Roger Schank’s Post

Increasing teacher salaries could be made possible if a) we ditched the 19th century "summers off" model, thus increasing the instructors work year so that full-year contracts were the norm, b) we required all faculty to be trained in the understanding and application of learning sciences, c) instituted a more rigorous way of assessing instructors performance and, finally d) abolished tenure, which dis-incentivizes quality performance, allows many faculty to obstruct needed changes, and protects the mediocre more than it empowers the exceptional.

Luckily politicians don't keep most of their promises.

We need a better approach towards workforce development. Workforce development is much needed in this community and beyond. However, in order for this region, and others, to succeed and grow and develop, work needs to be done further down the workforce pipeline. It is appalling that many of the school districts in the region tout the fact that a high percentage of their students are "accepted into college" with the percentage much higher than one would expect for any school district, recognizing the natural innate diversity of aptitudes and personality traits in any such population. Basing the success of a student on being accepted in college without tracking if the student actually attended or graduated from college or was successful in attaining suitable employment following such an education, is quite absurd and meaningless. Is not the purpose of an education to allow a person to develop his or her attributes to be a successful contributor to society? Why is this not the mark of the success of a school district instead of the touted figures, which are basically meaningless? 

 With such a drive to have students "college bound", the school districts are not fulfilling their responsibility to the community to provide the diversity of talents that would be appropriate to provide for the strong economic development of the community. Beginning with middle school, might it be beneficial to access the interest and aptitude and personality traits of students and assist them in developing their innate qualities to become appropriate contributors to the development of their community? 

Since I have education and a Corporate mix, the pandering elements need to be addressed so we truly have people who really care. Then we can apply change to the process. I have been someone who has put myself out there to change the dynamic of learning but the challenge is no one is willing to make change as they are having doing the status-quo because they are not paid well enough to give a damn. Students are challenged because they have paid for an education that has led to no career change for the better. We should keep in mind that leadership in education fears change and fears the “we’ve never done it that way” approach. So starting something new is not viable unless we pay teachers and make sure they are accountable for change and when students get their money’s worth that leads to career opportunities change will occur! The mindset of pandering has reasons thou it should not have to be that hard! I will join your chorus!

I think all the Dem solutions are great and long overdue: paying teachers fairly should be a national priority, making sure students don’t go hungry should be a national priority, ending the crippling student debt in which people languish for years should be a national priority. I applaud Biden, Warren and Sanders for those ideas. But I also agree that none of these very needed initiatives will make “education” itself better - that would take an overhaul of the whole system of teaching, advising and assessing, of the entire curricula itself, of the way we think about learning, of the types of things for which we award degrees, of how we teach and for how long, of the toxic and useless assessment industry, etc. I think the people who have a chance to change that will be our Secretaries of Education - which have all been awful. The current lady doing the job is an abyss of shocking ignorance! I wish someone like you would end up in that position. It would be a chance to see some real changes. Maybe you should get in touch with whoever you find more compelling politically, and have a conversation. I bet most of your ideas don’t make it in the policy background notes candidates get, and they should.

Great post, Roger. The trouble isn't that our current cadre of left-wing Democrats don't believe in reforming our education system, to improve outcomes, but there are more fundamental questions of fairness: of what matter is reform when a generation is held down by the albatross of student debt? How can we improve access and the outcomes of historically marginalized communities? In the era of Trump, of resurgent nationalism and ethnopolitics, why should we focus on reform when reform will serve only to further entrench the existing biases of our particular, trained, paperclip maximizer? Also, it appears that the current political battles of our times are focused also on the more fundamental question of the role of government: how can we focus on reform when some would eliminate taxation entirely, and everything it pays for? If education is privatized, reform is no longer a political concern, but simply a consumer interest. Predicting outcomes here is trivial.

How can we help them to see where the issues really are in the system? I'm in agreement with you on virtually everything. How can we influence the situation positivity? Thanks for your time.