This year, this discussion is bound to get louder, with a state budget deficit approaching two billion dollars and no federal stimulus money anywhere in sight. Traditionally, so-called conservatives want to start by going after teacher pensions and benefits.
So-called liberals, led by the teachers’ unions, rally to protect these bennies, and say we need to raise taxes and spend more on education instead. However, there’s a compelling new argument.
It says that we’ve have been asking the wrong questions and fighting over the wrong issues. Its major proponent is former state superintendent of schools Tom Watkins, now a business and education consultant both here and in China.
Watkins says public education is collapsing in this state, that the current model is failing students academically and is unsustainable financially. He’d spend more on education if it made sense to do so. But right now, he says that would be crazy. “We need to promote the three R‘s of education,“ he said in a recent newspaper column:
“Restructure, reform, and reinvent.”
Otherwise, he says investing new money in the schools “would be the equivalent of pouring water into a glass with a hole in the bottom and wondering why the glass never fills.”
Fixing the schools may be the single most important long-term challenge Michigan faces. Nobody disputes that the state is going to have to do more with less. But it is also true that unless we have a better educated workforce, and public schools that get the job done, the high-tech, good-paying jobs of the future aren’t coming to Michigan, even if our tax rate were to drop to zero.
Nearly everyone in the state is aware of the wretchedly dysfunctional condition of Detroit’s schools. But Watkins thinks that Detroit is just the canary in the coal mine warning what’s to come.
His argument is that it is time to stop tinkering with our current 19th century model for education, and “do a tear-down and start over.“
So where do we start? Watkins doesn’t pretend to have all the answers. Nobody does. But he knows we need to start by building an education system designed around the students.
Sadly, that’s too often not the case now. That doesn’t mean there aren’t islands of excellence out there. There are.
But study after study has indicated we need to totally reinvent the wheel. While we worry about the smart kids fleeing the state, we ought to be equally worried about the undereducated ones who stay behind, people for whom there are no longer any good jobs.
“We can either get smarter and wealthier or we can became dumber and poorer,” Watkins says; it’s up to us, and our leaders.
He’s hoping Governor-elect Rick Snyder is willing to think outside the box and take on the entrenched education establishment. Watkins wrote “Our world is changing in dramatic ways, and our system of education must embrace these changes or be engulfed by them.” Those words ring true. But what’s telling, significant and sad is that he wrote them nine years ago.
Now, there’s no more time left to waste.
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