Nostalgia For The Past Or Vision For The Future

Nostalgia for the Past or Vision for the Future Where did our education system go off the rails?

Canada Settlement School, Oneida Twp, District No 1 Fractional, Eaton County, Michigan Yes, the name is almost as big as the school.

Paul Richardson

Preface I am a fairly unusual person. I don’t know many people my age who attended a rural, one-room school. I consider myself fortunate because I had that experience for K6thgrade. I am fortunate not only because I got an excellent foundation during my time there in math, reading, writing, grammar, geography, social studies and history, but for many other reasons as well. I have been concerned for years that our education system is not working well. Far too many kids are passing through the system without acquiring the skills they need for success in the real world of work. Too many children are put in a position of limited potential because the system failed to prepare them to succeed in the increasingly rigorous global competition. I have studied the education system in great depth for over six years and have found enough problems to fill an encyclopedia. This will not be an encyclopedia but will point out the biggest problems I have found. If you look at the picture of the school you will see a large stump in the foreground. During the time I spent at the school the tree was there. It was a large and spreading Poplar. It gave great shade during spring, summer and early fall. It is too bad that it is no longer there. Of course, the school has been unused for decades too, which in its own way is also sad. Society has traded a very low cost and effective education alternative for a much more expensive one with a huge fleet of fuel-guzzling buses ranging far and wide over the countryside, big schools, bureaucratized structures and certainly less care and commitment to the children’s individualized education needs.

Memories On a bright September day in 1948, my Mom and I walked down the rural gravel road to the one-room school for my first day of kindergarten. I had looked forward to school for years it seemed. School was important to my parents. My Mom had graduated from high school but my father had finished 11th grade when his father and brother died of strep infection complications and he was left as the only one to work the farm for his mother and sisters and was forced to drop out. They both had good fundamental educations though and they realized the importance of education for their children. I was an only child that first day of kindergarten but knew that wouldn’t last long as Mom was expecting. We walked along with other kids my age who were starting school that day too. There were six of us which represented the vanguardof the coming baby boom. The Canada Settlement School was a substantial brick building which looked large to a five-year old. Mom kissed me sayinggood bye and to be good at the front door. I climbed up the three concrete steps to the door and went in. The hallway had coat hooks on both sides (unused on that day), and entrances to the boys and girls bathrooms on either side of the hall. At the end of the short hall was the entrance to the “one room” of the school. The front of the room was to the right. There was the teacher’s big desk and a filing cabinet to the right center of the front area. Also there was a big coal stove centered in the front area. To the left were blackboards on both the front and right wall around the corner and the teacher’s recitation table. I need to say a bit about the coal stove. The teacher would come very early in the cold weather so that she could get the fire going and the fire box fed with coal to get the temp to an acceptable level before the kids arrived for the school start. The teachers in the one-room schools were a “one-man-band” to be sure. They were the janitor, teacher, principal, superintendent, curriculum and admin department all rolled into one person. There was no communication problem between the different functions unless they resided in the head of the teacher which was not something I ever experienced. Luckily, by the time I was in the second grade the utility company put a gas line down the road in front of the school and the school board decided to put in a gas furnace with ducting andthermostat which was a big burden off the teacher’s shoulders. The desks were all in rows facing the front of the classroom. At the rear was the library in one corner (actually a floor to ceiling book shelf about ten feet wide). In the other rear corner was a sink where we cleaned up after doing art (painting, cutting, gluing, etc.) and washed up before eating our lunches. Kindergarten was mornings only so we didn’t have to bring a lunch that first year. Most had lunch pails with room for a small thermos in one end. The classroom had big windows on three sides and had an airy feel with its very high ceiling.

