invest and trust option is to provide support to children and their families to optimize readiness to learn. It also means trusting and encouraging people to participate in the decisions that effect their lives.
Unlike old school, top-down strategies like firing the bottom 10 percent of employees, invest and trust is not a prescriptive recipe for improvement in education. Modern management research and practice indicate that invest and trust is what any successful organization does. Research indicates investment and trust move organizations beyond the status quo. It is a better way to improve than threatening, blaming or abandoning the people who must do the hard work of improvement.
Identifying value-driven goals and what needs to change are the starting points for a better way to improve education. Democracy, opportunity, and shared responsibility are core, if sometimes contested, and not yet realized, aspirational American values. We need a society in which there is not just more equal opportunity, but more lived equity. Schools can play a part to realize these values and goals, but not alone.
We need better democracy, not more external control.
Education can advance individual wellbeing, but it also has shared social benefits. That means that its purpose, structure and quality should be democratically decided. A market driven system in which unelected charter boards or private schools are vested with decision-making powers violates this core democratic value. Therefore, The Better Way to Improve Education: Invest and Trust | Arthur Camins:
