American Manifesto Part Five: Education Section One

American Manifesto Part Five: Education Section One

               

"Education is the progressive realization of our ignorance." Albert Einstein. 

The Economic Consequences of Education

Education is our greatest asset to create a population of self-sustaining taxpayers.  Implied flawed capitalist logic may misguide us to believe that if we spend more money on education there will be a direct correlation to a net social tax benefit.  We hear this argument whenever we face a budget crisis and we discuss cutting education, because politicians know the threat will light a fire under the citizenry to support tax increases.  So why if we spend more on education than any other country on Earth, do we have some of the most inefficient public education systems in the western world? 

America has been anesthetized by a fear of pointing out the limitations of our children.  We have bathed ourselves in the misguided notion that every child is special and has the inherent capabilities to follow down a similar academic path from high school, four years of college, into a bachelor’s degree in fill in the blank that will then proclaim to the world that we are here forward educated. 

The reality is most of our inherent intellectual potential is determined by genetics and those with high potential will probably succeed despite an inefficient system and those with moderate to low potential will struggle and fall out of a one-size-fits-all system.  Education becomes devalued when its by-product does not lead to a path of self-sustaining life skills. 

"The only purpose of education is to teach a student how to live his life-by developing his mind and equipping him to deal with reality.  The training he needs is theoretical, i.e., conceptual. He has to be taught to think, to understand, to integrate, to prove.  He has to be taught the essentials of the knowledge discovered in the past-and he has to be equipped to acquire further knowledge by his own effort."

Ayn Rand

A working capitalist society is a mapped out on an x y axis of compensation paid for work skills that we can provide that others can not or are unwilling to provide.  If we start to artificially manipulate either extreme of the rewards too much for low skills or high skills the system will become dysfunctional.  Currently available governmental assistance programs providing guaranteed direct payments and housing subsidies for the poor create a framework of financial dependence and a disincentive to obtain the skills necessary to elevate tax-system integrated compensation above the threshold amount that would disallow the acquisition of base governmental benefits.  The same is true for the drug war, which sabotages the educational system on the bottom end, by circumventing the tax system under the travesty of prohibition.

"Economic growth without social progress lets the great majority of people remain in poverty, while a privileged few reap the benefits of rising abundance." John F. Kennedy

On the high end, when the top jobs in American corporate organizations bare compensation at thousands of times higher than the average employee in that organization, it creates a disaggregation between the goals of management and the goals of labor.  Lifestyles of excess and rationalized superiority are being subsidized off of the work of the hundreds of people creating the base of a work product that the one management level individual can manipulate. 

If management chooses short-term rather than long-term good of the company to boost current period profits the company will perish and current management is enriched.  Cost externalities of maintaining infrastructure and product development are often ignored to increase the current quarter’s bottom line and then funneled out the door through bonuses instead of long-term company sustaining assets. 

As larger businesses have become publically traded the checks and balances of ownership on management to conserve profit-motivations for long-term sustainability have been decimated because here today-gone tomorrow day traders are concerned with now.  Traditional “I built this company from the ground up” owners are often more concerned with tomorrow and a legacy for the vested nature of their life’s work.  This dynamic is where corporate raider capital and investment firms destroy our economy like insatiable vampires draining all the blood, rather than letting a body live to feed again for years.

In a free market system, top end earnings are inherently limitless, but corporate citizenship should create a boundary.  In an unlimited environment at some point the level of output on the top-end becomes unsustainable because the fixed cost of maintaining the base of labor to support that cost out weighs the value of the management-level employee’s input.  In almost all wage systems, compensation does not marginally decrease based on the profit of the company.  In some profit-based bonus compensation models usually for top-end employees, when profits decline the entire company falls apart because short-term debt obligations are over leveraged based on meeting an over zealous escalation in profit expectation because of management’s myopic vision set on profit and not company sustainability. 

Corporate citizenship mandates any organization consider the negative externalities that the creation of their products either in the supply or demand chains brings to their markets and ultimately the world that may be technically legal, but questionable.  Environmental impacts of carbon emissions, deforestation, price fixing, exploiting the poor, encouraging criminal activity, assisting foreign nations over the domestic nation, funding healthcare for internal employees, and most common of all doing the bare minimum to meet the standards of governmental regulations all represent costs that a corporation may choose to externalize rather than internalize and make more profit by doing so particularly in a global market place. 

These types of issues are at the heart of business ethics and typically only through the mutual assurance provided through a regulating entity funded through government or industry membership will an entity choosing to internalize these types of costs not be penalized in a market place where its competitors can provide their products at a lower market price for not doing so.  Government regulations through criminal and civil penalties need to be in place for this reason.