To start the day the teacher rang the large bell mounted in the belfry above the entrance hall by pulling the rope hanging down through a hole in the ceiling to call the older kids playing on the ball diamond into the flagpole area in front of the school. The teacher assigned sixth graders to raise the flag up the large flagpole after which we all said the pledge of allegiance. The teacher then led us into the building and we all were seated for the start of the day. After telling us which seats she wanted us to take, she checked with each student to see that we had the books and supplies that the school had specified in a letter to parents a month before school started. I had gone with Mom to a book store in Charlotte, the county seat where they had the books and supplies required. That was the norm for the rural schools; the parents were responsible to provide the books for their children. Then she called the kindergarteners up to her “recitation” table for our “class.” That first day she started right in with arithmetic and phonics, checking for number and alphabet recognition. She even used flip cards to drill us on basic facts in math and sounds in phonics. She also had us start printing the alphabet on that wide-lined paper with the dashed line between the upper and lower lines. So we were officially off on our education career. At the end of our class she assigned worksheets to do before the next day. We did them while the other classes were reciting that morning. Our teacher was not at all harsh but you knew who was boss and that you had better do as she expected you to do. The kids soon learned that getting in trouble at the school meant you would be in trouble with your parentsalso. The adults were united in setting high and consistent standards of behavior and work ethic. You might think that having the teacher work with the different grades would be a distraction for the other kids working on homework or reading. Wesoon developed the ability to ignore the distractions by concentrating on our own task at hand. Of course,if you wished you could listen to the lessons of the grades above yours. This was one way that kids could move ahead in their learning at a faster pace. It also provided the context needed to assure us that there was a natural progression of knowledge presented as the grade levels increased. That is, it convinced us that what we were learning was foundational to the future requirements we would face in the higher grades. My experience with teachers in that school was excellent except for one short exception. That was caused when our regular teacher became ill and needed serious surgery and time to heal that we had a substitute teacher. She was definitely not nice and was, shall we say physical,in her demands. That was in the last half of my first grade year. After that the old teacher retired because she didn’t feel well enough to continue and we got a wonderful teacher that stayed for the rest of my time there through sixth grade. She had the incredibly effective skill to be able to tailor things for all 25 or so of her students so that each child was being “pushed” to their full potential.

How about “extracurricular” activities you may ask? There were more than you might imagine. Our recess periods were always spent outside no matter the weather. In nice weather we liked to play “workup” softball the best. We did have a set of large swings in back of the school in addition to the ball field to the side. In colder fall or early spring we would play red rover, pom pom polaway, Annie aye over usingthe roof of the storage garage. In the winter we liked to go skating on a pond in the farm field next to the school. We would use most of our lunch break and our two recesses to do these activities. The school was also the social center for the community. We would have box socials, hayrides with apple bobbing, cider and doughnuts, meetings to discuss community concerns, etc. We would have a big Christmas program every year. Every child in the school from K to sixth had a “piece” to say. We would string a wire across one corner of the room and hang a makeshift curtain from it for the play which was always a part of the program. Singing to the piano played by the teacher was a frequent activity during school and of course in any of the programs (we didn’t call them concerts in those days). An added activity during some springsusually in the last week of school was a softball game against the team from the Centennial School which was the closest other oneroom school to ours. Sometimes we won and sometimes we lost but it was a good time with a potluck picnic provided by the Moms from both schools. One year we made a replica of an African bush village; fence, huts, etc. all from natural grass and limbs. It made learning the geography more fun. Our teacher used lots of competitive games to get us motivated to learn the material from spelling contests, to state capitals, to presidents, to parts of speech and math facts. These were fun and everyone enjoyed them. We took field trips. One I remember was going to the Michigan State University radio station and observing a live broadcast and how the sound effects were made. We also took one trip to the county seat and then by train to Lansing where the mothers picked us up again. Our teacher saw even at that time that rail travel was becoming less available and wanted us to experience it before it became more limited and difficult. Every year we took Iowa tests which were normed nationally to see what our progress was academically. We did well in that area. The test outputs were grade “equivalents” based on the national averages. That is, a score of 2.2 meant that the child had scored as well as the nationally average kid exiting second grade. Our teacher did so well with us that my own score in the spring of sixth grade came back as first semester college freshman. The problem with that was when going into seventh grade at the consolidated school in Grand Ledge we were so far ahead of our peers that it was easy to get lazy. Some coped better than others but the transition showed very well the academic strength of our one-room school.

