As we begin a conversation around education and its link to society, it seems that a major challenge that faces a learning community is understanding the value that our public schools add to our children, families, cities and towns. After all, there is little point in maintaining public education, and spending the massive amounts of money the system needs to function, if our schools do not add value to our communities. Proponents of education reform often speak about measuring the “success” of our educators by how much “value they add” to their students. By “value added,” these particular reformers are almost always referring to measuring whether students “know more” at the end of the year than they did at the beginning. Making sure every student “knows more” at the end of each school year is certainly a laudable goal. In fact, I sincerely hope that every educator’s students have learned in every one of their courses.
However, when reformers of this “value-added” mind set envision learning, they often envision a linear mode of knowledge attainment (the traditional “fill the bucket” mode of learning), and a type of measurement that values only certain types of learning. Traditionally, these reformers are interested in the Three Rs, and decry other types of learning as extraneous or “not real learning.”
This is unfortunate, because while educators, more than ever, are being measured by their students’ performances on standardized tests (multiple tests, administered multiple times a year), these examinations don’t even begin to measure all of the other areas in which our children are learning and growing. Additionally, the time dedicated to the types of learning that are measured by these standardized tests is reduced every year by the new types of learning (mentioned above) and other initiatives that compete for time during the school day.
Jamie Vollmer, progressive reform advocate and author of the powerful text Schools Cannot do it Alone (© 2010 by Jamie Vollmer), has created what he calls the “Increasing Burden on America’s Schools,” and which other industry advocates simply refer to as “Vollmer’s List.” Consider the massive amount of curricular, co-curricular and extra-curricular programs that have been added to education in the last century:
From 1900 to 1910, we shifted to the school responsibilities related to:
- Nutrition
- Immunization
- Health (Activities in the health arena multiply every year.)
From 1910 to 1920, we added:
- Physical education (including organized athletics)
- The Practical Arts/Domestic Science/Home economics (including sewing and cooking)
- Vocational education (including industrial and agricultural education)
- Mandated school transportation
In the 1940s, we added:
- Business education (including typing, shorthand, and bookkeeping)
- Art and music
- Speech and drama
- Half-day kindergarten
- School lunch programs (We take this for granted today, but it was a huge step to shift to the schools the job of feeding America’s children one third of their daily meals.)
In the 1950s, we added:
- Expanded science and math education
- Safety education
- Driver’s education
- Expanded music and art education
- Stronger foreign language requirements
- Sex education (Topics continue to escalate.)
In the 1960s, we added:
- Advanced Placement programs
- Head Start
- Title I
- Adult education
- Consumer education (resources, rights and responsibilities)
- Career education (options and entry level skill requirements)
- Peace, leisure, and recreation education
In the 1970s, the break up of the American family accelerated, and we added:
- Drug and alcohol abuse education
- Parenting education (techniques and tools for healthy parenting)
- Behavior adjustment classes (including classroom and communication skills)
- Character education
- Special education (mandated by federal government)
- Title IX programs (greatly expanded athletic programs for girls)
- Environmental education
- Women’s studies
- African-American heritage education
- School breakfast programs (Now some schools feed America’s children two-third of their daily meals throughout the school year and all summer. Sadly, these are the only decent meals some children receive.)
In the 1980s, the floodgates opened, and we added:
- Keyboarding and computer education
- Global education
- Multicultural/Ethnic education
- Nonsexist education
- English-as-a-second-language and bilingual education
- Teen pregnancy awareness
- Hispanic hertigae education
- Early childhood education
- Jump Start, Early Start, Even Start, and Prime Start
- Full-day kindergarten
- Preschool programs for children at risk
- After-school programs for children of working parents
- Alternative education in all its forms
- Stranger/danger education
- Sexual abuse prevention education
- Expanded health and psychological services
- Child abuse monitoring (a legal requirement for all teachers)
In the 1990s, we added:
- Conflict resolution and peer mediation
- HIV/AIDS education
- CPR training
- Death education
- America 2000 initiatives (Republican)
- Inclusion
- Expanded computer and internet education
- Distance learning
- Tech Prep and School to Work programs
- Technical Adequacy Assessment
- Post-secondary enrollment options
- Concurrent enrollment options
- Goals 2000 initiatives (Democrat)
- Expanded Talented and Gifted opportunities
- At-risk and dropout prevention
- Homeless education (including causes and effects on children)
- Gang education (urban centers)
- Service learning
- Bus safety, bicycle safety, gun safety, and water safety education
In the first decade of the twenty-first century, we have added:
- No Child Left Behind (Republican)
- Bully prevention
- Anti-harassment policies (gender, race, religion, or national origin)
- Expanded early childcare and wrap around programs
- Elevator and escalator safety instruction
- Body Mass Index evaluation (obesity monitoring)
- Organ donor education and awareness programs
- Personal financial literacy
- Entrepreneurial and innovation skills development
- Media literacy development
- Contextual learning skill development
- Health and wellness programs
- Race to the Top (Democrat)
What are the implications of Vollmer’s List? While deeper meaning may be more challenging to glean, initial observations should come fairly easily. As it stands, public educators have taken on (fairly or unfairly) these additional duties, roles and programs, as prescribed by their superintendents and Boards, and as accepted (implicitly or explicitly) by the community, without, as Vollmer points out in Schools, “a single minute being added to the school calendar” during the time that these changes were made. Clearly, this is a difficult problem, since the additions are important (the world our students live in is not the world of the early 1900s, or even the world of the 1950s that many of our community members are so fond of recalling). However, every new program diverts an educator’s attention away from the Three R’s that reformers, parents, Boards, and employers are so concerned about. With no new resources (“0% budgets” and deep cuts in instructional and professional development funds are routine) and no new time (the calendar doesn’t get any longer for students in most states), educators are literally being asked “to do more with less (newly-elected Maine Governor Paul LePage campaigned on this phrase, as if it was a promise).”
The challenge will be for communities to strike an appropriate balance. In a broader sense, Vollmer’s List shows an education community that has become extremely reactive, at least in the second half of the 20th Century, attempting to make up for a community’s shortcomings, rather than proactive, working with the members of their community to a) acknowledge that there is only so much time in the day, b) deciding which needs are most important and how to implement improvement, and c) following through with the needed changes. Once communities are ready to take on this proactive approach, our public schools can focus like a laser-beam on the issues that are most important to them, and improve outcomes, rather than drift like a life raft without room for all its passengers. It is incumbent upon parents, business leaders, Boards, superintendents and educators to begin this discussion.
