Education: refocusing on learning goals

(originally published in March, 2017 on dazuck.com)

When I moved into education a few years ago I was quickly struck by how huge that world is. The sheer number of dedicated people and well-intentioned organizations trying to improve US education is inspiring, and I tried to digest all of it. I was of course overwhelmed, and over time developed a concern that the breadth was, while inspiring, also inefficient and likely hiding problems (and solutions) that become hard to identify in such a sprawling landscape.

CB Insights Ed Tech Market Map (2016)

Certain sub-industries had created ‘market maps’ that helped their focus. For example, this CB Insights map of ed tech companies gives investors and technologists a way to think about how their skills and efforts fit into the ecosystem. Similar (though flawed) maps exist for higher education, charter systems, and even general reformers. However, I’ve found nothing that works if your goal is to question education from a wider starting point. Many of us want to figure out how we can best improve our society’s education. But ‘education’ is too big, and the subdivisions we typically jump to after that (‘math’, ‘tech’, ‘teaching’) are too narrow and disconnected from broader goals. I want a way to be more targeted and reasoned when addressing the hard questions about our learning ecosystem.

A few examples of how education being so broad causes problems today:

• Lack of adequate distinction between subjects has led, for example, to attempts to evaluate and pay Kindergarten art teachers based on performance, because that was deemed the right policy for subjects like middle school math.
• “Common Core” has become a politicized lightning rod as a symbol for centralization; the reality is some things should be standardized, some should not. But with no way for non-experts to mentally separate various parts of the school-day it’s not surprising people would react with hostility to apparent mass standardization.
• Those working in “education” deal with an informational firehose with no easy way to filter it. When I tell people I worked in ed tech (at Zearn, a K-5 digital math company), they often respond referencing MOOCs, coding platforms, or adult language learning programs. These have very little in common. But without a more specific framework we’re left grouping them altogether and get too overwhelmed by the magnitude to follow news effectively.

This article is an attempt to set up an education framework by mapping learning goals to how they are achieved in a way that can make policy, content, product development, and other considerations of the whole ecosystem — especially schools — more approachable. This not a fully-baked proposal, nor does it touch many critical aspects of improving education (especially anything related to the structures of the school system — teacher pay/support, unequal funding, etc.). It’s a starting point to improve upon my own fragmented understanding, a thought-experiment on the goals and structure of education in 4 parts:

1. Section 1 looks at the history that created today’s conflated world of ‘education’ and why it’s problematic
2. Section 2 proposes learning goals as the core to an education framework, mapping education categories to the purposes they serve for students and society
3. Section 3 evaluates how education categories differ on today’s most important questions in education policy and reform
4. Section 4 illustrates a hypothetical school and education system built on these goals, categories and insights

“Learning,” “education,” and “school” are often used interchangeably. They are meaningfully different though, and my hope for this exercise is to clarify how they relate to each other. Society has many ‘learning’ goals it should pursue; its ‘education’ system supports these learning goals that don’t happen independently; ‘school’ is the critical, state-funded institution within the education system. Not all learning goals should necessarily be part of school, and some likely are today as a result of inertia even if they could (should) be handled in other ways within the learning ecosystem. We’ll explore why historically first, and then how to think about things more explicitly going forward.

HOW WE GOT HERE

The fact that the US education system has unclear boundaries is unsurprising, as disagreements about the primary goal of the school system have been present since its founding. Successive periods that focused in turn on knowledge, morality, skill, liberal arts, and character have left us with a sprawling system and terminology. Each part may be valuable and deserve its place, but the way they are integrated (or not) today comes from leftovers of many individual programs more than any explicit decisions on what stays and what goes.

