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Giving Compass' Take:
• Tom Vander Ark outlines 10 problems educators face as they work to overcome the overwhelming history of America's school system.
• Can any of these challenges be used as advantages? How can funders help schools shift their strategies?
• Learn how to support STEM education.
Naming the problems we face is the first step towards building something better. In US education, we’ve got a stack of gnarly intertwined problems. Here’s a list of 10.
1. We inherited a factory. With a focus on compliance and routine, we inherited a factory but we need a design studio.
2. Goals. The goals of the factory were obedience and knowledge transfer. It efficiently sorted the noncompliant. Now that knowledge is widely accessible and initiative is more important than obedience, we need new goals for education–a new more relevant sense of purpose.
3. Gravity. Old buildings with narrow hallways and small classrooms with desks in rows just oozes tradition. Layers of local, state, and federal policy reinforce and outdated training add to the weight. An even bigger boat anchor is our collective and idealized memory of school.
4. Business model. In many parts of K-12 and HigherEd we’re experiencing declining enrollments and increasing costs–a bad combination for fiscal management.
5. Complexity. It has been hard enough trying to figure out how to personalize for basic skills and now we’re trying to customize on a broader set of outcomes.
6. Invention. We need a new core technology in education–new measures of learning, better ways to capture and communicate expanded human capability, something much better than time in a seat and a list of courses passed.
7. Lack of R&D capacity.
8. Speed. Working in phases is important but we often accept a pace that does students a disservice.
9. Unintended consequences.
10. Concentration of poverty.
Read the full article about education problems by Tom Vander Ark at Getting Smart.