Moving Forward and Not Looking Back

             Last week I attended my first State Board of Education session as a non-voting advisor.  I had such an outstanding experience sitting with the members of the school board and sharing some of my opinions on Common Exams (Measures of Student Learning), Race to the Top, and the new Common Core and Essential Standards.  I had the opportunity to share my opinions both formally at the meetings on Wednesday and Thursday and informally during conversations with school board members and members of DPI.  I am so appreciative that General Statute in North Carolina mandates the advisory positions of two state teachers of the year, the current state principal of the year, the current state superintendent of the year, and two student advisors.  It is so important that those whom educational policy most directly impacts are given an opportunity to share their voices with those making decisions.

                While I attended the meetings, Dr. Atkinson, our state superintendent, posed what struck me as the most interesting question of the two-day session.  It was not an agenda item, but was in response to discussion concerning Common Core standards and Common Exams.  She asked, “How do we move beyond twentieth century artifacts to the twenty-first century?”  The discussion that followed, while brief since we had an agenda to follow, was extremely thought-provoking for me.  Members of the school board brought up important areas that we could examine and modify in order to address the needs of our students today.  Members mentioned changing the school calendar to a year-round model, changing the way we grade students’ work, focusing on project-based learning, and changing the structure of our educational system from a fragmented K-12 model to a more inclusive 0-20 model.  Please note that these were merely discussions about education and not policies to be enacted.  During these discussions, the English teacher in me couldn’t help but to ponder the semantics that are tied into the efforts of educational reform across our country and our state.  Be forewarned, what follows is full of English teacher nerdiness, but directly addresses the culture of reform in education today.  J

                If you look at the word “education,” its origin can be traced to the Latin word educare, meaning “to bring up, raise, or train,” and educere, meaning “to bring out and to lead forth.”  The word “educate” was first commonly used to describe teaching children in the 1500s.  We still have a very similar association with education today: we want to assist in the raising of our students into culturally sympathetic, life-long learners, and we expect our teachers to “bring out” the best in their students and to serve as the guides to help “lead [them] forth” in their educational journeys.  The role of a good teacher does not end when the students leave the doors of that teacher’s classroom, but continues as the students reflect on the skills they gained from the teacher and use them to help navigate an increasingly complex world. 

                Although most people understand the definition and role of education, the semantics that people seem to ignore the most is the difference in reform and in progress.  There is a lot of talk about educational reform in the media, among politicians, and in our communities today.  After our conversations at the State Board meeting last week, I am fully convinced that reform is not what we want.  What we really need to see in our schools is progress.

Think about it: reform starts with the prefix “re-, “which means “back to the original place, again, anew, once more.”  If we want to improve our schools and bring about positive change, do we really want to go back to the educational artifacts of a different century?  Do we really want to rework, reuse, and essentially repeat what we’ve been doing for over one hundred years?  Our students exist in a world where they are inundated with information via the Internet, smart phones, and other forms of instant communication.  Should we really attempt to prepare them the same way we did in the early 1900s when public education first became compulsory and automobiles were only just becoming a primary form of transportation?   This is not what anyone really wants for the future leaders of our communities, our state, our nation, and now more than ever, the world.

                We have become so caught up in the systems that have been in place for a hundred years, that in our efforts to reform public education, we create sweeping mandates that do little to address the fundamental difference: that our students are learning in a vastly different world from the one that many of us once learned in.  We tend to throw money at the problem and withhold money from other areas without really bringing about any true change.  What we really need is progress and not reform.

                Progress comes from the prefix “pro-, “which means “forward, forth, toward the front,” “beforehand, in advance,” and “taking care of.”  It makes sense to structure our educational system around these concepts.  We want our students to move “forward,” and we certainly want their education to place them “toward the front” in a globally competitive world.  If we want to see our students advance, our educational policies must also be forward-thinking.  We cannot continue to be content with looking back to the past.  We can learn from the past, but we cannot dwell in it.  We cannot become a nation of educators that like Lot’s wife or Orpheus look back too much and lose the opportunity to move forward.  We must also be a system that “[takes] care of” our young people in order for them to be the best that they can be.  It is our responsibility to help our students move farther forward than they ever thought possible in order to achieve their goals and dreams.

                Finally, artifact has two primary meanings.  First of all, it is “anything made by human art.”  Our educational system over the past one hundred years has been a work of art, a beautiful creation to serve the majority of our citizens and to make our nation stronger.  However, we cannot let education fall into the second definition of artifact, “an object…of archeological or historical interest.”  Artifacts are lovely and should serve as a reminder of where we once were, what we once did, and how far we have come.  Let us not get so caught up in the history of having summers off, of an A-F grading scale, of traditional testing, or of a fragmented K-12 model that we become a nation of relics that serve as a collection of artifacts for other countries who were willing to keep moving forward.   I am not saying that we need to implement all of these changes, but I do think we need to take some time to consider which changes will best move us forward into the twenty-first century. 

                In thinking about the semantics of education, reform, and progress, I think it becomes clear that we have to be willing to make some changes.  Is change scary?  Absolutely.  Is it necessary in public education?  Without a doubt, but only if we are attempting to progress instead of to reform.  So, in the words of Dr. Atkinson, we all need to ask ourselves, “How can we move beyond twentieth century artifacts into the twenty-first century?”  The lives of our children depend on our answers.