Education Reform: Two things that matter.

When writing Improving the Odds: Raising the Class, the book looked at long-term factors that would affect public education. The two factors are: 1. better curriculum delivered to the classroom; and 2. lowering the entropy or disorder to the education process. What is clear regarding most education reform efforts is how little they address either of these key issues.

The United States does not have a coherent system of putting forth the best lessons into the classroom. This is not the fault of the teachers, unions, site administrators, but of the system itself. There simply is no real system to collect information about what lessons work best in classrooms. What teachers try to do is to present lessons the best way they can. What if medicine worked the same way?

Medicine has developed methods for analyzing and treating patient to improve their conditions. Individual doctors do not go into the office and come up with novel approaches to treating diseases. Doctors learn the best techniques that are delivered to the health system by researchers in the field. In fact the skill that doctors have is not related to making up diagnoses on the fly, the skill is related to knowing how best to apply what the system of medicine has learned.

If teachers want to be considered "professionals," then the school system must create a system to train teachers and insure that each one follows the best educational practices. The second factor that the education system must address is removing entropy or disorder from the education system, a factor that will be discussed in the next post.