A New Paradigm for Excellence in American Education

Stallard and Cocker examine why America's schools continue failing to meet children's and society's needs. It explains why the present system cannot be reformed and why a new vision of how children and youth prepare for adulthood must replace it. The process begins with making School Choice a national option. Doing so will create a market for educational services beyond what traditional schools can provide. Their thesis holds that conventional schools are organized around teaching, not learning and that current schools' design and resources were developed to facilitate teaching, not learning. The new paradigm is all about learning and how to support each learner through the process of becoming educated. The early chapters examine how schools became incapable over the past several decades. It looks at the basic assumptions about what a school should be and what it should try to accomplish. In a search for a clear and achievable purpose for schools, they explain how schools have been left to define goals for themselves and how to achieve them without input from the scientific community or guidance from a government that funds and sets standards and regulations for their operation. In an age of political correctness, they dare to examine the role of culture and environment in how and what individual children can do when they get to school. Drawing on the science of genetics, epigenetics, learning science, and neuroscience, they examine how today's child differs from those of only a few decades ago and how schools have yet to recognize these changes and adapt to the learning needs they impose. Showing that schools were designed initially to support the work of teachers more than meet the needs of individual learners with unique abilities and motivations, they make the case that the current model cannot be reformed, reorganized, or amended to meet the challenge. Part of the inability is the lack of understanding of what learning is, how the process differs for different types of learning, and how formal abstract learning of school subjects is complicated for today's child. As the current struggle around curriculum issues clearly shows, it has also contributed to our schools' failure. Drawing upon the structure of knowledge domains, the authors examine how today's curriculum no longer resembles the logical subjects of study that were the heart of formal education for most of the nation's history. They explain how what schools teach has been appropriated for social engineering purposes and how that practice has introduced many learning obstacles for students of all ability levels. They offer an approach to curriculum development supported with learning resources schools and teachers could never produce and show how it can be presented in whatever style or medium best suited for individual learners. Both the curriculum and the delivery system they propose are designed for students to experience success before moving ahead, thereby eliminating failure after failure, which leads to behavior problems and ultimately dropping out of school. The authors explain why Education as a career is not a profession and why there is no Science of Education, and examine how teachers are trained and certified. They cite research in other fields that could improve learning and explain why that knowledge has yet to be applied to teacher education or K-12 classrooms. They show how government bureaucracies have impeded the adoption of more effective practices and new insights from psychology and neuroscience and why their role needs to change. Having made a case for the end of schooling as we know it, they offer a better alternative that will be much less expensive and more flexible regarding when, where, and how students study. Their Web of Learning organizes the vital elements needed for academic success. It is adaptable to the new kinds of learners coming to school today. The Web Of Learning utilizes the power of Adaptive Computing, Virtual and Augmented Reality, and advances in signal processing technologies, among others, to eliminate the repetitive process of teacher-made lessons and assessments. The complex learning and management system they propose removes the need for many who serve in school administration and redefines the traditional roles of teachers. Their system serves learners one at a time. The experience is wholly individualized, and its delivery is managed lesson-by-lesson to ensure the learner completes it successfully. They describe how Adaptive Computing and biosensing technologies will monitor learners' cognitive and emotional states at all times and adjust teaching resources to overcome whatever obstacle prevents success. The concluding chapters examine each technology in detail and describe its role in the system. Further, the authors explain why the Edu-tech Industry has yet to produce the resources they portray and why School Choice and the free market will be the driving force for its creation and adoption. Their defined process for its development, including teaching resources and curricula, will ensure the system's integrity in the future and guide the development of a broad range of new specialized learning resources that will address learning disabilities and deficiencies that are unlikely to appear if the present system is retained. While the paradigm does not eliminate the role of government in education, it narrows its input into setting standards and certification. If there is hope for more equity and excellence in American education, this is how it will be found