I have more than a passing connection to education in the United States. For a start, although I was educated entirely in Canada, I am the oldest of 6 children, 4 of whom did most of their K-12 in the US, along with all their post-secondary schooling. I have dear friends who have moved to the US for work and are now navigating the educational waters in California and Texas. And I even have a close friend running in next year's State House of Representatives election, where education will be a critical campaign issue in the great state of Minnesota. All the best Lindsey! I've been a member of the US-based National Science Teachers' Association for most of my career and attended Regional and National Conferences south of the border on a number of occasions, meeting educators and making connections throughout the States.
I'm no expert on the American education system by any means, but I think I can safely say that I've done more than my fair share of that all too Canadian of pastimes: America-watching (at least as far as education goes anyway). Gawking at our southern neighbors is almost as Canadian an activity as watching hockey and making a Tim Horton's run. And let's be honest about what we Canucks are most excited to see from the world of Americana: mention of anything even remotely Canadian. For instance, the day before our recent federal election, HBO's "Last Week Tonight" had John Oliver (ironically, not an American) devoting 20 solid minutes of his weekly monologue-ing to the Canadian parliamentary race. My Facebook feed blew up, as our entire nation positively vibrated with uncontrollable giddiness at the acknowledgement of not only our existence, but recognition of a national election outside the insanity of their own national election! I'm willing to wager that of the roughly 5 million YouTube views that bit has logged, 95% of them are from Canadians who just had to see it one more time.
So my point here is that I've got both a personal and a cultural interest in paying attention to all things education in the US. And like a typical Canadian, I can't help but compare.
When I first started attending conferences in the States as a young science teacher, there were a couple things that immediately struck me profoundly:
- Everyone in the US seemed to be doing different things. This positively blew me away. No one could really describe a coherent curriculum to me. Teachers from Washington had different curricula from those in Texas, California, Colorado, New York, etc. It's worth remembering that this was back in the early 2000s before No Child Left Behind (NCLB) had really sunk its teeth in and long before things like Race to the Top and Common Core had made it on the scene. What made this especially weird to me was that I was already aware of the fact that America has one of the most mobile cultures on the planet. They move a lot. And the fact that their state (and even school) objectives varied so much seemed really counter intuitive given how likely it was that kids would bounce around between schools and states.
- There was SO MUCH STUFF. The vendor floor at even a small Regional Conference was always jammed with companies of every size peddling educational aids, tech, texts, and toys. I remember being absolutely floored by textbook publishers ready to hand over full copy samples of their science textbooks (not just little chapter samples). Never would that happen at a Teachers' Convention north of the border, even when it was exactly the same publishers in attendance. There was clearly a lot of money in American education.
- High school "down there" seemed easier -- or at least required less discrete, detailed knowledge from kids than our students were responsible for. My 12th graders were doing work that looked more challenging than some Junior College course work that I was seeing my siblings encounter.
The results from this outsider's perspective have been painful to watch. The hand wringing and ballyhooing in response to the continued downward trends in international comparisons, particularly in the maths (yes, pluralizing math is completely valid, isn't that right Britain?) have made for quite the spectacle on mainstream media and in educational discourse south of the border.
When I first started in the profession, I can remember smugly thinking how fortunate I was to not have to ply my trade in the States, as I visited with colleagues in places like Seattle, Denver, and Salt Lake and listened to the plight of teachers working in what they described as a disjointed and wayward system. With everything that has transpired in American education since, you might think that my disdain would be doubly strong today. But that would depend very largely on what part of American education you were asking me about.
In all my travels south of the border (and there have been many more beyond the occasional science convention), one thing that continuously strikes me about the US is how natural folks seem to be about starting up business ventures. The willingness to try one's hand in the entrepreneurial arts seems to be encoded somewhere in the American genome, as I find it to be far more pervasive among the general population than it is in Canada. And American educators are no exception.
As the drive for more high stakes testing and better performance from schools has morphed American education into a grim caricature of its post-WWII self, pockets of innovative counter-culture have begun springing up throughout the US. Reformist school initiatives have blossomed in nearly every state. Magnet schools, charters, public and private reform initiatives, and teacher college transformations with progressive reform and student-centered principles as their underpinnings are blossoming throughout the country. And for every "next-level" school that opens or transforms itself, there are 1000 teachers who are starting their own transformations with blogs, podcasts, product launches, software development, web curating, e-commerce, and all manner of innovation. For a country that is supposedly losing its ability to educate innovators, it sure seems to be producing some pretty innovative stuff in the Edu-sphere these days.
The next great American revolution is well under way. If things catch on ubiquitously, there is absolutely no telling what the US could accomplish. If reform movements that are already generating hard data on their efficacy and effectiveness are able to be duplicated in a large scale fashion, the United States will most assuredly lead the global economy through the 21st century.
So what might that mean for Canada? We are also faced with defining our role in a global economy, and one thing that is almost certain is that the resources upon which our nation currently generates a large percentage of its wealth are finite. We may be content in Alberta to allow oil and gas to pay for a large percentage of our present, but our future will demand diversification. One could argue that our present demands it as well. So too will our children.
We can continue to stratify our student populations into "future oil executives" and "future oil drillers," but one day this dichotomy is going to break down. We can either latch on to the wave of innovation generation that we're seeing our neighbors to the south begin to undertake, or we can find a model that more closely aligns with the cultural trajectory of this country. What we can't do, however, is to continue pointing the battleship forward in the hopes that it will sail our children into a comfortable middle class future. The signs are already far too clear that the status quo will not serve indefinitely.
TL;DR: Where American education is bad, it is very bad, but where it is good, it is very very good! If the States can scale up the good, their nation will undoubtedly be the global economic leader on the planet for decades. If they can't... Who knows? Either way the rest of us developed nations should be paying very close attention to the good stuff, if not emulating it outright.
Vive la revolution and God Bless America!
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