Early community-run school-houses were mostly one room with dozens of children, all ages, focused on memorization of certain facts and some literacy. Schooling in a more standard and scaled way came about through ‘normal schools,’ in which Catherine Beecher’s corps of female school-teachers were coached to be ‘mother-teachers,’ raising children morally to participate in democracy. Horace Mann, the first state secretary of education (in MA), also prioritized morality and preached “good-will towards men, and upward in reverence to god” above liberal education, which he thought was a waste. With these anti-intellectual roots, carried out by newly trained female teachers, the country’s network of schools grew and spread west.

The turn of the 20th century brought a more modern pedagogy focused on skill and personal development for children, ushered in by John Dewey and his disciples. These goals called for more student-led intellectual learning, and the role of the teacher and school necessarily changed (and broadened) as they now were asked to help students learn how to think, grow, and ‘learn to learn’ rather than absorb the facts and moral codes being recited at them. Then in the middle of the century, war years (among other factors, including some backlash) pushed priorities back towards morality with a focus patriotism, along with classes on “useful skills” like home economics and machine shop.

Throughout the 20th century as budgets grew, professional teachers and their unions gained influence, and education became near-universal, education policy became more visible. Debates around tracking students and vocational programs emerged among others, and big questions about who should control policy and content gained urgency when the 1965 Education Act put the state front and center for the first time. Over the century the school system also absorbed initiatives, reform movements and debates over (not comprehensive): health and nutrition (free lunch programs); sports and other extracurriculars; sex-ed; counseling and school/career planning; revitalizing STEM; character (grit and growth mindset), and others. This is before even getting to the central role education plays in questions of equal opportunity, with implications in civil rights law (busing, integration), taxation, school choice (charters, voucher programs), and others. All these debates, programs and goals sit on top of the core learning objectives that were the sole focus just 150 years ago: basic morality, social behavior, critical knowledge acquisition.

(A similar confusion of purposes is behind some of the debates about higher education today, as our current institutions maintain the liberal arts traditions modeled after the English aristocracy but have also heavily adopted the German research university model. This leads to an uneasy balance between workforce-ready engineering and broader liberal arts studies, with the lack of role-clarity made more apparent by unanswered questions about the role of internet/remote classes.)

None of this suggests any of these are unimportant, or that they should not be integrated into our school system. However, many pieces have been added ad-hoc, each to serve its own purpose. And when each new piece is added (whether because of new research, or politics, or fads) it’s often patched on rather than integrating with (or clearing out) old ones. This cycle is understandable (why is a whole separate topic). It is also a snowball — it’s easier to keep adding weight to a truck than a scooter. Like an overly complex tax system, merits of each individual policy may start to be outweighed by the crushing weight and confusion of a now-jumbled system.

So whose learning goals should we be solving for? Students’ and society’s. Children are the primary stakeholder. Since a society’s reason for existing is to help its citizens thrive and survive, and in today’s world that requires an education in addition to security and rule of law, some basic level of education is an individual right. Parents and teachers are not themselves stakeholders. Both have a right to input as proxies and the most informed citizens, respectively, but are not themselves stakeholders with their own learning goals.

Society itself is also a stakeholder. If it is investing in each citizen, it should also consider the value education is providing for the broader society (to be more specifically defined later). School in the US and abroad historically had plenty of focus on morality, citizenship and character. And with good reason: we live in groups, so students need to learn to think about themselves as part of a group as well as capable individuals. The best historical predictor of the fall of a society is the decay of morals and character — individuals forgetting what it means to think of and act as part of a group. Learning goals must include fostering that (especially in the US right now).

STARTING WITH LEARNING GOALS

What are the key learning goals of our two stakeholders, students and society? We’ll evaluate the priority of these later; for now my summary of the goals that our education system tries, at least in part, to accomplish:

Student goals:

1. Foundational skills needed for adulthood
2. Ability to reason and problem solve independently
3. Practical skills to be applied to work/home life
4. Intellectual capacity to explore, question, grow as a person
5. Basic moral code (including the norms of the society)
6. Character strengths
7. Knowledge in subjects of students’ own election
8. Physical growth and outlet (sports, recreation, etc.)

