Restructuring Educ: Teacher & Money Issues

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Restructuring Educ: Teacher & Money Issues

Posted by Sharon Quinn on Jun 21, 2011 in Careers in Teaching, Education, Education Articles, Educational Sense Blog, Matea Model, Paradigm Shift in Education | 0 comments

Our exciting career creation Matea Model trains a new breed of entrepreneurial teachers who are aware & well trained in pedagogy and observation.

(Thus, they’re able to discern best practices for optimal responsiveness
>> to individual students &
>> to the dynamics of their classes as interactive socially evolving groups.
They’ll be well trained in communication skills and oriented to collaborate their findings.)

With their skill-set, values and passion, they’ll lead us out of the chaos of a failed educational system into a system that not only

naturally generates a love of learning for self-propelled motivation with rapport driven teaching-learning,
classrooms organized as communities with mutuality, respect and communication oriented,
targets empirical evidence as reliable accountability via an ongoing observable clinical feedback process,
graduates smart kids with the skills they need to successfully parent and earn a professional income, but also
synthesizes multiple intelligences with learning paths into a cohesive teaching-learning model that aims for wholism integration of skills & values for a paced, yet, widespread replication.

Everybody wins. Isn’t that the way education is meant to be and what every parent wants for their child?! No one should have to settle for less. But we do. Why?

People have become convinced that either

It is a REALLY HUGE problem that is so complex as to take a mammoth effort to “fix it” (Or something along those lines with overwhelm and a sense of futility running through the efforts of reforming it).

It’s pretty good as it is, it’s okay (a bit apathetic without a decent metric guiding their opinion).

It’s all about money and that is pretty scarce. (making learning more economic than intentional)

There’s not much we can do about it, so why bother? They just don’t know how & feel paralyzed (or are confused by all the issues framed by statisticians and/or academic propaganda defending their position or status that is effectively keeping the status quo intact).

It’s viewed as a policy and political problem requiring legislative intervention &/or a plethora of heady “experts” to figure it out. (learning is a consciousness and biological imperative beyond the scope of either).

????

Targetmiss1 e1308700453855 Restructuring Educ: Teacher & Money Issues

The point is this: We don’t have our focus for change honed in on the bull’s eye of what is needed. We have our attention on all sorts of details that keep us off target,and most certainly OFF the BULL’S EYE.

Thus, the change we desire, as high achievement standards, being a world leader emulated for our successful competence & learning performance systems, and renowned for honest ethical mastery, keeps eluding us. It doesn’t have to be this way.

For example, lots of attention and weight is given to MONEY being the answer to end our educational woes. While this is an integral component to healing any educational system, it is not what lies at the heart of what will make our kids more globally competent and well trained. While money is determinately on the target, it is NOT the BULL’S EYE.

Let’s think this through… I’m going to display two random summaries out of a huge selection of choices – far too many to even count – that give an appropriate bottom line that ‘s essential to grokking this whole $money myth$ that has turned into a frenzy of getting $money$ over (1)accountability and (2)consistent practical learning productivity outcomes.

Taken from a CATO Institute executive summary, “Money And School Performance: Lessons from the Kansas City Desegregation Experiment”

For decades critics of the public schools have been saying, ‘You can’t solve educational problems by throwing money at them.’ The education establishment & its supporters have replied, “No one’s ever tried.” In Kansas City they did try. To improve the education of black students and encourage desegregation, a federal judge invited the Kansas City, Missouri, School District to come up with a cost-is-no-object educational plan…

Kansas City spent as much as $11,700 per pupil–more money per pupil, on a cost of living adjusted basis, than any other of the 280 largest districts in the country. The money bought higher teachers’ salaries, 15 new schools,…amenities as an Olympic-sized swimming pool with an underwater viewing room, television and animation studios, a robotics lab, a 25-acre wildlife sanctuary, a zoo, a model United Nations with simultaneous translation capability, and field trips to Mexico and Senegal. The student-teacher ratio was 12 or 13 to 1, the lowest of any major school district in the country.

