THE REALITY
When is enough, enough?
When does failure finally demand change?
Earlier in the year we again reviewed the reasons for the dismal, destructive failure of America’s education system. We have been recounting these failures for the past five years.
This last time we focused not on the reasons for failure but on the results by determining that these failures had produced the worst educated generation in our history – Gen Z – and that these young people had not only entered our business systems, but were now part of our government as well. The results of this involvement indicate a profound and fundamental ignorance based on the simple universal truth that not knowing what you don’t know naturally and invariably results in failure.
Business leaders have been direct in indicting these young people for their indifference to learning and to making no effort to deal with challenging problems, preferring to be told how to do things rather than working on solutions themselves.
In government – and here we have focused on the Williamsburg and Green Point sections of Brooklyn, the “oldest” neighborhood in all of New York City – and one which has attracted a large Gen Z population – their decisions are alarming and defy logic, reasoning and common sense.
Nothing has improved the quality of our public education system. Results of national standardized tests in reading and math continue to remain well below levels of success. Schools have simply abandoned the teaching of economics, history, civics and the social sciences – following the disappearance of such areas as music and art.
The future of an educated America has already arrived: it is not only bleak but frightening.
This country has always looked at the next generation with enthusiasm and hope but that seems almost impossible now.
Increasingly, the struggle to get into “good” colleges seems a difficult and expensive waste of time because well-paying jobs can be found with no college experience necessary.
This now broken system has produced young people who cannot write their names to sign a legal document, cannot tell time by looking at a clock, and cannot make change when purchasing something in a store.
One-third of every senior class in high school in America have just graduated without being able to read at grade level.
A new report from the well- respected Manhattan Institute came after it arranged for a conference of recent college graduates from the Nashville, Tennessee area. It found little interest in work, little indication that their college experience and expense had mattered much, no interest in marriage, children or buying a home – in essentially living the life Americans had grown to accept as what well educated, increasingly comfortable Americans wanted from their efforts and education.
What has too often been missing from understanding the reasons for this failing system has been a public awareness of the very poor training America’s teachers receive.
Another failure has been a public awareness of the changing attitudes of parents who no longer demand excellence in schools but seem only concerned about whether their children are “happy” in school.
Independent reports from as long ago as ten years indicate that teachers graduate from Schools of Education unprepared to walk into a classroom and teach with confidence and comfort.
And why teachers- to -be didn’t begin working in classrooms much earlier in their education rather than in their last year before graduation.
There is no saving the system that exists today.
America will celebrate its 250 year history later this year. Our education system is more than one hundred and 25 years old. There is no genuine reason to continue dumbing down our young people. Calling it education is almost criminal and certainly is cruel.
There are new ways to educate our children.
All we need is the courage, fortitude and belief to try something else.
A NEW WAY
We know now that AI is indeed being used in our public schools. We also know that it’s use has been marked by actions and attitudes that see AI as a danger to learning, an impediment, perhaps even a deterrent, to education.
There is nothing new about the misuse of high tech in our society. The brilliance of IPhone tech has become an example of just such a deterrent – brought into classrooms across the country with little or any controls on the part of the schools or concern expressed by patents who need to know they can contact their children in an emergency and don’t seem to care that their children are more interested in looking at their phones than learning anything in school. That is now changing to some extent as schools are showing the courage to ban those phones from the classroom.
And then we learn that more than 50% of teachers and students using AI have no formal training in its use and so do the best they can despite all kinds of results some helpful, some not.
But there is something happening in Texas that demands attention.
A private school system – ALPHA Schools – based in Austin, the State capital, is now employing the brilliance of Artificial Intelligence to teach academic subjects directly to elementary and middle school students without the aide of teachers. In fact, for two hours every single day, there are no teachers in any of the classrooms – just children, each with an AI tutor.
The computer has been instructed to teach language, Math, Science and Reading to each child according to how that child learns best and easiest. That AI tutor stays with the child through its years at Alpha right into high school and the results are far beyond any other “normal” school in America. All of its students reach around the 99th percentile in learning…no such numbers exist in a school with a teacher at the head of the classroom.
Alpha does not hire “typical” teachers. It hires guides and mentors.
They focus on the children after their two hour academic day and spend the rest of the hours in school working with them in such areas as leadership in team workshops, financial literacy, public speaking, entrepreneurship, socialization and sports and games.
What this Two Hour, AI approach to learning is doing is something that no single teacher in front of the classroom can ever do – teach each child according to that child’s personal capabilities and talents. There are children in fifth grade already doing high school work because each child can move at his or her best pace and nothing stops the educational process.
Alpha’s most advanced school is in Austin, Texas but it has schools opening in Brownsville, Ft. Worth and Plano, Texas outside of Dallas.
It is also working on the development of schools in Scottsdale, Arizona, Raleigh, North Carolina, San Francisco. Irvine and Santa Barbara in California, Miami and Palm Beach, Florida and in Chantilly, Virginia.
If any of this interests you, You Tube, Alpha Schools and its founder MacKenzie Price taking a Deep Dive into the program. She is selling as she beautifully and enthusiastically explains the details because each year in her private schools cost $40,000.
Education is expensive. It costs NYC $40 Million every year to graduate one-third of its students who cannot read at grade level.
Can such a program as Alpha exist as a public school entity? Would the demand for teacher retraining in so-called Schools of Education be so disruptive to this age-old approach that no one would even dare suggest it?
Will any single educational or political leader dare suggest that the only way to turn failure into success is by employing change?
Do we dare recognize a truth we have been talking about for years—that every major power in World history lost that power because it failed to educate its children?
There is no way to deny the growing disintegration of America’s influence in the World. When a country must turn to armed military might to influence its own people, we are looking right in the face of loss.
Can we stop it?
I suppose AI teaching, being one-on-one, would spare eager learners from disruptive ones. I was surprised to hear from an NYC teacher that they are not allowed to warn a parent that misbehavior in class may well lead to that miscreant never having a well paying job or turning criminal. Wouldn’t such a warning motivate the parent to correct the pupil?