Education Reform

Jim Shanley | President Emeritus, Fort Peck Community College

We all know that all the king’s horses and all the king’s men could not put Humpty Dumpty back together again. My observations are that the educational system in the United States is very much like Humpty Dumpty. Because of this we are going to see dramatic transformations in the current K-12 and higher education systems. I’d like to approach this change from three different viewpoints.

The first is structure. We know that we are having problems with our K-12 system. Much of that has to do with the structure. The system originated in the 1800s as a public education model. It was built on a human growth model. This means that as a child grows they are able to learn various abstract concepts and ideas, with that capacity growing as the child ages. This allows education to be gradual. It works well for the first eight years. Although some constituents have problems, notably minorities, those in poor school systems, and those with language barriers, on the whole it works well.

However in high school it gets problematic. Bill Gates, for one, thinks that high school should be totally tossed out the door. He says it doesn’t work for most kids. It is boring. It consists of trying to force feed information to the kids that they don’t want to know and don’t care about. This has caused a real problem in regards to motivation.

Some of that has to do with the fact that our culture is changing very fast. We are inundated with information. Our high school students are inundated with a fantastic amount of information. Most of them have seen more movie plots than you can find in almost all of the great studies of literature! So when we talk about the type of student now compared to the 1800s, we have an entirely different animal now.

This structural problem is difficult to change. As our population has grown and as our society has matured, education has become very bureaucratic. From the U.S. Department of Education to state Departments of Education to local school districts, there are so many vested interests at each level that it is almost impossible to break this bureaucracy and try anything new. Charter schools for example are a marvelous idea. But due to so many stakeholders in the current system, they haven’t been fully exploited and they just barely bend the structure; they certainly don’t break it.

We have a problem with K-12, particularly with high school. Our bureaucracy and structure do not allow it to change. We are starting to see some real cracks in the structure.

Yet when we move on to higher education we see a number of problems. The first problem, which is catching most of the news these days, is cost. The cost of higher education is sky rocketing. From 1982 – 2007 tuition for students in the United States increased 436 percent. Family income at the same time only increased 147 percent. In the meantime public funding, by taxation, for those universities and colleges has decreased. For example here in Montana over the past 20 years public funding for education has decreased by almost 50 percent. Public input into higher education in terms of dollars has really slowed down. One of the reasons is because higher education has the ability to bring in revenue from other sources. How? Raise tuition. Tuition costs are just fantastically high and they will continue to rise.

Yet at the same time that costs are increasing, we have a president and a Congress, many prestigious foundations and universities that are saying we have to get more people to graduate from college. They say it is essential if we are to maintain our economic standing in the world we need to have more educated citizens. But the costs are prohibitive.

They say that in 25 years it is possible that it would take four-fifths of a family’s yearly income to send one child to college. Our system can certainly not handle that kind of expense. Some have compared the cost of higher education to the bubble in real estate that caused the 2008 recession. They say at some point this bubble is going to crack, and when it does it is going to create tremendous amount of problems.

Another problem we have with higher education is that its structure is flawed as well. Colleges and universities are based on a medieval model going back to the thirteenth and fourteenth centuries. If you thought the K-12 system was inflexible, higher education is even worse. One of the tenets of higher-ed is the system of tenure. Tenure was originally put in place to support academic freedom. But we know that somewhere between 60 – 87 percent of all college classes are taught by non-tenured faculty. That means you have the largest number of teachers in our higher education system working as second-class citizens. In many cases they don’t receive any benefits whatsoever. They don’t receive large amounts of retirement, or other benefits, until at such time they make tenure or enter into a tenure-track position.

So we have all of this money that is spent on higher education. And salary-wise, looking at the teaching and learning aspect, the money is going to a small, elite, tenured group—maybe to only one-fifth or one-fourth of all the professors teaching. Now this would be wonderful if all these professors were dynamic teachers and taught 30 hours a semester. But the average tenured professor does not teach 30 hours. I work in a community college, and our faculty is not so fortunate. They do not have tenure. And they are expected to teach 12 – 15 hours a semester. Most tenured faculty in Montana, at our colleges and universities, teach only three or four courses a year. And as they get long in the tooth and become ready to retire, they can even teach as few as one or two courses a year. In addition they can take a semester off for sabbatical every five or six years.

Now I’m not denigrating what academics do. They do many other things. And colleges and universities do many other things besides teaching and learning. But we fund it on the basis of being a teaching and learning engine. That is how it is funded. That is how it is represented to the public that pays the taxes, even if it is only 35 – 40 percent of the cost.

We have some real cost problems. We have structural and cost problems. That is not what is going to kill Humpty Dumpty. We are facing a new age in this country and in this world. That is the age of knowledge and information. Not only is this the age of accumulating knowledge, but it is also the age of access to knowledge. That is going to cause us to reform what we consider to be an educated person. Many years ago when someone was very well educated they were called a Renaissance man. Today to be a Renaissance man or woman, all you need is an iPhone. You can literally collect and receive information instantaneously. And we are on the very frontier of this new age. We are on the tip of the iceberg of this mass of information and how it transforms and accesses itself into everyday life.

It is going to force higher education to find out how we can build mental concepts that don’t need to rely on the memorization of information. Anybody that has gone to college knows that you have many classes where you sit in a desk and people expect you to memorize information. But that is no longer necessary.

What is necessary in order to educate a person, to give them problem solving abilities, concept solving capabilities, to build the whole mental framework that will move them forward in the future? Education hasn’t figured that out yet. Even though we have the most scientific data on how a human being learns, how a brain and our bodies function on one hand, we still haven’t found a way to combine this data with our medieval system of higher education on the other. Both decks haven’t been shuffled together. This is going to cause a tremendous rift when it is shuffled because there are so many different stakeholders who have a piece of the present system who don’t want to see it changed.

If you’ve been teaching for 25 or 30 years, on tenure, looking to cruise your last 10 years to retirement, you certainly don’t want to see this system changed!

So I don’t know if there is a way that we can prevent Humpty from cracking. And perhaps we shouldn’t. Our culture and our information processes are changing so fast that they may push ol‘ Humpty off the wall whether we want them to or not. But we need to start discussing possible solutions.

I was thinking of how it could apply in particular instances. Take medical school for example. I have an older sister who is an M.D. She can whip out her iPhone and there is an entire pharmacy glossary on her phone. She can punch up any drug that is commonly being used in the United States and she can give you all the information that she has about it: what it interacts with, what it doesn’t interact with, correct dosages, etc. These are typical tools that doctors carry now.

If we have these types of tools available, how are we going to train doctors? What kind of systems do we put in place to make sure that doctors can access the information but at the same time can make a human connection and figure out the correct way to apply it? It is the same with law school. For years and years students studied in the stacks for 15 or 20 hours a day. They studied case law so that if they ran into a case in that particular area they would know where to look for precedence. When all of this information is integrated into a database, a law student will be able to punch up a particular topic and find out whatever cases or precedence applies to it.

Spending all that time in the stacks won’t be necessary any more. If you think about this situation in terms of the rest of higher education I’m sure you can find many parallels. But we are going to have to find different ways to evaluate who is a learned person, who knows what about what.

To end I’m not trying to throw a scare at anybody. I am saying that there is a tidal wave of change coming. People in education need to work to break down the structures they are in and move forward so that we can have a true teaching and learning society, rather than the ivory pods that we have built.

Thank you.