REMEDIES:

A 21st Century Program for Fixing Education

A SYNOPSIS

By

© James L. Horend, MS, Ed-Adm, 2009

(Second Revision:  June 2011)

It’s a national disgrace! And from all the evidence it’s in shambles and badly broken! Heard that before? I’m sure you have. Leading educators, the Congress, statisticians, bloggers, columnists and all who analyze and report on the state of education in America agree – our system is failing or should I say, has failed. And it continues to get worse - if that is possible. Why? The entire system is archaic, backward, outmoded and irrelevant! WOW!

After years of tweaking it, throwing money at it, implementing many, many innovative programs at the local and state levels, not to mention nationwide, none has made more than a very small dent in the downward spiral that has our high school graduates currently scoring lower in both math and science than many of the graduates in other industrialized countries. (An assessment conducted in 2006 that measured applied learning and problem-solving skills of 15 year olds in thirty countries found the U.S. ranked in the middle of the pack in math and science.) That’s inexcusable and unacceptable and reflects only one such measure of many, many, many conducted over the last twenty-plus years. (More recent studies are just as bad.) Yes, there have been exceptions – programs that “worked” or showed great promise - but they are few and far between, and they usually succeed for a while due to the inordinate support and motivation the innovator applies to the effort. And then the innovation is replaced with another “sure thing” or the innovator moves on to more lucrative pastures. In most of these cases the young student – the square peg – is expected to fit into a round hole that never seems to change or be adequately modified to accommodate the multifaceted needs of the student. This square peg/round-hole approach is fervently attempted without regard for student differences or a close look at the relevance of the round hole.

If we accept the premise that all children are unique – special and not equal – then how can we support the one-size-fits-all approach used in 90% of our classrooms? If we don’t accept the one-size premise then how can we justify not finding ways to provide each learner, each square peg (from now on referred to as each unique peg) with individualized, learner-appropriate and relevant educational experiences that will become the new square hole (from now on referred to as the new relevant hole) for each child? These are just two of the many questions being asked by informed educators and lay people alike all over this country.

My recommendations, detailed in “REMEDIES”, are based on my life-long research and interest in educational betterment as well as my personal observations during my 7 years of classroom teaching, 2 years as special education principal, 3 years as principal of a K-8 school and 20 more as principal of a K-4 school. During my tenure I had the privilege of working with children from all walks of life and from all levels of the socio-economic spectrum; ranging in age from 5 through 17. Included were children on free or reduced lunches – in some cases free breakfasts too - and children from highly affluent backgrounds as well as all those in between. My experience also included working for two years as a self-contained classroom teacher with junior-senior-high aged youngsters who were attempting to learn while dealing with puberty, emotional or neurological problems or all three at the same time.

Being that education reform is a top priority of the current administration, I believe that now is the right time to bring forth some relevant prescriptions for treating our sickly system.  So I have identified and am proposing many approaches and remedies that answer the what, why and how-can-we questions for getting the job done. I also put forth ideas that show how to eliminate most of the impediments currently blocking meaningful reforms along with highlighting many, many additional benefits that are possible and probable as outcomes. Six concrete remedies are identified in this synopsis and are fully developed in my book in progress: “REMEDIES: A 21st Century Program for Fixing Education”.

These six interconnected remedies constitute the heart of my reform proposals and include a major effort to engage families during the prenatal period and to keep them on board from birth through - at least – grade 4 and hopefully through high school graduation and beyond. Combined with and supporting early engagement by parents are plans to establish a network of very early childhood and pre-school “curricula” and to totally revamp the existing K-4 programs nationwide. Expanding the new model in grades 5-12 will necessarily follow in due time.

