Editor’s note: This commentary is by Wavell Cowan, of Montpelier, a research scientist, inventor, entrepreneur, businessman, social activist, and author.
[I]n an age when connectivity by other means is rapidly expanding and educational groupings through distance learning options are becoming both increasingly available and feasible, the recourse to “consolidation” demonstrates a fatal backward-looking faith in “economies of size,” a dogma made increasingly obsolete by modern technology. Thus the delusions of Act 46 further delay badly needed, “meaningful” education reforms.
Suppose instead of Act 46 we could replace such failed measures as NCLB with a demonstrably sound approach to assessing student performance. This would properly integrate teacher assessments with standard test data, track individual student performance over time and provide predictive data in respect to future individual learning difficulties. It would also provide the public with demonstrably valid, normalized quality performance data characterizing every school in the state.
Suppose the enormous amount of unanalyzed data in the Department of Education archives plus any required additional data were used to produce a demonstrably sound method for measuring the cost efficiency with which schools delivered educational services. This would provide the public with a meaningful, “normalized” educational cost figure for every school in the state.
Suppose school board members were trained to properly understand their fundamental mission and role; i.e. to challenge and support local administrators in developing and pursuing new strategies to improve educational quality and to reduce educational costs as an ongoing mission.
Suppose school board members were trained to properly understand their fundamental mission and role; i.e. to challenge and support local administrators in developing and pursuing new strategies to improve educational quality and to reduce educational costs as an ongoing mission.
Suppose that mission was to be innovatively pursued by the principals and teachers in each school under the authority of a local school board rather than controlled by the dictates of an education bureaucracy.
Suppose we had a reporting system that ensured that knowledge of successful local initiatives in the areas of improving educational quality and reducing educational costs, were widely promulgated for the potential benefit of other schools as models to be emulated.
Suppose we had a Department of Education whose primary function was to ensure that all these suppositions were fulfilled.
Suppose we had a Legislature that would mandate this role change for the Department of Education.
Then and only then would we have a self-regulating and continuously self-improving educational system where every school would know its position on the statewide educational quality and cost spectrums; where every school, positioned poorly on either of these spectrums would know of and be able to consult with schools whose operations were well-positioned on these spectrums; where every school board (now unfortunately being greatly diminished in numbers and therefore greatly diminished in the plurality of problem-solving effort) would expect their administrators to respond to these data with new initiatives for improvement, and be responsible for financing the resources needed for implementation.
Could such a data driven, self-regulating, self-improving system be introduced? As a professional scientist who had the good fortune to spend six productive years as a school board member in a school with an exceptionally entrepreneurial principal, and the opportunity to explore in detail all of these questions, I would answer, yes. It certainly could be done. But will it? Not until progress becomes more important to politicians and their appointees than acquisition of power and the arrogance of its use.
