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Few issues get more political attention this year than education, as evidenced by the rally with hundreds of Colorado teachers and administrators at the capitol last week, all united in their opposition to our governor's proposal to issue letter grades to schools.
On the national level, the presumptive nominees of both major parties have focused on it. Vice-President Al Gore wants to increase federal spending on education, something that comes naturally for a Democrat.
Texas Gov. George W. Bush has pointed to school reforms in the Lone Star state during his state house tenure, and even a major Bush non-fan like Molly Ivins writes that it is something he cares deeply about and fights for.
All these proposals and contentions may be appropriate, especially in an election year, but they may all be missing the point.
The American system of public education took root after the Civil War as the nation moved from an agricultural to an industrial economy, and it still carries that DNA.
The school schedule is a remnant of the days when most Americans lived on farms and the children were needed to help tend the fields during the summer growing season.
So why not change it, and use those expensive facilities all year?
For one thing, those facilities often lack air conditioning, making them uncomfortable or worse in the summer. For another, our economy has too much invested in the current schedule.
Many teachers chose that profession because they like that schedule, and it's understandable that they would object to substantial changes.
In tourist zones -- note that travel and tourism are the largest industry in the world -- the summer-off schedule has two benefits. Local kids are free to take summer jobs, and this provides a cheap seasonal labor supply to local employers. And families from elsewhere come on their vacations in the summer when their kids are out of school.
The importance of the latter connection hit me about 20 years ago, when I was editing the local daily. The tourist flow here usually begins on Memorial Day weekend, but that year, the flow from out-of-state was a trickle that produced lamentations from local merchants. Where were our tourists?
Most of our tourist families then came from the Midwest, where it had been a hard winter with sub-zero blizzards that closed the schools several times. Those days had to be made up in June.
The last day of school came late in Illinois, which delayed vacations, and that cost Salida merchants plenty in lost business. Such are the collateral effects of school schedules.
But that's just one industry. Recall that American public education took form as the nation was industrializing. Then consider the power of industry, that it could take raw materials and transform them into useful items -- quickly, cheaply and by the millions.
Little wonder that people were impressed, and tried to apply the efficient and robust industrial model to other settings, like public education.
And so we have schools that run like factories. Send in the raw materials, process them in specified ways for a certain interval, and you should get standardized products of varying grades of quality.
Further, schools inculcate certain skills, like responding to bells and standing in line, that are also important for factory work.
There are two problems with the factory model. One is
that factories need somewhat standardized raw materials --
a copper smelter needs retooling to work with gold
concentrates. But as society has changed, our schools'
raw materials
have become more diverse, and yet we
still have a system designed to process children from
middle-class two-parent homes.
The other is that the number of factory jobs continues to decline relative to the number of other jobs in the economy, and the ability to respond to bells and stand in line is less important than the ability to identify problems and find solutions.
Until our candidates start addressing this structural problem in American education -- its reliance on an industrial model that never fit all that well anyway -- then it's hard to believe that any of their proposed reforms or spending will make much difference. It's like applying a fresh coat of paint to a house with a crumbling foundation.
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