The new education model that will emerge, I believe, will halt and reverse the current downward spiral and provide the foundation and blueprint for the total reform of our floundering system. My proposed “REMEDIES”, my six relevance based and interrelated approaches are:

1.      The establishment of a National New-Born Registry

2.      The development of an Individualized Learner Program model

3.      The creation of a relevant National Skills and Core Knowledge Data Bank

4.    Making major modifications in the Time Spent on Tasks and in the School Year

5.   Staffing the classrooms for the 21st century and

6.      Supporting the new model with appropriate Professional Compensation for revamped staffing

I anticipate these remedies and reforms in this new model will be viewed and judged by: 1. the usual skeptics as nothing short of too radical and totally impossible, 2. the experts as probably impossible but interesting or 3. the long-awaited answers by those who truly understand the learning process, the uniqueness of each child and the archaic and irrelevant nature of the “round hole”.

To start with I am proposing the immediate establishment of a National New-Born Registry of every child born in this country! (Remember I said my remedies would be viewed and judged as too radical or impossible.)

The goals of this registry program are first to have it function as a pre-school-school tracking system that creates a cumulative record for each child using computers tied into the national registry network thus enabling the monitoring and documenting of the progress of all children during their preparation for entering the more formal school system.  It will become each child’s permanent data bank.

The second goal is to have the individual’s cumulative record continue to follow the child throughout his or her K-4 school career – and beyond - and serve as the basis for all ensuing educational decisions – from the minute to the major – from curricular decisions to assessments, placements and reporting. The registry will make it possible to track every learning initiative tackled by every child throughout his or her early “school” years no matter where he or she is enrolled in the U.S. The technology to make this happen already exists. One existing example, the New York City schools Achievement Reporting and Innovation System (ARIS), could be modified enabling adaptation of this registry and tracking program.

The responsibilities for maintenance and tracking will fall to the collective resources of federal, state and local agencies: the schools, teachers, health care professionals, and all other social agencies, all working in collaboration with parents, guardians or other care-givers.  The local schools will serve as the primary coordinating agencies. When no social agency is available, the school will have to shoulder their necessary functions as well. Remember, a primary goal of the stimulus plan – the American Recovery and Reinvestment Act – is to create jobs, and in this model, job creation is a large and vital segment. Woven within the goals of this program are components designed to provide support in the areas of parenting, health and nutrition and pre-school learning experiences. This program ties directly into the Obama-Biden comprehensive “Zero to Five” plan, Head Start, and is designed as well to coordinate programs and supporting services nationwide!

Next, on to the concept of the Individualized Learner Program; another vital and long overdue remedy. The first phase of the program is created to provide early suggestions and guidelines for parents and to establish a non-academic preschool “curriculum”. The second phase, involving revamping and replacing the entire K-4 curriculum with a new relevance model, one tailored to support the learning needs of each individual – each special learner - is briefly outlined herein. Developing and implementing this program is no small task as it requires the understanding and acceptance of the administration, Congress, the educational community and society at large. It will require getting all to believe, or at the very least, willing to accept, as I do, that: 1. Every child is special and 2. Most current teaching practices and curricula are irrelevant, inappropriate and need to be reformed or replaced because they are obviously not working - never have and never will.  A square peg just doesn’t fit in a round hole!  But a “unique peg” can and will fit into a “relevant hole”.

What is so wrong that has caused me to believe such monumental reforms are needed? First a look at the learner: Ever hear these descriptions? All children are different; all children learn at their own rate; my child is an auditory learner or visual learner; that child comes from a deprived home environment or an advantaged home environment or he is a slow learner or she is gifted, dyslectic, hyperactive, has AD/HD, has Down syndrome... And the list goes on and on. And it should, because with any given child any description or any combination of descriptions may apply. All children really are different. They may all be called square pegs, but they aren’t, they are all irregular – multi faceted – unique pegs and so too should be their learning experiences, when, how and wherever possible.

Second, a look at the round hole. Over the years accommodations have been made to provide the “best” learning environment and “best” learning materials for “very special” children as well as for “slow”, “average” or “gifted” children. But in spite of all the modifications and efforts, the best learning environments have rarely been realized and the most appropriate and student relevant learning materials rarely found. A relevance standard has been and still is missing in most attempts at creating a relevant round hole.

