The public policy discussion around public education would be a comedy if it wasn't so damned tragic.
Let's review a few commonly-understood facts.
1) Public education continues to take more taxpayer money while providing little to no improvement in "outcomes" for kids, whatever that means [insert your own definition]
2) For those kids lucky enough to learn enough to be employable, businesses are now picking up the slack, with on-the-job mentoring and training. Business does a lot of training in the U.S.
3) Blaming one group or another isn't useful. It's not the parents, or the taxpayers, or the teacher's unions, or the administrators. What we have here is a systemic problem. The system is structured such that it sucks the life out of the teachers and continues to consume more and more resources. It's a bad system.
4) Making the system worse is the fact that it's full of consultants and external experts -- all of whom have some different idea of just what the hell the education system is supposed to accomplish. This article was a good example of that. Great ideas -- I love the idea of emphasizing relationships -- but markedly different from "Teach Johnny to read and write" or "Educate Sue enough so that she can get a job" or "Amit needs to be prepared for college". We all have different goals here.
So the problem is clear: there is no defined problem the education system is trying to solve. Therefore there is no strategy that can be "best", there is no expense that is either productive or non-productive, and there is no advice that is more or less useful than any other.
Until this issue of definitions is solved, no further progress can be made. In fact, no further progress is possible. Yes, you can come to the table with some great ideas, and you can make little snide political attacks against those who have different worldviews. Maybe even the other professors will pat you on the back. But you're not helping things.
So we're left with the problem Socrates gave us: the definition of terms. Without that, I am not optimistic that progress can be made. And guess what? Once we have a common definition of what the schools are supposed to be doing, we have a test. And so we are back to where we started. No matter what you do, you're going to have to measure it if you want to have some meaningful discussion about how it's done. That's an epistemological conclusion, not a political one.
I agree that the debate over education is crippled by a lack of clear teleological goals that everyone can agree on before discussing. But that's expected in a big discussion.
Most Big Social Issues have this same problem because they are political by nature, not technological or epistemological. Our society hasn't reached consensus on what an 'education' is, just like how it hasn't decided what a good life is (work/life balance debate), what 'freedom' is (drug criminality debate), or what a just war is.
But ESPECIALLY with education, I wouldn't expect a 'defined problem' or a set of agreed upon terms to come about by consensus. Why? Like tax policy, education policy has a very intimate relationship to politics and social classes because it affects everyone closely. The issue of definitions is 'solved' when one group's ideas win by force of influence.
The point you may be missing is that this has already happened. For the wealthy, the system isn't broken at all. The current system of standardization (test scores, bean-counting admissions processes) for everyone with a side of elite tutoring and private schools for themselves isn't failing. It's doing quite well: Pay extra disposable income for Mary to have better 'aptitude' --> secure acceptance into the next stage of life. The wealthy don't want to make the masses dumb, that would be too dangerous and gut their workforce . They'd rather make them predictably average so their children can beat their peers, reliably, with extra financial firepower.
They may not think these details out consciously, but it's the game being played.
Sure it's a political problem. So -- people who want to change the system are required to define what the system is to them. We all don't have to have agreement. Petitioners for change simply have to clearly define their terms. That way we can judge them on whether our definitions are similar, whether those goals are worth meeting, whether the strategies employed might meet them, and whether or not their argument is self-consistent. None of that guarantees a "best" outcome, after all it is political, but it guarantees a reasonable framework for public discourse.
Let's review a few commonly-understood facts.
1) Public education continues to take more taxpayer money while providing little to no improvement in "outcomes" for kids, whatever that means [insert your own definition]
2) For those kids lucky enough to learn enough to be employable, businesses are now picking up the slack, with on-the-job mentoring and training. Business does a lot of training in the U.S.
3) Blaming one group or another isn't useful. It's not the parents, or the taxpayers, or the teacher's unions, or the administrators. What we have here is a systemic problem. The system is structured such that it sucks the life out of the teachers and continues to consume more and more resources. It's a bad system.
4) Making the system worse is the fact that it's full of consultants and external experts -- all of whom have some different idea of just what the hell the education system is supposed to accomplish. This article was a good example of that. Great ideas -- I love the idea of emphasizing relationships -- but markedly different from "Teach Johnny to read and write" or "Educate Sue enough so that she can get a job" or "Amit needs to be prepared for college". We all have different goals here.
So the problem is clear: there is no defined problem the education system is trying to solve. Therefore there is no strategy that can be "best", there is no expense that is either productive or non-productive, and there is no advice that is more or less useful than any other.
Until this issue of definitions is solved, no further progress can be made. In fact, no further progress is possible. Yes, you can come to the table with some great ideas, and you can make little snide political attacks against those who have different worldviews. Maybe even the other professors will pat you on the back. But you're not helping things.
So we're left with the problem Socrates gave us: the definition of terms. Without that, I am not optimistic that progress can be made. And guess what? Once we have a common definition of what the schools are supposed to be doing, we have a test. And so we are back to where we started. No matter what you do, you're going to have to measure it if you want to have some meaningful discussion about how it's done. That's an epistemological conclusion, not a political one.