More education, less schooling

School districts across the country are running out of money.  Many do not have enough funds to finish the school year.  Their main options seem stark: cut days off the term or cut programs and people.

When superintendent and state legislatures act, no doubt, prudently and pragmatically to terminate school employees, this approach has an obvious logic: since cutting school days would hurt teachers and students (income and learning), downsizing faculty to keep school days only hurts teachers (income, but not learning).  Since beating up on teachers has more political expediency than slashing school days (and risk being seen as against student learning), districts will eliminate jobs in an orderly fashion, from seniority and necessity to temporary and support.

Too bad, since enabling the institution of the school comes with the risk of degrading the purpose of the school, education.  More time in classroom studying more content to learn more skill means little as a concept.  A worthy outcome, true.  Herein lies the trouble, though.  Although schools can scaffold the opportunity for this learning, they can not produce it.  Schools are space of possibility, not quality control centers of excellence.  It falls upon the people within these spaces - teachers, staff, students, leaders, lunch ladies, custodians, everyone - to reach beyond the input/output logicistic of schooling for education to be realized.

Lest I be dismissed as incorrigibly impractical, given the real-politic of educational policies and the physical and social conditions of our schools and student populations, try the following thought experience.  Imagine you have been asked to explain to a visitor from another dimension the purpose for education.  Think for a few moments about what you would tell her.

(Pause)

OK.  Now consider how to explain to her how you would know that you have achieved that purpose.

(Pause)

Can you institutionalize a process to do so without changing either of your answers?

MORE.

The WSJ demonstrates how considerations of education are framing through considerations of schooling.  Education codifies into outcomes ("having the highest proportion of college graduates" "increase the number of students taking AP and college-level courses") that infer substantial education; common sense tells us that such outcomes should mean that students have been well-educated.  Planning for outcomes is exactly the main grist of institutional orders.  Schools collectivize its resources toward that goal, regarding "how" is achieved to a secondary, and manageable concern.  Teachers and students serve the system, which is ordained, indifferent to the people who serve it.

Perhaps you have a different take?

"Anything that runs off correlation is charlatanism"

Add this to the bowel of educational measurement.  What level of abstraction is assumed about learning when a teacher correlates a certain pedagogy with accountability tools?  Rifting on the epistemelogic of the earlier post, is it fair to all students to correlate the assessment/evaluation/grade with their learning?

What is education?

An old, classic debate seems relevant today, at least for those involved in the work of schooling.  On one hand, education is something real, a specific set of practices and outcomes that every teacher and student strive to achieve.  This underlies many relevant ideas about what school should be, including what needs to be taught, how it best should be taught and why society should go about teaching at all.  Read many textbooks, current or decrepit, to find the essential elements of content.  Truth is both evident and overt; methods of teaching are learnable and perfectable; measures of learning are accurate and predictive.

The counter argues something like this:

"There is something real, but not universal.  Do not look outside of some particular thing for the essence of that thing.  That thing that you see is all that there is to that thing."  For example, think of education.  Whatever general idea you have about what it is, how is works or what people do in it comes not from something that truly exists.  Rather, your idea is formed by all the specific examples of education you have experienced.  The concept of education forms from the repetition of these examples, that you gloop together in forming your schema of education.

Now, I recognize that schooling and education need not be the same thing.  Many, I suppose, will express a great faith in education but denigrate the actual schools in which it takes place.  Fair enough.  Yet, this is an example of conflating an ought - the best of what education should be - with an is - the actual state of any particular school.  And while some might argue that real reality has itself become a concept (or a fiction formed by a faith in essence over existence), others express the same point as epistemelogical modesty.

A question then, for any of you who are teachers or who have a stake in what education is to be. Ask yourself not just what education is or what it is for, nor just what works in schooling, but a more ontological question about yourself: "how do I know I know what I know?"

First Question

At what point does recognition of difference create the difference that is recognized?