So how does this Individualized Learner Program meet the need each child has for truly relevant learner-appropriate materials and a learner-appropriate work environment? In the new model based on these remedies it begins when a child enters a mandatory pre-K program or approved, age-appropriate program anywhere in the U. S. The child arrives with National New-Born Registry documentation; his profile developed from birth. The teaching team receiving the child immediately transfers the data into a school based master computer, then staffs and places the child. It’s a process similar to starting a medical chart with a detailed history. The data will consist of all acquired core knowledge and readiness skills – or deficiencies – and will include some social information as well. A supervising master teacher and team will know exactly where to begin in order to develop a relevant individualized learning plan – a “relevant” hole - for the new learner. The relevant learning plan entries – gleaned from approved programs of basic skills and basic knowledge components contained in the National Skills and Core Knowledge Data Bank - are then modified or added to throughout each day as the child progresses. It is important to understand that the everyday accounting of the mastered learning achievements entered into the individualized learning plan will serve as the stepping stones for all future learning activities. And will serve as a reporting and accountability tool accessible to the child’s parents and all other professionals or agencies working for or with the child. Confidentiality will be strictly maintained in accordance with appropriate laws and policies.

A key component of this Individualized Learner Program is that the data will follow the child – the learner - throughout his primary school years no matter what school the child enters or transfers to – anywhere in the nation. The data will go with him and enable the receiving school to build on the child’s unique individualized learner plan. A program of this magnitude and complexity can also be adapted to support all unique classifications of children including, but not limited to, homeless, home-schooled, migrant and the educationally challenged.

In “REMEDIES” - and above - I describe how all learning goals and objectives are supported by sequenced skills and core knowledge components readily available to every teaching team from the National Skills and Core Knowledge Data Bank. But first these learning goals and objectives and sequenced skills need to be generated by teachers, parents, educational researchers, learning experts and programmers working in conjunction with 3,000 school districts nationwide to identify – by relevance tests – knowledge components and skills that are actually necessary for individual children to be exposed to or experience and master in order to move forward successfully and then – and only then - entered into the National Skills and Core Knowledge Data Bank as “relevant hole” components.

Accomplishing the goals and assuring the success of this new model education system requires providing remedies for two of the major interconnected weaknesses in the existing system: Time-On-Tasks and The School Year. It is not enough to have a great program and then to have it fail because inadequate time was devoted to implementing and utilizing it.

Productivity in our society is based on a combination of many factors, but one measure related to production and easy to measure is time-on-tasks. When you look at our current education model it is easy to see that our schools, by using an archaic work-year calendar based on planting and harvesting crops are not spending nearly enough time on the tasks that actually enable the student to progress. If you ask the schools to educate a student – any student – and to do it in 13 years, you would think that would be ample time to come up with an excellent finished product, but it is obviously based on a flawed model that doesn’t work very well.

In the new education model based on these remedies, the time-on-tasks for learners and staff and the proposed modifications of the school year are radically different from the currently accepted standards in the existing model. Please bear with me while I outline for you a rough description of the current time-on-tasks parameters and of the proposed revisions that will remedy these two interconnected weaknesses:

The current school year is usually 180 days out of 365 or just less than 50% of the year. And the school day for elementary students is approximately 5 1/2 - 6 hours, less time for lunch, recess, special classes such as art, music, and physical education, along with housekeeping chores, collecting homework and lunch money, sharpening pencils and other mundane and non-academic activities, for a maximum available time-on-tasks of 3 1/2 -4 1/2 hours or 17 1/2 - 22 1/2 hours per week. (And I believe I'm being generous with my estimates.) In the existing model, therefore, students may get between 630 and 810 hours per year of time-on-tasks provided they do not miss any days due to illness, family emergencies, teacher workshops, parent-teacher conference days, weather days and so on. I propose a new modified model in which children will attend school for 225, 8 hour days; a 25% increase in days of attendance per year. The longer days will make 1,462 hours available for tasks per year (as compared to a maximum of 810) which represents between an 80 and 132% increase for each student per year or somewhere between 1,440 and 1,800 hours of time-on-tasks per year! Spread that increase over 13 years, combine it with top-notch teaching teams, an Individualized Learner Program based on relevant skills selected from the National Skills and Core Knowledge Data Bank and the excellent finished product becomes a reality.

