CREDO

CREDO

There’s much to admire about American schools, and there’s also much to criticize. The 21^st Century is here, and we’re still arguing not only about the performance of our public schools, but the reasons for their very existence. Americans, as a rule, like to argue.

In that very spirit of argument, the purpose of this forum is to dispute the orthodox ideas of what we’ll loosely call the American Education Establishment. Some see the various and most persistent education controversies as conflicts of left vs. right, liberal vs. conservative; we see them as labor vs. management. We believe educrats are the single largest obstacle to learning in today’s schools. By “educrats,” we mean the people who make policy, control the agenda, and set standards for teacher certification and evaluation. This includes a wide range of education professionals: school principals and assistant principals; miscellaneous support personnel with job titles like “Leader,” “Coordinator,” and “Facilitator”; professors of education; state and federal officials; and the ever-growing army of private education consultants—aka gurus.

Although the class of professionals described above is small in number compared to teachers, its influence is enormous. Educrats are the bourgeoisie, the ruling class of American education. And it’s time for a revolt. For too long teachers, the people actually tasked with educating the nation’s children, have been subordinate to the flaky ideas and ruinous policies of educrats. The academic subjects themselves have been subordinated to the fads and gimmicks promoted by the educrat class, although educrats don’t call them fads and gimmicks—instead these are lovingly called “student-centered,” “research-based” “best practice.” Educrats have a vested interest in maintaining a culture of education fads because it furthers their individual careers. The more progressive and “cutting-edge” an educrat is, the more influence (and often, the more money) he or she garners.

Many would say that innovation has always been the key to success in American culture, and so American schools should be encouraged to innovate and evolve. But most educratic fads can’t be legitimately compared to real innovations because they don’t operate in a competitive environment. Some fads raise test scores here and there, but there’s often no way to tell if a school is doing its very best to educate kids when all the schools in a given city or area are controlled by the same entity (the school district) and the same handful of educrats (superintendents, principals, etc). And since most teachers are not given the choice or the chance of openly questioning school policy, success often occurs despite the fads, not because of them. Nonetheless, we can all be sure that fad-promoting educrats will crow and gloat over any upward tic in state test scores, calling it a vindication of them and their policies. But what if schools could not only do better, but far better?

Our philosophy is that schools do their best when run by their faculties, not by educrats. We also believe that academics and subject-matter are the foundation of excellence, not any given pedagogy or “best practice.” Teachers should be masters of their subjects, and students should be taught to strive for mastery themselves. We will call schools that operate by this philosophy Sane Schools. By and large, American public schools are not sane places. The word sanus in Latin means “healthy,” and there is nothing healthy about educrat-run schools. Any institution of learning that encourages kids to follow their own natural, narcissistic impulses; that promotes group learning over intellect; that “dumbs down” learning so that everyone can pass rather than venerate scholastic pursuits so that everyone has the opportunity to excel; is not a school at all. It’s more akin to an asylum, the kind of place where the mentally ill are locked up and left to rot. Today’s school-kids can rarely be called mentally ill, but they do suffer from ignorance, and just as the asylums of old once sanctioned mental illness by warehousing their patients instead of treating them, most of our public schools are sanctioning ignorance by not providing quality education. They don’t mean to do it, but they are. We believe that if teachers were empowered over educrats, this would all change.

How would we do it? See the Ten Pillars listed below. These are intended not only as the outline for a new (yet old) philosophy of genuine school reform (educrats would call this a “paradigm”), but also as explicit answers to the Professional Learning Communities fad currently being pushed by educrats in school districts all across the country. They will seem reactionary at a glance, and that’s because they are a reaction, partly to PLC and other fashionable schemes, and partly to the recently released Tough Choices or Tough Times report; but we think the specifics are quite moderate. Each Pillar will eventually be linked to a separate page that explains it in detail.

TEN Pillars of Sane Schools[1]

Pillar I: Traditionalism, Not Progressivism

Pillar II: Intellectual Authority of Teachers

Pillar III: Mastery, Not Certification

Pillar IV: Substance, Not Process

Pillar V: Democracy, Not “Education Leadership”

Pillar VI: Collegiality, Not Collectivism

Pillar VII: Academics, Not “Assessment”

Pillar VIII: Retention, Not “Intervention”

Pillar IX: Discipline, Not Therapy

Pillar X: Variety, Not “Diversity”

More info soon…

[1] Apologia: Yes, we know. “Ten Pillars” sounds pompous, and it also sounds a lot like the very gimmicks that we’re criticizing. But clarity is important when advocating reform—and why not fight fire with fire?