Re-Engineering Education -

Preface
 

This analysis and recommendations stem primarily from my own thinking on this problem, starting from when our first child entered elementary school in 1989, plus innumerable conversations with my wife and indispensable co-author, Susan Brefach. As a licensed psychologist and certified school psychologist, she has seen it all at first hand - the good, the bad and the downright ugly. She has spent countless hours sitting in classrooms observing in minute detail exactly what actually happens, as opposed to what teachers and administrators say happens.  She has done so on behalf of hundreds of children whom the schools were dramatically failing.  The 12 year old who could not read, at all.  The 10 year who was ready to leave school and go to work with his father to learn his trade, since he would never be able to do anything the school wanted. The depressed and despairing, as well as the moderately learning disabled and the occasional superior student.

Even my master's in educational psychology did not begin to prepare me for what I was to learn.  What occurs on the ground in the supposedly superior public school system of Lexington, Massachusetts, home to many a faculty member of our nation's most prestigious universities, fell substantially short of what could be accomplished with the same resources by an intelligently engineered teaching system.  Now, as our last child approaches high school graduation almost 20 years later, the system is no better in any significant respect, and in a few specific areas is somewhat worse.

In parallel with our children's education, my education about the system of education began. As I watched missed opportunity after missed opportunity, I tried to understand why. There was no simple answer.  I could not blame incompetence, though Lexington has a normal distribution of competence from dismal to brilliant with most in between. Private school was not an answer either.  As a graduate of an excellent small college prep school in Texas, I knew that private school was a better implementation of what I had begun to see as a flawed system.  Vouchers, despite their intuitive appeal, ultimately would at best ensure an equal implementation of a flawed system, and securing widespread implementation is dubious. Even the crown jewels of American education, our world leading universities, do not do the job they like to think they do, as I learned as an undergraduate at MIT.  The problem was, and is, the system itself.

Once the enormity of the process defects became clear, I began an analysis of the educational business as a formal system, the intellectual perspective that was instilled in me during my undergraduate years in the late 1960s and early 1970s. Once I had a clear theoretical model of the dynamics of the system, I had a basis upon which to test proposed solutions. All proposals I have seen, read about or heard of fail, sooner or later, when applied to the model. 

Therefore, I turned to the formal process analysis principles from business process re-engineering, which has succeeded with many a dysfunctional business process. One must get completely outside of the educational box to produce an analysis that has any chance of meeting the goals stated on the home page. In the language of the Internet age, they just don't get it.

However, my contribution is primarily analytical.  All of the key insights into the solution proposed here came from Susan. She introduced me to the mastery based educational model of Maria Montessori, the key insight that led to the proposed solution. But this proposal is not a 21st century version of Montessori education, which fails the model test as a general solution. Rather, it draws on the process rather than the theory of Montessori education. In my opinion, the traditional Montessori model is most applicable to the younger grades but progressively less applicable in middle school and high school years.  Nevertheless, it is an ideal complement to the proposals here that are less applicable in the elementary years but become more and more applicable to middle school, high school and particularly college levels of instruction.

Your thoughtful consideration and feedback is vital to fine tuning these concepts, and finding a venue for implementation.

Don Estes
Lexington, Massachusetts
June, 2008

© 2008 by Don Estes