Currently the school day for teachers in the New York State district where I worked is roughly 6 ½  to 7 ½  hours of required-to-be-there time, less 30-60 minutes for lunch and 30-60 minutes for preparation or from 27 ½ to 32 ½  hours per week for student contact or teaching time. After-school meetings, parent conferences, evening programs, correcting papers, staff meetings, etc., may add roughly 12 to 36 hours per year or the equivalent of about 4 to 6 work days. Keep in mind that these are approximations and that some teachers work the bare minimum while others exceed the averages. But all the averages and approximations go out the window with the implementation of the new model.

It is very obvious that one of the biggest weaknesses in the current model is the actual time teachers have to spend working with students. We pay them to work only 180 days. Professionals in other fields – doctors, lawyers, optometrists, audiologists, CEOs, business owners – work, on average, 230 to 250 days per year and their work days often extend well beyond the old 8 hour norm. (I have a lawyer friend who thinks ten to twelve hour days are the norm!) For teachers, one sad consequence of the 180 day “year” is that they get labeled “quasi professionals” or “part timers”. Another is that the public balks at paying “part timers” professional salaries for half a year’s work. Combine those two with the fact that the image of the teaching "profession" has slowly - over the last 50 years or so slipped from a respected "white collar" profession to a less respected "blue collar" job. And the biggest consequence of all is that teachers, all too often, get blamed for the lack of student achievement that inevitably occurs when inadequate time is provided for teaching and learning – for relevant time on the tasks that matter.

In the new model these weaknesses are addressed by expanding the school day and school year for the professional staff and for the students. This increase in attendance time provides many, many additional hours of potential time-on-tasks. The revamped school year and work day times are summarized as follows:

1. Student attendance increases to 225 days per year at 8 hours per day which, as stated above represents an 80 to 132% increase in the total potential time available to be on relevant tasks.

2. Teacher attendance increases to 236, 9 to 10 hour days per year, including 6 days of training and 5 days devoted to planning; a potential 31% increase in the work year and a possible 28-43% increase in daily time available for teaching.

This revamped school year in the new model allows for 10 paid holidays and 15 paid vacation days for teachers and 10 holidays plus 26 vacation days for students. Remember, the current archaic or existing model is based on the planting and harvesting calendar, when the schools were shut down in the spring and reopened in the fall and children had 60 or more days off in the summers alone.

The Staffing approach used in this new education model will accomplish the goal of having outstanding teachers in each classroom supported by a team that will provide all the children with the opportunity to be successful. No longer will having one teacher, standing in front of 25 to 35 seated-at-their-desks students - trying to reach each individual’s needs - be the accepted standard. It is not the way the very best teachers teach. And even the best teachers have their hands tied much too much of the time by the that’s-the-way-we-do-it staffing patterns, curricular requirements, testing demands and time constraints currently in vogue in our schools today. To attain the goal of providing every child with the best education possible we must begin by staffing our classrooms with a team of professionals, paraprofessionals, student trainees, parents and other volunteers.

It all begins with placing one supervising master teacher in each learning setting with the overall responsibility and accountability for providing the maximum academic growth of every child; for the supervision and coordination of the in–room team and coordination with all other teachers and support personnel working with the class, small groups or individuals at any given time. He or she is the direct link to the home, parents or care givers and community resources.

Assisting the supervising master teacher are two certified associate teachers each responsible to the master teacher for the maximum academic growth of 50% of the class and for the supervision and coordination of the paraprofessionals, student trainees, student teachers, National Service Program and Teach for America participants, parents, other volunteers and all other personnel working with their students and with each other. Each classroom will resemble a mini-school!