One area people will certainly criticize when comparing my experience in the one-room school with today’s schools is the homogeneity of our school. All from working class, white families. And that is true. However, I remember that our teacher knowing that the spearmint farms to the south of the school always brought in Hispanic migrant workers for their harvest which put them in the area for a small part of the school year. She insisted that the board allow her to invite those children to come to our school. Yes, it was cramped as it expanded the population to almost double. But it was a great experience as the teacher would have the Hispanic kids share about their culture with us and we would have class work associated with it to support thatas well. There was never any problem with fights or confrontations between groups. We were so “close” physically we got used to each other well in the process. But the kids in the “town” schools were basically from the same homogeneous demographic that we were in the one-room school and yet the performance of ouroneroom school far outpaced that of the bigger schools. So the question to ask is what are the differences between the educational system in today’s schools and that I experienced in the one-room rural school? And further which changes are an improvement and which are a drag on performance? Before I leave this memoriessection I need to “confess” that the school was not populated by angels. You knew that already, I am sure. I want to tell you about the snowball incident. Quite a few of the kids who went to the school lived along the road that ran south toward Potterville. I would wait for the ones who lived further south and we would all walk together picking up even more kids who were closer to the school. There were 8 of uswho normally walked to school together, no matter rain, shine, snow, or freezing rain. On one morning we got up to a fresh snowfall of 10 inches of wet, heavy snow. It was perfect packing snow for making snowmen or snowballs for a fight. I had started a snowball up my driveway to the road and as the other kids arrived was about to push it off the side into the ditch along the road. But the other kids said let’s keep it going on our way to school. That seemed innocent enough but it grew to humongous proportions by the time we got to school. It was like a short cylinder about 6 feet in diameter and about two feet thick. By the time we approached the driveway into the school yard it was so heavy all eight of us could barely move it anymore. At that pointwe realized we had spent a lot of time on our project when the bell rang for the flag ceremony. We tried to push the snowball over to the side of the road but it pivoted on us and ended up falling about dead center in the road. We went into school and didn’t think much about it. The road had been plowed by the time we went out to recess and the snowball had been demolished by that. Here comes the rest of the story. After getting home from work Dad decided it was time that he and I go to town and get our haircuts. At the barbershop the barber said to Dad, “Say, you

live down Hartel Road near the school on the corner of Strange Hwydon’t you?” Dad,said yes we did. The barber then asked if he had heard about the roadblock on the road by the school that morning. He had been on his way to town and couldn’t get through so went to the nearest house and used the phone to call the county to send out a plow. He finished by turning to me and saying, “You don’t know anything about it do you?” I told him no in the long tradition of kids facing those situations. Then he told Dad that he knew it must have been those school kids that did the deed. I learned a lesson that seemingly innocent activities could get out of control.

TEACHING One big area of difference is the teacher preparation piece of the system. First,we’ll explore the teacher training prevalent in the era of the one-room schools at so called “Normal” schools. These schools provided certificate programs of two years duration after high school. The attempt was to assure that the teacher had the basic subject skills necessary to be effective in teaching their students. The following quote is from the Clark Historical Library of Central Michigan Universitywebsite. http://clarke.cmich.edu/schoolhouse/schoolsteach.htm “The curriculum offered at normal schools was of a practical bent. Future teachers learned reading, writing, arithmetic, geography, grammar, spelling, composition, and other subjects that would serve as the core of their own teaching when they ventured forth from the normal. Subjects such as music and drawing were added to the curriculum in the 1870's, when it became clear that teachers who could play an instrument or also offer art instruction could more readily find jobs. Although the faculty of traditional colleges often looked down on the normals because they did not offer a classical curriculum, those involved in the normal movement often took considerable pride in the fact that their schools glorified common, everyday learning. In the twentieth century normal schools transformed themselves into teacher colleges. As colleges, the "normals" developed four year curriculums and were authorized to award degrees, rather than certificates. Michigan State Normal, in Ypsilanti, was among the first normals in the nation to accomplish the transformation into a college. In 1897 the state legislature designated Michigan State Normal a college and authorized the institution to confer college degrees. When the college granted its first bachelor's degree in 1905 it was the first normal school in the nation to do so. Despite this transformation into degree-granting institutions, teacher colleges in the first half of the twentieth century saw themselves as being distinguished from pre-existing state colleges and universities by their more limited mission. It was only in the latter half of the twentieth century, when higher education expanded in ways completely unanticipated by earlier generations, that many teacher colleges again transformed themselves, this time into universities that helped meet American society's seemingly unquenchable desire for a college education.” Now let’s contrast the original “practical” approach in the normal schools to what is happening today in our schools of education. Basically, they have drifted far away from practicality requiring subject knowledge as was the basic tenant of the Normal schools. They have moved toteaching process (pedagogy) almost exclusively. And the pedagogy taught is suspect. E.D. Hirsch Jr. says in his book, The Knowledge Deficit, (2006) “The reason for this state of affairs – tragic for millions of students as well as for the nation – is that [today] an army of American educators and reading experts are fundamentally wrong in their ideas about education and especially about reading comprehension. Their well-intentioned yet mistaken views are the significant reason (more than other constantly blamed factors, even poverty) that many of our children are not attaining reading proficiency, thus crippling their later schooling. He points out that the reading process favored by virtually all education schools is drilled into prospective teachers like a catechism. Reading is not, as the ed school facultieshold, either a natural acquisition or a formal skill. Even though their methods have been proven to be