The results were dismal. Test scores did not rise; the black-white gap did not diminish; and there was less, not greater, integration.”

Taken from an article in the Arizona Nogales International “School performance: Does money matter?”

“No issue appears to be more important to the public than the well-being of the public schools, and the timely and timeless “policy” issue invariably is school spending…

Overstated? What does the research tell us? More than 25 years ago, carefully examining and summarizing all of the pertinent research, Eric Hanusek, an economist at the University of Rochester, concluded that ‘Money does not matter, as the schools are presently structured.’ His findings have been confirmed many times since; yet nothing has changed. ‘Spend more!’ continues as the proffered solution…

As Benjamin Bloom, a distinguished sociologist at the U. of Chicago has poignantly stated, ‘In regard to educational research, we have proven far more than we know!’ In other words we ignore what we know to be the facts…

The critical element in Hanusek’s conclusion is the final clause, ‘as the schools are presently structured. How can the problems be addressed successfully?’ ‘Restructuring” is my topic for next time…’

As the above information demonstrates, the TRUTH of $money is all we need$ is a myth. It’s evident in how we’ve been ‘throwing money’ at schools, and despite this influx, they are declining in graduating standards, not improving them. So much aim focused on money misses the real issues that money has the power to the enhance delivery thereof.

As Larry Leslie concludes in the above, “restructuring” is one of those areas dealing with one of the vital underlying issues that reform must appropriately deal with in finding a long term solution.

We call it transforming the structure-function (S/F) dynamic. We address restructuring from the FUNCTION aspect first because function is education’s purpose, specifically to learn, and this FUNCTION drives our search for STRUCTURES and/or methods to efficiently accomplish learning. Everything else takes a second seat.

Conditions of violence and social volatility is increasing in many schools which indicates we’ve let this condition deteriorate for way to long. The proverbial cracks are more honestly wide gaps/craters. Our current education system is in a denied exit stage, and our kids are truly suffering.

We are blinded by a money answer; we’ve got to get over this and regain our children’s trust that we DO have their interests at heart and we will do better by them. They’re bored to death, and we label them ADD or ADHD (passive aggressive blame, eh?) They rebel against our hypocrisy, and we call them ungrateful. We teach the petty, not the grand, and our kids resent it.

They’re justly cynical about our declared intentions of loving our kids above all else when we force them consume useless, senseless, rote, & petty info & ignore their cries for help when what works for the teacher overrides what works for the learner. Our current school model is teacher oriented, not learner oriented. Clearly, this is backwards.

blinded by money Restructuring Educ: Teacher & Money Issues

Money Alone Is NOT the Answer to End our Educational Woes

We go for, “show me the money,” and that’s the narcissistic lesson they learn from us, too.

If you’re someone who likes stats, you’ll find them here. And for more cogent arguments speaking of this decline, see the More Research & Related Articles section below.

That is where AKRNA comes in as Change Maker with a vision that has the force of clarity of the bull’s eye and this keeps our focus clear & uncluttered by the details, problems, policies, or politics that tempt to distract our attention away from healing our schools. It is so easy to fall down the proverbial rabbit hole with these issues. Causal factors, and that includes S/F, are the heart of ending our failures rather painlessly, and most adroitly.

There’s a well known metaphor I’d like to share that has always made it easy for me to grok the intrinsic value of securing the causal factors, aka. “getting to the bottom line,” S/F, seed and root of issues for healthy growth.

It’s a lovely day at the local park, and many are enjoying their picnic day, when suddenly people hear the cries of a baby.

They seek its location by following its cries and find a baby drowning in the swift moving stream. As they race to the infant’s rescue, another baby is noticed to be drowning, too. So, another goes to that babe’s aid.

Quickly, another baby is seen floating in these waters, and another, and another, and another… Everyone is so caught up in the panic of the rapid appearance of so many drowning babies & all the efforts of saving them. Everyone in the park is involved with emergency seek & rescue. Well, the flow of babies continues and it is proliferating rapidly. Everyone’s attention is emergency oriented.

