Raising Ruckus: The Decline of Public Education in the 21st Century

By David Osborne September 4, Creating a 21st Century Education System is a story of transformation.

Smashwords Interview

Osborne distills lessons learned from these hubs of innovation, unpacking a broader theory of how U. The 74 traveled the country to document the faces and stories of the individuals who are leading the charge to bring new models of education to students in those cities. Head over to the new multimedia experience to see them in their hometowns, listen to them share their histories, and watch them express their hope for the future.

I f we were creating a public education system from scratch, would we organize it as most of our public systems are now organized? Would our classrooms look just as they did before the advent of personal computers and the Internet? Would we give teachers lifetime jobs after their second or third year of teaching? Would we let schools survive if, year after year, half their students dropped out? Would we send children to school for only eight and a half months a year and six hours a day?

Would we assign them to schools by neighborhood, reinforcing racial and economic segregation?

Few people would answer yes to such questions. One city did get a chance to start over, however. In , after the third-deadliest hurricane in U. Over the next nine years, the RSD gradually turned them into charter schools — a new form of public school that has emerged over the last quarter century.

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Charters are public schools operated by independent, mostly nonprofit organizations, free of most state and district rules but held accountable for performance by written charters, which function like performance contracts. Most, but not all, are schools of choice. In the old Orleans Parish School Board, which is elected, decided to transition its last four traditional schools to charter status.

The results should shake the very foundations of American education. Test scores, school performance scores, graduation and dropout rates, college-going rates, and independent studies all tell the same story: The district has improved faster than any other in the state — and no doubt in the nation. On several important metrics, New Orleans is the first big city with a majority of low-income minorities to outperform its state.

In Congress created the D. Public Charter School Board, which grants charters to nonprofit organizations to start schools. Families choose the charter school they prefer. The board closes or replaces those in which kids are falling behind, while encouraging the best to expand or open new schools. The competition from charters helped spur D. Leaders in other struggling urban districts have paid close attention to such reforms, and they are spreading. A decade ago the elected school board in Denver, frustrated by the traditional bureaucracy, decided to embrace charter schools.

The board gave most charters space in district buildings and encouraged the successful ones to replicate as fast as possible. By it had the highest. Massachusetts and the Springfield Public Schools have created an Empowerment Zone Partnership, with its own board, whose ten schools are treated much like charters.

Three other states have copied Louisiana and created their own recovery districts. Most of the debate in this field is stuck on the tired issue of whether charter schools perform any better than traditional public schools. The evidence on that question, from dozens of careful studies, is clear: But even they show that, on average, students who spend four or more years in charter schools gain an additional two months of learning in reading and more than two months in math every year , compared to similar students in traditional public schools.

Urban students gain five months in math and three and a half in reading. And charter parents are happier with their schools. Any good idea can be done poorly, and some states have proven it with their charter practices. One has to look beyond the averages to see the truth: In states where charter authorizers close or replace failing schools — a central feature of the charter model — charters vastly outperform traditional public schools, with students gaining as much as an extra year of learning every year. But in states where failing charters are allowed to remain open, they are, on average, no better than other public schools.

Do they have the autonomy they need to design a school model that works for the children they must educate? Are they free to hire the best teachers and fire the worst? Do they experience competition that drives them to continuously improve? Gene Levinson PhD's favorite authors on Smashwords.

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Elizabeth Witbeck Latest book: The Decline of Public Education in the 21st Century. Published October 28, As the author suggests in the title, Elizabeth Witbeck fully intends to stir things up with this book… a lot. Clearly, change is in the wind. There are other ways. Witbeck offers many progressive alternatives.

Elizabeth Witbeck

Genuine learning and knowledge are no longer confined to brick-and-mortar schools. Kids can now connect with thousands of teachers, anywhere, anytime, at the touch of a smartphone or ipad. Customized learning is now on the horizon. When students attend lectures online, teachers are free to spend more time in one-on-one interactions in the classroom. This is a golden opportunity to make classroom learning both fun and challenging. Schools were, Witbeck would argue, set up to provide human resources to feed corporate interests.

Yet few parents want to see their kids treated as cannon fodder to feed corporate gluttony. If students are not getting what they need in school, then they, along with other stakeholders such as parents and teachers, will take matters into their own hands. Either the school administration will be open to radical change, or it will lose the popular support of the community.

Gene Levinson PhD

Ultimately, that will mean loss of political support as well. This book serves as a fine introduction to the central educational contradictions of our time. It is a call to action, a manifesto. These are just some of the creative and industrious individuals who made their mark on the world not by virtue of the public school system, but rather in spite of it. Many questions are indirectly raised by the book, and many deserve further discussion elsewhere. Who will be the new authorities? How will schools and educational funds be integrated with tele-learning?

How will high community standards—based on shared values, not on the old model--be maintained?