scientifically wrong they still cling stubbornly to their beliefs in an “if it isn’t true it ought to be” stance. Almost three decades earlier Gary Lyon wrote in Texas Monthly Magazine (Sept, 1979) under the title Why Teachers Can’t Teach, “Basic traditional academic disciplines, in which fundamental intellectual skills are supposed to be taught” had, he found, been replaced in teacher education by “a promiscuous choice of courses” that he called the intellectual equivalent of puffed wheat: one kernel of knowledge inflated by means of hot air, divided into pieces and puffed again.” The graduates of the schools of education, “where everyone is transformed into an A student,” he charged, “are defrauded into believing they have an education,” and he identified the cause of grade inflation and trivial courses (in which “fools dissect, categorize and elaborate upon the perfectly obvious” and in which it is “virtually impossible to fail”) as the system that made the operating budgets of all state colleges dependent on the number of students enrolled. In programs “where there is no subject matter, only method,” Lyon saw enormous amounts of money, energy, and time wasted, and suggested that future teachers could get more useful experience in less time if they were “apprenticed after securing honest college degrees to proven and experienced master teachers in actual classrooms with real kids.” When he made the suggestion to a professor of education, the response was, “You’re talking about my job.” The normal schools were formed to meet a need for teachers who required the subject knowledge for teaching theirstudents. They responded to their “customer” base by adding music and art. This responsiveness to the needs of the community is missing in the new transformationsto degree granting education schools. The ethic now is based on “how do we serve ourselves best” with little to no concern about the “societal customers.” There have been many other critiques of the shortcomings of the education school teacher training but the insiders (all graduates of the education schools themselves) at the state and national oversight bureaucracies, the education school deans, faculty and even college presidents are all addicted to the huge amounts of money that this scam is skimming out of the public trough and soany criticism is ignored. When it comes down to it, teachers who don’t understand the subject can’t teach it effectively. This has led to more travesties in the form of the constructivist or discovery learning system where the teacher becomes a facilitator (not having the subject knowledge required to teach) and students work in groups to “discover” the answers to questions posed. This method necessarily takes far longer than the time-honored direct instruction method that our strongest competitor nations use in teaching their children. Thus, our kids fall further and further behind the global competition the longer they stay in school.

Not long ago the accepted principle was that it was dumb to re-invent the wheel. But we are expected to believe from educators that this discovery learning approach is the proper technique to use with our most valuable resource, our kids.

EDUCATION FUNDING AND MANAGEMENT A major difference between the days of my school experience and our current-day system is that the bureaucratic requirements tied to funds access is an enormous burden today and barely existed back then. Because the Federal Money that started to grow dramatically in the sixties comes with strings attached it has added greatly to the administrative overhead of schools so that the compliance of the specified use of the moneys can be requested (grant requests), tracked, and audited. The states are tasked under the laws to administer the federal and state money that is spent on education. All of the laws are written so specifically that the state and federal money can’t be spent as the local school district feels is best for their unique situation but how the state and federal laws specify. I remember when I went to the thousand-student Grand Ledge High School our principal had a secretary and a clerk working for him. All of the necessary records for the school were kept in a row of filing cabinets along one wall of the Secretary’s office. Today the situation is much more complex and the record keeping is immense in scope. This system has a lot in common with the central planning used so successfully in the Soviet Empire days. Of course, I am being sarcastic, it was anything but successful. This method adds greatly to the cost of education delivery but provides little benefit for the kids where the “rubber meets the road.” I mentioned in the Preface that I had studied the education system in detail for over 6 years and in that process talked to many superintendents of school districts over multiple states. One comment I heard too often when asking how the kids could be so poorly served by the system was, “Paul, you don’t understand. The education system is run to benefit the adults who work here, not the kids.” Am I saying that the adults working in education shouldn’t be well paid for good work? Of course not. However, I am saying that the balance has been tipped too far away from serving the need to teach the kids to their potentials so that they can compete in the increasingly competitive global arena.