In today’s global market place the regulations in one country such as China are often more lax and allow an American company to exploit human beings in a way that their “domestic” business ethics may not tolerate.  If we remove or never implement these regulations the economic and environmental fallouts plastered across our nightly news casts can ensue.  The cheaper foreign products we got the opportunity to purchase will be paid for ten-fold through higher domestic taxes to pay for the social impact on our people for the temporary cost externalities of exploiting a foreign nation’s workers and the decay of our only Earth.  

Most people in America are not in either a corporate position or living off our fellow taxpayers.  We work in small businesses supporting the infrastructure of this country with mortgage payments correlated to our income streams.  We feel caught in the middle and taken for granted. 

The American education system made our expectations settle in our internal drives.  That expectation can lead to stagnation to accept the standard.  The problem is that the standard on the bottom end is too often falling out.  The average person is paying tax upon tax for a public education system.  In some cases taxpayers bypass their children’s enrollment for a private solution and tolerate the action as an acceptable casualty in poor service by their government.  

On a conservative approach the government spends at least forty percent more to educate a child than private institutions.  The private system only has ten percent of the population of students including select concerned parents with few special needs children.  So how can we do a better job on our whole population? 

Private schooling is inherently more adaptable to tailor itself into what the student population who chooses to attend the school desires rather than mandate itself to a one-size-fits-all system required by governmental law.  However the logistics of getting a child in a physical area to that school are real.  The logistics of a school of round holes and square-peg kids sitting on the sidelines are real.  How can we address these constraints?  We need to discuss how hybrid private-public partnership charter schools with local management and federal-digital assets can provide a menu for parents to pair a tailored education to a student independent of physical location.

An American Education

There is not one correct way to educate a child.  There are lots of wonderful people in this world coming from differing backgrounds that end up with a common capability, but fulfill that capability through dissimilar methods.  We can adapt our education system to provide a menu for parents to choose from particularly in secondary education by using new technologies to overcome problematic logistics and maintain the spirit of acts like the American with Disabilities Act that covers learning disabilities.  The key is allowing school administrators to adapt to the needs of their student population preferably within the same physical building, but offer teachers at these schools access to additional federally-coordinated assets via cloud-based educational computing. 

Parents know their child and want to assist their child on a path that fits their child’s talents.  That’s Darwinian.  We often insulate our children from failing.  We postpone giving them the opportunity to grow into thinkers or force them to make adult decisions about their lives with sufficient supporting information.  Children fail in the proverbial nest because they are not sufficiently challenged.  

If the government created an avenue for post-elementary public schools to champion more student and parent-elected courses and in more cases have admissions processes based on aptitude in these areas, the gap between parental disinterest and an instructor’s ability to communicate a child’s classroom aptitude and performance information would be reduced. 

Digital classrooms and presentations could be utilized as dynamic supplements to reach student interest.  Why can’t some courses be taught in a laboratory of laptops and headphones on certain lecture levels to allow scattered junior high and high school students to select courses offered on a nation-wide level?  Why can’t a teacher be more of a hovering guide to redirect a student as he or she navigates tailored software that moves at the student’s speed? 

Training could ooze like a coagulant to clot the knowledge gap inside each mind.  The software can skip sections that are well-understood or optional and disinteresting to the student and focus on areas that are weak or optional and intriguing to the student.  Old school lecturers have to give one message to a full-class.  The future is individual-based learning.

This paradigm shift surpasses the logistical limitations of geography and connects learners with premium centers of excellence in subject matters designed by the best-of-the-best our nation has to offer.  We can expose our students to great thinkers of varied backgrounds so that when the students intercept the discipline that their brain is best suited for the knowledge may resonate to transform a thinker into a future doer correlated with that student’s available skill set.

How are students supposed to have any clue of what actual daily professional activities in a career are without people in those fields advising or showing them the reality of jobs and the monetary and family/work life balance aspects of those career choices?  So many children inefficiently follow their parent’s career path.  This happens because a parent’s career predominates the small spectrum of career options the student has been exposed.  How can we reach children with parents in prison?  How can we use changes in the way we communicate and instruct to overcome these logistical challenges?

 

Digital Evolution

We live in a global and fluid professional environment.  The expansion of teleconferencing and telecommunications technologies into the modern classroom are paramount for the adaptation of our learning environments to assimilate students into their out of school environments.  These technologies are becoming less expensive to utilize and more of an accepted norm rather than a futuristic novelty.  The costs of the creation and instruction of specialized programs in music, sciences, mathematics, and social sciences can be reduced by the utilization of these technologies on a federal level.

