EmailPosition Statements
SectionsIntroduction:
I have 8 children, who attended Spokane Public Schools for 21 years from 1982 – 2003. Three of my grandchildren are now enrolled in District 81. I have a Master's degree in Teaching, certified to teach at both the secondary and elementary levels, have taught in the public schools and at the Institute for Extended Learning, and at EWU. I have taught students from many different cultures, and, by working closely with them and continuing associations with them, have learned to SEE things about our own culture.
I think about education in terms of our cultural context. We have, according to researchers, developed the most individualistic culture on the earth. An individualistic culture champions the rights of the individual over the group and values personal creativity, personal uniqueness, personal development. Collective, or group, cultures, on the other hand, seek to preserve the values of the collective. I have had many students from collective cultures who are unable to make the smallest individual decision. They wait for the group to make their decisions. We expect and teach students to think for themselves in our education system. In systems in collective cultures, students are taught to preserve the values and attitudes of the group. The U.S. military is a type of collective culture with which we are all familiar. Think about how the individual relates to the group in the military. Think about how standards are set and maintained in the military. Think about how much individual creativity is encouraged, or even tolerated, in the military. Thinking about the collective military culture gives us a little insight and understanding of our individualistic national culture.
Our individualistic approach has produced great innovations and creative inventions that have benefited the entire world. This is our contribution to the world: creativity, individualism. But, individualism, as it develops, creates some problems that we are now having to face as never before. Individualism does not teach people how to collaborate, how to agree, how to cooperate. We can't even, for example, agree on something as basic as whether or not we will all salute the flag. Individualism does not set standards and expectations that everyone is supposed to meet. Many of the conflicts in education today stem from the nature of our individualistic culture as we contrast our outcomes with those of collective cultures.
Assessment:
When we compare our scores on standardized tests with scores of students from collective cultures, we often conclude that we are "falling behind." But we have to remember that our educational aims are not the same as the aims of education systems in collective cultures. They are educating for sameness; we are educating for uniqueness.
We need to maintain some means of assessing those aspects of education that are very difficult to assess: individuality, critical thinking, creativity, uniqueness. Many teachers currently use portfolios and personal projects to test students' comprehension and application of material taught in the classroom. In the rush to quantify, we must not abandon the things that we Americans do best: foster individuality, creativity, and critical thinking. We must, however, incorporate some basic standards and measure achievement based on those standards. This means establishing some objectives that all students are expected to meet. We have to do this carefully and maintain a balance between the demands of a collective standard and the valuing of the individual. We are the people in the world who do this best: the valuing of individuality and creativity. This is one of our major contributions to the world as the world's most individualistic culture. As we compare our educational outcomes to the outcomes of more collective cultures, we have to remember that we are educating for a different purpose than they are. We have to be true to the greatest strengths of our cultural identity while carefully correcting the weaknesses as they become apparent to us.
Lowering the drop-out rate:
District 81 has always done a pretty good job of preparing students for college. Programs such as AP classes and Running Start help with this. We are not as successfully engaging students who want to graduate high school and go to work. We need to prepare this group and we need to begin to prepare them while they are in Middle School. They need to learn about the business world that they wish to enter. Our curriculum needs to begin early to be starkly relevant to the outside world.
Programs that have succeeded in lowering the drop-out rate have engaged students in learning about project management, corporate interactive models, and in solving problems based on real-life situations---and they begin in the eighth or ninth grade. Successful programs teach students to interact in a new culture, usually a corporate culture. These cultures always demand less individualism and more group (collective) orientation. They teach students new cultural habits. The KIPP program in New York is one example of this. We need to look closely at these programs and incorporate some of our own community businesses' cultural models beginning in Middle School curricula. Employers who have entry-level jobs need to see high school graduates as employable BECAUSE of their high school education.
Connections and collaborations:
I like to listen to people, and I like to work to make as many connections as possible. Right now, I talk regularly with juvenile offenders who have been arrested for relatively minor infractions. One of the things that often strikes me in these conversations is that many of these kids have very few connections with adults. Research has shown that having meaningful connections with even one adult in the schools is the most important factor to deter students from dropping out. Obviously, then, student interactions and relationships with teachers, administrators, and other adult school personnel are vital. In addition, connections and relationships with other adults in the community are also necessary. Connections between adults and kids are vital to the futures of both.
Connections between the business community and the schools need to be fostered on a more intimate level. We can integrate more business concepts into the schools in writing, reading, thinking, science and math. We can get business leaders to collaborate with teachers in providing scenarios for problem solving. For example, principles of sales and marketing can be taught in the schools and applied to real life situations. Each student, as he / she graduates and seeks employment will be marketing himself or herself. There is a marketing component to every successful business and to every successful business relationship. If we can get more business leaders involved in the schools on a regular basis, that will be one way to provide more adults to make connections with students, and it will provide a new cultural context for students to adapt to. Good connections between schools and the "outside world" will help us to lower the drop-out rate by giving students more options and more interaction with adults. We need to make sure that the fostering of connections also lightens the load for teachers and gives them access to new instructional resources.
Final statement:
The culture wars always play out in the schools. According to researchers, we have created the world's most individualistic culture. We have created a lot of ways to accommodate the individual, but we have lost the sense of a collective standard. The strength of our culture is that it allows individuals to be innovative, to try things out, to experiment. A weakness is that there are fewer and fewer standards that we all agree on. Individualism creates disparity. We are struggling now to find ways to reach agreement, consensus, common standards. We do this sometimes by holding Team Building Workshops and designing Mission Statements. Agreement, consensus and common standards are integral in collective cultures. Every culture in the world is more collectively oriented than we are. The more collectively oriented a culture is, the more common agreement about wide ranges of issues there is within the culture. No society has ever been as individualistically oriented as we are, so there is no pattern for building consensus in societies such as ours. We are in a unique situation in the history of the world. Once again, we are trying to do something that hasn't been done before. Setting collective standards in the schools is a huge step away from our carefully developed individualistic orientation. Here we are, confronting an apparent weakness in our cultural orientation: the lack of common standards that we all agree everyone should achieve. We have to figure out how to establish common standards while still maintaining enough individualistic orientation to encourage creativity and uniqueness. It is a quest for balancing two opposite orientations. The strength will be in the balance as we are able to achieve it. I will help achieve this balance.