Education Leadership In my six years of research I have found the education leadership to be very weak. Of all of the superintendents that I have interviewed (including state superintendents of the year) I found not one that could be considered even minimally competent. How could that be? We train them to be that way. In my personal experience in management and in observing many managers from great ones to poor ones, it is obvious that managers are trained not born. That is, without adequate opportunity to learn the skills and practice them you cannot be an effective leader/manager. Managers need both the cognitive skill set in human psychology and motivation, the effective techniques that have been proven by research to work for any human endeavor, and management basics including communication, planning and other valuable concepts. However, without the ability to practice them and receive feedback on their performance they will not be effective. All of the cognitive knowledge in the world unemployed is worthless. Let’s look at the current leadership training methods employed ubiquitously in education. The common career progression for a leader in education is to start as a teacher, obtain a mastersin ed leadership, be promoted to asst principal and then principal. While a principal the next step is to get a doctorate in edleadership opening the door to the superintendent level. While there is no firm requirement for the ed doctorate to be a superintendent, school boards and the public like the sound of Doctor in front of their superintendent’s name. Since the performance of education leaders can be described as “go along, get along” status quo maintaining at best there must be a problem with the edschool training. If you sample a cross-section of education schools across the country from the biggies to the local ones you will find amazing consistency in the curricula and approach of the education doctorate programs. Typically they include about a third of the content in statistical coursework with the rest being a thesis and courses that could only be called meaningless fluff. So where are all of the human psychology, the study of management theories broadly researched, the basic management skills, etc.? Yes, they aremissing. Where is the clinical experience with feedback to practice the skills they weren’t taught. Yes, you guessed it. It is missing or done as a go through the motions exercise. An example is the “shadowing” a practitioner for three months requirement in some programs. If the person being shadowed isn’t competent, what value is there in learning how they do it. Also, I am told by victims of this process that the superintendent allows very little “shadowing” but finds lots of make work projects for the “shadower” to do. Is this only my warped view of what is going on in the edleadership programs? Hardly, about a year after I came to the above conclusions, Arthur Levine, then president of Columbia Teachers College, published his report, Educating School Leaders. This report was based on several years of research studying every degree granting ed school leadership program in the country. His conclusions were many but a few of the most important are—

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Principals and superintendents are being engaged in studies that are irrelevant to their jobs.

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The ed school leadership programs confer masters on those who show anything but mastery and doctorates in name only.

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The ed doctorate has no value in any school administration job.

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The ed school leadership programs are in a “race to the bottom” lowering admission and graduation requirements and shortening times required to get the degree in response to the demand for the “paper” not the education.

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In his study of thousands of doctoral theses he found over 90% to be of no value. This is an indictment of the quality of the statistical portion of the doctoral training and of the lack of rigor in the programs as a whole.

So, it is very obvious that the reverence that school boards and the public have for the title of doctor has blinded them to what that label means in the education context. Another problem is that the communication in the modern school district of any size is extremely difficult. That is, the number of people who need to be “in the loop” has grown exponentially and this makes clear, concise and effective communication much more difficult especiallyfor someone without the skills to do it well. This problem is related to not only the poor management skill of education leaders but also to the huge and growing number of people in administration required to cope with the excessively bureaucratic top-down legislative and regulatory environment.

Curricula The approach to curricula in education today is essentially a “walk in the wilderness.” The curricula that are inflicted on most of our children areridiculously poor. This has happened for many reasons. My nominee for first offender is the education school teacher training. As mentioned earlier they have an“only process matters” mentality which precludes their graduates from understanding the subject matter well enough to teach it. Rita Kramer in her famous book, Ed School Follies, did an in-depth study of the education school teacher preparation regimens as represented by a sampling of major edschools across the country. Here are some quotes from her book. The ones in quotes are from professors she talked to, those without quotes are hers. “We’re too worried about methods and not enough about what we use them for. The best way to learn is still to listen to a learned person who uses reasoned logic and will expect you to demonstrate understanding.” This is heresy in the ed school world of today and he knows it. “I look at them and I think, ‘How are you going to manage?’ They’re ignorant, naïve, they have low abilities. Let’s face it;education is what you go into if you can’t get into anything else. I had a student, a very nice young man, who liked people and got along well with kids but just could not write. His mother called me to complain because he was failing and I asked her, ‘Does he really belong in education? In that field, our tools are reading and writing.’ And she said, ‘But if he’s not a teacher, he’ll have to go and work on the line.’ So there you have it. We’re the next to the bottom rung.” The people who become “educators” and who run our school systems usually have degrees in education, psychology, social sciences, public administration; they are not people who have studied, know, and love literature, history, science, or philosophy. Our “educators” are not educated. They do not love learning. Naturally enough, they think of the past as dead because it has never been alive to them. And they will not bring it alive for their pupils. By now you may be wondering how this relates to curricula. Simply put, educators without the subject knowledge (“our ‘educators’ are not educated.” R.K.) do not have the understanding of the subjectsrequired to make good decisions about what curricula make sense. This is why you have such poor curricula in areas across the subject list. Another complication is the money being thrown at the problem by the government that funds all sorts of loony “research” into better ways of fouling up the curricula that have been optimized over centuries when people with subject knowledge were making the decisions. Where from Here?