How many students can a teacher instruct at one time?  What if there are no students in the room? What if students live in different school districts or states?  What if there are three hundred students from four grade levels in one room?  What if the teacher is pre-recorded?  What if lectures became homework and practice problems became class?

Academics and practioners of knowledge bases can design universal courses of instruction in various subject matters on an annual or bi-annual basis designed as tablet-based applications or web-based software.  We should design the second grade math app, the fifth grade Language Arts app, the seventh grade science app. etc.  Then we should allow school-districts to choose functionality and components inside those applications to present on a class basis inside each school and then allow teachers in that class selections by student in that class in some instances based on the capabilities of that student.  

In most cases allow the student’s own interaction with the software to present focused-information to the student. Communicate this pace to the local instructor digitally.  Empower the instructor closest to the student with the digital aid of our entire country to help each kid.  Principals, teachers, and students could all communicate and evolve best practices to feed back into the applications.  Give Americans the conduit to self-direct and unleash creativity.

The base needs to be led by a United States Department of Education headed by educators with access to information technology professionals that can integrate educational concepts and factual content.  Educators need to guide the design of software and systems to deliver dynamic information that works inside a progressive classroom environment targeted by grade level. 

Allow school systems from all fifty states to have brainstorming teams for each grade from pre-K through 12^th, take one representative from those teams for fifty people for each grade to meet, galvanize through democratic vote core issues and teaching points for a lesson plan by grade.  Incorporate options for a 365 day learning experience from August first through July 31^st each year for the life of an educator to choose from for what it means to teach that grade level in America to each type of student those brainstorming sessions identified.  Meld that knowledge into software created by IT people as a base. 

Build web-based software with those goals and update and evolve it every year forward to allow the local educator to choose from a core of curriculum options on how to teach mathematics or fourth grade English to each specific kid in his or her classroom.  Not every kid in that fourth grade is going to get the exact same presentation, but in the end the core skills are presented in a pace to that child in a manner that the digital instructor can go over it twenty times if need be: in the class, at home, on the bus, but we reach that kid.  The local instructor is aware of the repetition, success or struggle.  This is how no child gets left behind.

These classes will create an economy of scaled-learning tweaked and designed by educators for educators.  This also requires readdressing state rights versus federal rights legal changes in the administrative funding of education in America, which is the greatest hurdle from such a system ever previously occurring. 

Types of Classroom Days

                Education in America could be divided into three types of classroom days. 

1. Live or prerecorded lectured instruction via digital teleconference or pre-recorded video or pre-designed software in a streamlined presentation created and administered on a federal level.  Software will adapt based on needs or retention of student.

2. Live in-class point to point instruction supporting and integrated with the digital instruction that allows local discretion.

3. Examination days administered through a digital interface designed by and funded on a federal level with local discretion to edit questions, but be graded digitally.

On the first type of instruction these dynamic courses could be led through a combination of live instruction via teleconference and pre-recorded lectures or pre-designed software on more standardized materials.  Regular teachers could still be in class or they could be teaching a different class depending on what that school chooses for their budget and their students.  Students during the live teleconference could email in questions to a teacher’s assistant and then email or message back replies to that student, that class or all students based on the instructor’s judgment. 

Help databases could be built in software’s designed for the course utilized on a student’s laptop while taking the course to respond to frequently asked questions and links to additional information with the expansion of an IBM Watson type infrastructure to interact with students.  Homework could be emailed or set up on a message board that both students and parents could see.  Parts of this is already in use, but the cloud-based software needs to be more dynamic and expansive.

One school could have a single classroom computer lab setup with one moderator of the room, with thirty students taking eighteen different courses with the use of headphones, screens and keyboards.  Dual monitors could display bullet point formatted notes correlated with lectures. Students could edit or add as desired.  The moderator becomes a guide to actually create more one-on-one time as questions arise.

Modern students communicate digitally in their daily life.  Many children have grown up with some combination of the internet, cell phones, console and hand-held gaming as givens.  The speed at which change occurs in their environment is exponentially faster than previous generations.  A child that acquires most of his or her out of classroom information via a computer monitor, iPad or cell phone demonstrates an increased attention in continuing to acquire educational material via that medium in the modern classroom experience.  However the poverty gap in America needs to address providing these tools and internet access to poorer homes.  We will discuss this gap later on.