This new model brings the approximate number of certified and non-certified adults in the learning setting to a heart stopping dozen or so. Great! All the Individualized Learner Programs and the comprehensive accountability components supporting the learners will require many hands for maximum effectiveness. The ideal adult to child ratio needed to support this early childhood model effectively is about one-to-two, and with this staffing model we attain or exceed that number.

(The how-to methods – rough job descriptions - for utilizing the team members and engaging the parents and community in the new model are treated in greater detail in “REMEDIES” and include the idea of having employers provide one paid work day off every month, enabling working parents time for classroom participation and support.)

The implications for teacher salaries – Professional Compensation - are obvious. My suggested guidelines are that supervising master teachers should receive compensation ranging from a minimum of $200,000 to $250,000 and up. Associate teachers should start from a minimum of $150,000 and top out somewhere around $200,000. A promotion to supervising master teacher would qualify them for a commensurate increase based on evaluations, experience and an intensive review process. The acquisition of advanced graduate work, although desirable, would not automatically lead to a salary increase.   Any course work that was required by the employer would then be compensated for in the form of a one-time bonus. These salaries reflect the high level of time, performance and accountability required in the new teaching-profession model that needs to be developed to support the new K-4 education model based on these remedies described above. Further, these salaries make teaching attractive to those high quality graduates entering the work force every year who very often turn away from teaching due to more lucrative opportunities elsewhere. Higher salaries will also help to quell the high rate of attrition that costs US taxpayers millions and millions annually.

Next let’s talk a little about job creation and expanded involvement. The complete new education model – when fully implemented and ideally staffed nationwide – will require adding five to six million jobs - teachers, paraprofessionals, social workers, nutritionists, consultants, researchers, programmers and etcetera- to the existing millions serving our thirty five million students right now. That is a huge order but the new model, as proposed, helps with present and future staffing requirements by providing built-in training and apprenticeship programs and incorporating those already in existence. Additionally the model includes proposals for greatly increasing parental and community involvement in the overall process.

There are many other potential benefits expected to occur once these remedies are implemented and operational. These changes will begin to impact student confidence and self esteem, special education placements, failure rates, dropout numbers, bullying behaviors, childhood obesity levels, truancy, drug use, child abuse, criminal behaviors, and summer school and after school tutorial programs, to name just a few. It is anticipated and projected that once all the reforms put forth in “REMEDIES” have had a one to two generation history, the country will begin to close prisons and have to create thousands of additional classrooms – learning environments – for post high school graduates.

This synopsis is brief by design and therefore leaves out many supportive ideas, concepts and explanations which can and will be found in “REMEDIES”.  Included therein is an outline of an implementation plan – a pilot program – that could start with one school, the elementary schools in Detroit, in an entire state – or two or three – or in a selected group of charter schools.  This pilot approach would create a new tested and proven model that could then be replicated anywhere, and hopefully, everywhere.  In my opinion - if we hope to regain our rightful first-place position in the world community and, at long last, provide appropriate and optimal learning experiences for our children – the anticipated outcomes justify the expenditures.  The question that must be answered is for us to determine if we have the national will to solve our education system problems and become – once again – a world leader in providing the very best education possible for all our children or do we continue on blindly supporting our existing archaic and mediocre system.  We bailed out our banks – now let’s bail out our schools and invest in our children and the future of this country.

Remember, the success of each individual is the only acceptable goal for this country.

So let the “REMEDIES” begin!

 (© by James L Horend 2009 and revised in 2011)

 No reprint or other use of this article or its contents may be made without the express written consent of the author.

If you have an interest in receiving additional information I have already drafted or will be drafting pertaining to the six major remedies or other topics referred to in the synopsis, please contact me by E-mail at jimhorend@optonline.net and I will be happy to respond as readily as possible.