Basically it is time for the adults in education to “suck it up” and face the reality of their poor performance. While most educators I have talked to are well-meaning they are also adept at suppressing the truth of their performance. The current iron-clad political correctness regimen is preventing the truth from being acknowledged. I have a perfect example from a school board meeting that I attended a couple of years ago. One of the directors expressed concern that in a visit to one of the district high schools he had been told that hundreds of 9thgraders were reading between the first and sixth grade levels. What was the response? Zero, zip, nada. The many ed school doctors in the administration from the superintendent on down pretended to not hear the comment and the board president deftly moved the discussion on to another subject. There was a response though. The person who had the temerity to tell the truth to the board member was told that their contract would not be renewed for the coming year. The message to the whole organization was very clear. Not teaching the kids to read well was OK but telling the truth was a hanging offense. Another example I read about in the paper was that a board member at another district was voted off the board because he had violated the board policy requiring that a board member never say anything negative about the district’s performance. That is the first example I have seenof a written policy suppressing the truth. This should all be no surprise. When a system has become more and more inbred in its attitudes and less and less competent in its knowledge; defensiveness, delusion and insularity are bound to flourish. Let’s think back and compare and contrast the current situation to the one-room school with Normal School trained teachers. What are the key areas of difference where the past system worked better than the current system? •

For grades K-8 the normal school training produced much more competent teachers than today’s “process only” ed school graduates.

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The one-room schools were much more efficient ○ No huge bus fleets guzzling costly fuel and requiring a large staff to buy, drive and maintain. ○

No maintenance staff, clerks, paraprofessional assistants, no principals, superintendents, curricula specialists, grant requestors and trackers.

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The one-room schools were much more responsive to their communities and the needs of individual students.

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There were no “step-pay” systems where teachers (and sometimes administrators) are given raises each year no matter what their performance is.

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There were no automatic raises for getting an advanced degree. If we were using a merit pay system there would be no automatic raises for completing what Levine characterized as “no value” degrees. There would be raises for improved performance which should be facilitated by any worthwhile added schooling.

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There was no tenure. Teachers were retained based on their performancenot because of some “rule” making it difficult to address poor performance. That system was much more responsive to the needs of the students and the community.

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Since there were no administrative levels between the school boards and the teacher the communication was much more direct, truthful and productive.

What are the counter-arguments? •

The library resources at the one-room school were too limited. Of course,with the internet that point is not valid anymore. No library for K-12 issues can compete with the internet for research and learning supplements.

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The physical education program is weak or totally missing. Yet, the kids in the one-room schools got more physical activity than the kids in today’s school physical education classes.

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You need all of the added administrative overhead to cope with the government/bureaucratic requirements. Isn’t it time to end the insanity of the government’s approach to funding education? It is certainly neither efficient nor effective. It has been a major negative influence driving our education performance further and further away from where it should be. You get what you pay for and in the current case, governments pay for lots of trivial and counterproductive stuff.

I can’t avoid the conclusion that the old school system had much better performance for those lucky enough to experience the one-room schools of that era. Could the same concept be applied in today’s situation, especially in densely populated urban areas. My answer is yes. Can you imagine the benefit of each school being controlled by its school board from its local community? I think it would have benefits far beyond just improved schools but also improved communities. It would take some creativity and effort but we are currently expending billions of dollars on improvements that never happen. Certainly it is time to go back to basics and value real performance not activity or the amount of money spent. That is, results count.