Tools for the Modern Classroom

Why do we still need paper textbooks?  Why not laptops or electronic tablets that go with the student or computers that remain in the classroom for younger children?  Colleges are adapting.  Electronic bi-fold out tablets some numbered generation from now iPad or Android will replicate a bound book with a two screen tablet capable of opening and closing.  If we put two screens on the inside with protective backings on the outside so when a fourth grader sits on it or drops it, the iPad when folded does not break.  Sometimes, one screen could be controlled by the teacher, the other by the student.  We will have a revolutionary paradigm shifting educational tool that simulates our accustomed traditional human experience.  Microsoft Surface is also coming, which could revolutionize the concept of a desk or a projection blackboard into fully interactive tangible learning tools

It is cheaper and more efficient to provide updated material on a timelier basis by supplying web-based software and software updates than printing textbooks.  It seems inevitable that just as newspapers are a dying method to deliver our daily information due to the lack of speed, environmental impact, and limited reach, we will replace the physical textbook with a digital one. 

What is the cost of a textbook?  The cost is primarily in the printing and distribution.  The cost of the knowledge is negligible in comparison.  The cost of the knowledge is in the update of inherent facts and principles of learning that for the most part do not change much from year to year in pre-college level classrooms.  We never had the tools to operate this way before.  We are on the precipice.  We have no more need for a book store, a freight truck or a warehouse or a printing press or to fell the timber from our environment. 

Digital instruction into the classroom should expand as a child ages, but even on a pre-school level, children can interact with a computer or a tablet.  Four-year-olds can utilize educational software prospering reading, math, sorting, art, and spatial recognition skills as a supplement to classroom environments. 

Knowledge is no longer confined to the words in a book or the mouth of an educator, but swarms around us like oxygen itself in a digital-atmosphere waiting for us to simply breathe.  It is up to professional educators to cannibalize their egos to admit the current system can be improved often at the cost of their numbers and historic practices.  Future college lectures will be to digital cameras not thousand-year tradition lecture halls.  The acknowledgment and transition to a modern digitally-integrated paradigm will truncate some members out the profession and allow others to shine in a digital classroom norm.

We can utilize a system of interactive questions based on the subject matter being instructed or previously instructed that come up on the student’s logged-in screen in different orders and patterns in the form of multiple choice questions that have to be responded to within a certain time frame to access if the student logged-in is attentively listening to the subject matter.  This system overcomes the limitations of only being able to call on one student at a time for feedback or a student timid to raise her or his hand in front of the other students, but can be identified digitally by the instructor.  Inversely this forces student’s who rarely want to raise their hand to be more involved.

Based on the accuracy of responses the teacher not only provides the student an automatic consequence for not-listening, but provides a timely feedback of the effectiveness of the lesson on the student that a non-digital format could not provide.  Multiple choice questions could be systematically proposed in a random order so that students could not just ask or look on the screen next to them for the answer and the video and audio monitoring of the classroom could be reviewed in the event cheating was alleged.  The costs of designing such “quizzes” would be spread over the hundreds of classrooms receiving the lessons.  The results could be tracked in a profile based on the log-in and either digitally graded or used as a tool to help the student on weak areas.  Take-home paper grading for teachers is dead.

For classroom days as described in parts one and three earlier we can also have larger classrooms set up as computer labs with headphones for cloud-based instruction and teachers available for questions and disciplinary oversight where fewer in-class personnel can cover more students.

Students should be able to take laptops or tablets home with them to facilitate this change.  Ultimately the costs of computers and equipment to facilitate the system will get less and less expensive.  The idea of a laptop being an educational supply commensurate with a history book purchased for each student by a school board seems inevitable and also cheaper and more efficient for the goal of educating our children particularly if the U.S. Department of Education is designing most of the software to be used across the country.  The USDE can hire teams of educators to update information via cloud computing rather than buying software licenses for each laptop form for profit software manufactures like Microsoft.  The web-based software is installed an updated in server-cities, not on each machine. 

Can you imagine if the Federal government said we were going to spend eight billion dollars to fund a fifth grade digital education application instead of a bomber that we have never used in combat?

The idea that a school board would have to pay several hundred dollars per user for a software license would be gone, because the taxpayers would own the software.  If the U.S. government has a dynamic daily lesson for each grade and each function level for each subject that is put on the cloud and every kid in America that is in that learning pool goes to that subject for that class on that day for that lesson, why would there ever be a fee paid by the school? 

As the programs become more advanced, classroom versions could run these tablets where teachers could gain wireless control over the twenty-two tablets in the classroom and keep younger children navigated.  A monitoring station could also be developed to connect for the teacher to see or control at least one page of each student’s iPad on a split-screen during the class for disciplinary and educational purposes.  A simple screen that shows a split-grid of twenty-five screen shots of the student controlled tablet or laptop in the room could monitor rouge internet use.  Social media sites could be blocked.  The teacher’s tablet could be integrated with a desk top and an in-class digital overhead projector chalk board as many schools use today.