Societal goals

1. Individuals that observe rule of law, uphold social norms, do not disturb security
2. Families that support themselves without need for external support
3. Workers with skill that add value to the economy
4. Citizens that participate civically, casting informed votes and otherwise ‘owning’ democracy
5. Communities that maintain national pride + unity while also nurturing their own strengths + values

Some may be tempted to dismiss the societal goals as softer or less important, but this is dangerous and exacerbates the problems of recent history. Student goals seem more familiar and so ‘right’ because we have skewed that way in recent times, as specialized knowledge and competitive jobs pushed individuals (and so schools) towards more self-serving collection of intellect.

Even if you disagree with the goals above — which should be challenged — the point for now is to examine how the lens of goals can be applied to the many things we are working on now. If a middle school math teacher is trying to become more impactful outside that subject, or a state superintendent wants to strengthen her state’s moral character, or a tech billionaire just ‘wants to make the world better,’ how do they decide what to do? They could start by seeing how on-the-ground initiatives (classes) connect to learning goals. The 7 education categories in this diagram (which don’t include enablers like nutrition) could be debated, bucketed and mapped differently of course, but this is my take:

The categorization and goal-mapping allows us to see which goals are served by which programs. We can quickly see that if we are looking to improve society’s civic participation that our levers are specialized classes, humanities and character development. This mapping helps us see options and trace connections, and when we use these categories to look more finely at the more complicated questions in education we start to get a better picture of how best to achieve our learning goals.

EDUCATION ISSUES BY CATEGORY

The goals served by various categories of education are different. So what? This only matters if our approach in how we prioritize and deliver each category, in pursuit of the goals they each serve, should differ meaningfully. There are dozens of important questions in education debates today, many of which contain (very sensitive, political) implications about centralization vs. decentralization. Some particularly pertinent ones:

• What topics should be required (standard curriculum) or optional (privately governed schools)?
• Who should decide on the specific content taught and pedagogy employed?
• How is this learning be efficiently delivered (tech, large group, small group)?
• Where does funding come from, and how much for various topics?
• Should success/achievement be measured for accountability to standards?
• What, if any, effective mechanisms to use to incentivize and if necessary replace stakeholders who don’t measure up to standards?

These hard questions, with trade-offs both ways, should not be answered on a whim or all at once, or the same for ‘all of education.’ They should be examined based on the dimensions that matter and the trade-offs they each imply. For example: whether a given topic is best delivered in small group, large group, or digitally is a function (in part) of how much coaching is needed and how important peer-to-peer contact is to the learning goal. I’ve done this with some example questions for each issue above and ranked each category.

Obviously the categories vary dramatically. Some quick conclusions that you could draw:

• Core topics should be required and highly standardized — required, measured, funded — so every student gets this in high quality, but doesn’t necessarily require in-person/high-attention classes.
• Humanities should be prioritized everywhere, but the content and standard specifics could be left to localities
• On the other hand, critical thinking topics should be more standardized to leverage the more objective and researched nature of the subject
• Character and humanities have the most need for direct instruction, so high demands on teacher skill and time
• Meanwhile specialized, practical and even some core skills could be done through other avenues that are cheaper, more efficient and less burdensome to schools
• Practical and physical education could be distributed, letting centralized focus and funding going to more standards-intensive categories
• Specialized topics could be done primarily outside the centralized system despite standardization benefits due to low priority, funding and direct delivery scores

One way to organize the impact of this analysis further would be to group priority + delivery + funding together to indicate whether each category should be in standardized schools or elsewhere in the education system, then adding content + accountability + measurement to guide whether decisions on each subject should happen centrally or locally. Mapping each category on these two dimensions starts to suggest a picture for the structure of the education system.