Finally, someone steps back a moment and ponders, where are these babies coming from? Maybe If I can get to the source of how they’re entering the water, we can end this frantic mess. At the rate it’s going, there’s no end in site, and we’ll have to call in more people.

So, this person goes in search of the cause. Lo, and behold, they discover how this is happening and they stop the babies from falling in the water. Down the stream the flow of infants in distress lessens and soon they retrieve the last child… sure, no child is left behind, and, more poignantly, no more drowning children. The cause was attended to, and the problematic details lessened till they were no longer an issue.

Nutshell Recommendations:

In a nutshell, AKRNA proposes a restructuring of our educational system for a FRESH re-start that’s aligned with 21st century living as it appears on our horizon today. The core Principles of contemporary education need to keep pace with modern living that technology keeps changing the face of how we live every few years.

This phenomenal growth is challenging and earmarked by calls for adaptability, flexibility, resiliency, and an openness that is responsive to what is happening.

We refer to this conglomeration of skills as being alive. Alive is being responsible to a learning intention that’s attuned and recognizing the meaning of what daily empirical feedback is communicating in the classroom.

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In other words, reflective observation delivers critical awareness regarding learning needs, both individually and collectively as a community of shared interest in learning, exploring, thinking, imagining, and creating is being translated from what is learned into experiences and expressions relative to each student’s meaning and progression of abilities.

Our current system is not equipped for such rapid change, rather it is static and geared for producing conformity, compliance, and rote repetition – all earmarks of preparing graduates for industrial production line work and a satisfaction with mediocrity.

CLEARLY, our education system structure is the opposite of what it needs to be for our information, service, and technology based world. We cannot wait to change, that’s ludicrous. We’re already out of synch & mismatched which, consequently, is producing dysfunctional graduates with learning deficits, both socially and academically, that are generating serious socioeconomic difficulties.

What is the key component of A.K.R.N.A’S S/F restructuring? It is The Matea Model of a new breed of teachers trained to be proficient is all the components of a human’s intelligences as a non-gapped wholism, including the learning path preferences and educating by establishing rapport driven teaching-learning. We think it has an elegant quality. Teachers led by students’ leaning needs will lead the way whereby the teacher & student are intertwined as a unit, with learning beating the heart back into an aliveness!e

“Quotes” from Educators

“The social regression of the past 30 years is due in large part to the enfeebled state of our social institutions and their failure to carry out their critical and time-honored tasks. We desperately need to recover a sense of the fundamental purpose of education, which is to engage in the architecture of souls. When a self-governing society ignores this responsibility, it does so at its peril.” –Mr. Bennett, secretary of education from 1985 to 1988, is co-director of Empower America, a new political organization, and a fellow at the Heritage Foundation

“The West…has been undergoing an erosion and obscuring of high moral and ethical ideals. The spiritual axis of life has grown dim.” –Alexander Solzhenitsyn in a speech given in 1993

“The powers exercised by the institutions of social control have been constrained and people, especially young people, have embraced an ethos that values self-expression over self-control.” –James Q. Wilson

“It’s appalling — it’s really astounding, only 31 percent of college graduates can read a complex book and extrapolate from it. That’s not saying much for the remainder.” — Michael Gorman, president of the American Library Association and a librarian at California State University at Fresno

“Only 41 percent of graduate students tested in 2003 could be classified as “proficient” in prose — reading and understanding information in short texts — down 10 percentage points since 1992″ –Reported by Lois Romano

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All to Love,
Sharon Quinn
Co-Founder AKRNA, Education Strategist, UCP Program Director of AKRNA
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For More Research & Stats:

Literacy of College Graduates Is on Decline; Survey’s Finding of a Drop in Reading Proficiency…

Quantifying America’s Decline

Related Articles:

Educational “Experts” are Clueless! (Yikes)