Children could respond to a question at the same time rather than kids needing to raise hands.  Design interfaces by grade level.  Use mass multiple-choice responses with instant classroom polling.  

Concentrate national resources on digital lesson plans and allow individual schools to sculpt curriculum inside a menu of options inside those plans to reach each kid under their responsibility.  Teachers could focus on teaching the information with the assistance of the digital environment and reduce paper work.  Tests could be graded by a computer program.  Written essays could be analyzed for key-words using optical character recognition techniques compared against pre-designated key-words from the teacher to score points to reduce grading time.  If we can spend trillions of dollars on aircraft carriers and tanks, why can’t we utilize the asset of safety our wars have “earned” and shift a small portion of that cost to transform education?

Software can already effectively translate a student’s printing or script on a tablet into typed digital input.  Tablets could have a folder for each class.  Store notes, Power Point or Good Reader presentations and homework assignments in a pre-downloaded hierarchy of pre-organized folders for students in some combination by the federal design and the local educator’s manipulation that adapts annually. 

All of this could be stored on a cloud server owned by the government to provide storage and control by the educator.  The teacher’s master unit could take over each student’s pad in the room and sort homework or prompt assignments to be started to maintain class time work flow.

Homework assignments could be in an online folder complete with links to digital videos or auditory files with questions, guidance or tutoring.  Reading assignments could be read to students in applicable cases.  This will replace the old “read chapter five” and instead of just answering the questions in the back the student could have a digital form to respond.  Voice recognition software that converts speech into typed words could assist dyslexic students. Homework could be graded digitally by the software instead of manually by teachers. 

School systems could have Skype-type afterschool tutors to help with that specific homework assignment.  Call centers of tutors located in the Pacific time-zone could answer the nation’s children as homework progresses each evening.  Students could log-in for frequently asked questions.  Every fifth grader in America is taking that course in that semester and could look to the same source to decipher the trouble points of that particular assignment.  Individual school systems could have Skype-tutors available for “Log me in”-type assistance for multiple grade levels without the teacher having to leave her home.  Students could Skype each other as they do now to complete homework.  Two sided cameras on iPad two’s create instant digital face-to-face meetings.

Power-Point-type presentations could be designed on state or national levels. (Many come with textbooks now.)  Teachers could edit as desired by the school or educator rather than creating from scratch.  Teachers could select from multiple available options for his or her classroom.  Students would carry around a small laptop-type bag or just their tablet.  No more lockers and swapping out books, maybe just battery-charging devices.  Time and space is saved and available for education.

Every book could be auditory and visual.  A student could have Shakespeare read to them in different character’s voices over a set of head phones and each word could be highlighted as read.  Video could be inserted directly into text books.  Links to websites and moments in history could be at the touch of a screen.  The world of fifty years ago or today could be alive in every classroom.  Dyslexic students could learn in a way specifically adapted for their form of dyslexia for their brain without overtly social ostracizing the student. 

Student examinations could be built into the software that replaces the textbook to provide digital grading for subjects where it is pertinent.  Secure access to this information could be made through digital-changing key codes provided by the instructor at the beginning of the examination unique to the student’s log-in.  This should reduce the administrative time required by teachers. 

The at-home effect of the confluence of these digital technologies could also tip the scales in taxpayer-funded national Wi-Fi domestic internet access facilitated through school enrollments to mitigate the risks of computer hacking and identity theft concerns by participants. This could also be subsidized with standard-dollar tax credits.  Link discounted internet access thorough cable companies to student’s on discounted federal lunch programs.  Make the discounts a part of franchise agreements with municipalities. Greatest of all these advances would catapult public education above private education galvanizing taxpayers around a mutual motivation to better public education.  But what is private education?  Is there even a best educational avenue?  Does there need to be?

Local management could be a non-profit charter.  It could be a district public school.  It could be a private school that is religious or secular.  Partner local management with federal assets under contractual student and teacher performance-based agreements.  If we all pay for the software and give parents the option of where they want their child to attend then that software should be a mutual asset shared by every school. 

Other public funding should not go to religious schools based on the separation of church and state, but the software itself, and the performance evaluation tools integrated into that software need to be a standard asset we give to each student in America independent and partnered with parental choice based on the minimal marginal cost in sharing that asset with additional schools once the asset is created and fairness.
Continued Pt 5 Education Section Two