These of course are over-generalizations. Digging deeper into the categories and the sub-questions, we can see some nuances that are important to address:

• Humanities: there’s a large gap between high societal benefit (2) and lack of standardization benefits; how to ensure the social benefit without the standards?
• Character: high priority and funding, but how to effect that without standardization, agreed upon norms, or established classes in the subject?
• Specialized: while lower in priority and funding early, some specialized subjects may be critical for students’ success in later education in more specialized higher education
• Practical: some of this experience is needed to prepare students for action along with contemplation, putting ideas to work not just theoretical consideration

The half-answer to all of these is that neither decisions nor implementations are all or nothing. This structure is a starting guide, and the design of the system needs to reflect more nuanced realities. That is not to disregard the data and framework; rather, we should continue to look at the sub-questions and multiple goals served by each category rather than rely solely on the top-level summary. The next section roughly illustrates a system that would orient education more directly around these principles.

ILLUSTRATIVE, STRIPPED DOWN ED. SYSTEM

This exercise has a bias towards decentralization. There are plenty of extremely important goals and initiatives that should be part of the school system, but I’m not too worried about that: there are also plenty of voices lobbying to do and add more in schools. This exercise is meant to balance out the voices trying (with good intentions) to add with a critical eye towards removing what has lingered in the status quo with complicating negative consequences. It follows the principle of subsidiarity: do things at the lowest, most decentralized level they can be efficiently done. This unburdens teachers and schools so they can put more focus and budget on the highest priority responsibilities; it maintains room for experimentation and growth; it makes the system anti-fragile; and it gives agency to communities who clamor for it (so is good politics, even if you err on the side of more ‘expert’ control in education).

Coming back to the dimensions from earlier, we can see a starting structure. School would focus on core skills, critical thinking and humanities, as well as character development, with the first two more standardized across schools, drawing on the best research available to make sure each student gets the most helpful preparation, which can then be tested to incentivize and hold accountable schools and teachers for this education. Humanities — for which testing is harder, general exposure most important, and values diverse — would be left more (though not completely) up to localities. Specialized, practical and physical education could happen more outside of school through other institutions; for example, community publications with journalism classes, vocational training supported by employers, and sports leagues respectively. These are of course generalizations for still-large categories..

Within humanities you may have some nationally mandated (and funded) portions of the curriculum to ensure societal goals like unity, while leaving other parts more distributed. Many programs in the supporting categories (counseling, health) — for example free lunch — obviously may coordinate closely with school systems as that is the institution already in place to reach students. But they could be operated outside the direct purview of principals and others already over-burdened with all that is required to deliver academic education. Similarly, this framework doesn’t suggest that specialized education has no place; just that the focus of our scaled school system with standardized testing, pay-for-merit policies, and mobile teaching force should be foundational skills plus the critical thinking and humanities every student needs. Dance classes, Model UN, sports and agriculture classes are all great, but those can be decided and run (and have funding allocated) more locally. Some types of practical education may make it into some schools, but things like vocational training should be left more to employers or employee training organizations (even within the government), rather than thought of as part of the standard school system.

This structure would keep each institution closely aligned to — and accountable to — the learning goal it is tasked with developing. Principals and teachers would know the areas they are responsible for, which would be the focus of their energy. Sports leagues and clubs would be supported and run separately, providing a different benefit and so operated under a different set of norms and policies and debates. And when people — be it the math teacher, state superintendent or tech billionaire — are aiming to improve education, they would be able to focus more quickly on the right goals and relevant levers when pursuing training, funding, policies and reforms.

This stripping down of the school system is a broad and theoretical vision, based on a series of logical steps from learning goals to education categories to my subjective ratings. I am not advocating that the school system should be stripped down quickly, or even at all. I am advocating for more critical evaluation of education policies. Evaluation that explicitly connects initiatives to learning goals, and that acknowledges side effects of bloat and complication when doing too many things at once. I am advocating for experiments — whether in new schools, radical communities, or international projects where less exists now — that could test how more distributed models might work. Even if the basic system doesn’t change, we can do more to help our educators and ourselves know what we are supposed to be focused on, and what our various programs are aiming to accomplish.