Blazing New Trails - Connexions

Shadows and Images II 11
settings, implement ideas, monitor and evaluate them, all with the assistance of classmates
and the professor? By removing an administrator to the sterile environment of the university
classroom, we ignore a rich, available resource for providing first-hand experience that can
help develop competence.
Finally, what would it hurt if every professor adopted a school each year and served as
a mentor, an observer, and a helpful critic? Not as a consultant, I hasten to add, but as a
portion of his/her regular set of assignments. Hard work? You bet. Important work? Without
question. But, this sort of involvement with the real life of schools, students, and
administrators is what we as professors should be about.
Shadow/Image Number Three
The popular notion that competition for students between and among schools, the socalled
market-based approach, is the solution to education’s problems, to my way of thinking,
to be charitable, is short sighted and untenable. First, applying the free enterprise model of
business is naïve. Education is not a business. We are not working with widgets of identical
characteristics. We don’t have a singular, specified outcome for our “products.” Our
customers don’t want the same identity for all of our “products.” I could go on, but I suspect I
am preaching to the choir.
Second, our measures of “success” and “quality” are rudimentary at best. Judging the
effectiveness of educational output with a few tests of cognitive prowess is simplistic.
Successful, educated human beings are more than an answering machine on foot. Remember,
everything that can be counted doesn’t necessarily count, and everything that counts can’t
necessarily be counted.
Third, I believe that we as a society have confused education and schooling. Our
critics focus on schooling but hold us accountable for education. That is an impossible task!
To be sure, we as school people have a critical role in the education of students. But, think of
the other educational forces at work in our society. Family, church, community, sports, and
media are all important actors in the education process. Think of your own background. How
much of your educational attainment is attributable to schooling alone?
So, when competition among schools is introduced as the “answer” to education’s
problems, I become somewhat paranoid. I smell a sinister effort to dismantle the current
public education system in order to institute a non-system that caters to special interests of
specific ideologies in the ever growing fractiousness of our society. I fear that the public
schools will become the pauper schools with charter and private schools educating the
children of those families able to afford alternatives, thus furthering fractioning our society.
Competition among schools for students has resulted in a plethora of charter schools
that have sprung up all over the nation. The media, public school critics, and the political
establishment appear to have all boarded the bandwagon of charters as the cure-all solution
for American education’s problems. But, what are the results?
The results are mixed at best, and often conflicting. Admittedly, I have not read all of
the charter school studies and reports. However, it appears to me that most of the studies
focus on one or a small number of schools. Supporters often cite the records of the successful,
individual schools as evidence of the movement’s success. Using these reports as examples of
the success of charter schools, in general, is poor scholarship at best, or political manipulation
at worst. There have been a few national studies of charter school results. Let me cite two
such studies. One was a national study conducted early in the life of the movement and
addressed inputs extant in the schools. In 2003, Policy Analysis for California Education