The PhoenX Group

The PhoenX Event! The Book Series

The PhoenX Event

Collapse of Public Education in America and What Comes After

By Ivan Phillip Prueitt

Introduction

Public education infrastructure in the United States is in decay, rusting from irrelevance and is beyond long term repair. Citizens from all walks of life and stratus of society are persistently grumbling about the failure of public schools, from kindergarten to community colleges, from urban centers to rural America. In spite of the massive amounts of tax dollars invested, citizens recognize that public schools are inefficient, burdened with conflicting agendas and fragmented into city-state monopolies. Such a state of disrepair has yet to manifest itself into the public discourse. The national conversation is muted; drowned out by the polarizing demagoguery of the right and manifestos from the left. Governments – local, state and federal – agencies have worked over decades to “reform” a system that is in effect an artifact of the 19th and early 20th century. And yet no unifying definition of purpose motivating efforts of front line teachers and administrators is voiced as consensus.

“The erosion of the old consensus has not been followed by the emergence of any clear alternative. Some individual reformers and critics know what they want, of course, but no one way of thinking about education policy has taken hold. E. D. Hirsch, for example, wants a national K-8 curriculum aimed at forging culturally literate Americans. Charter critics want tighter regulation of all “schools of choice.” Some Republicans want greater freedom for states and parents; some Democrats want less. Secretary Duncan wants to transform the lowest-performing 5% of schools. A number of people obsessively want to promote “21st-century skills.” The Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation wants more people to go to college. McKinsey & Co. wants the United States to be more like Singapore. There is simply no unity — or even a broad coalition — built around a shared view of ends or means.”

While, in the center, the average American goes to work to support their families struggling to have a future; a future appearing more dismal and fractured. Having lost faith in public schools, young families fret over how to give their children the best possible education; a learning experience that shapes, instructs, and inspires the next generation to participate – as activist- in this young century.

“The problem is not that these ideas are misguided. Rather, they are just not powerful enough to force the rusty infrastructure of American primary and secondary education to undergo meaningful change. They have failed at bringing about the reformers’ most important goal: dramatically improved student achievement.”Chester Finn – Hoover Institute at Stanford.   Chester Finn – National Review

Too many good teachers are dropping out to pursue more fulfilling careers. Massive layoffs across the county push out younger, fresher teachers while keeping in place the old guard. Dedicated administrators get rung out,  coping with the endless internal bickering, political pressures, government mandated testing standards and organizational deficiencies.  Or worse, they hang on to their jobs until they reach retirement, not venturing to explore new ideas; to risk breaking a fragile system. Superintendents become PR agents or politicians always on the edge of losing their jobs as they perform balancing act between opposing forces demanding their attention.

Students become apathetic, bored, rebellious and frustrated with stressful learning environments where content is crammed into their brains.   Children live in parallel universes. One where gadgets, the internet, and virtual social communities deliver instant feedback. stimulus and gratification, Second universe where they enter a time warp back to the 80′s, where subject matter is fragmented into courses; History, Math, English, Art, Wood Shop etc. with little effort to integrate these domains into holistic learning.  Classrooms are housed in small to massive buildings to collect students.  Students are group by ages into grades rather than their levels of accomplishments. They are slotted into “class periods” and arranged mostly into ridged rows of desks, piled with 400 page text books. All of this orchestrated by a cadre of teachers, principles, counselors, school boards and well paid superintendents. I paint this picture for emphasis and contrast to what faces children once they leave the system. Little has changed in this picture for 40 years, since I was a victim in such a system.

Students may, in their educational life time, encounter just one teacher that gives them a distinction worthy of the work.  Most of their teachers have become forced to teach-to-the-test and do this with large classes. A kind of forced march towards meeting standards universally applied to all who pass through a system, like some kind of quality control applied to manufacturing widgets. Let it be acknowledged that these observations are across the board a reality. All parents, teacher, administrators, school board members, legislators and scholars are individually unsettled about the direction we are heading.

It is to this community I write this book. I put forward this proposition: Public and compulsory eduction, as we have known it in modern times, will cease to play any significant role in mass learning and instruction by the end of this decade, the year 2020. Over the next 10 years current federal, state and locally financed schools will slide into marginal relevance, taking with it much of our national wealth.

I will illustrate -from the contemporary  scholarship, empirical data and personal insights gleaned from interviews of scores of educators, parents, students, politicians and business leaders – why the system is not fixable.  Within a decade the system will collapse.  It will be painful, disruptive and cause social upheavals. It will ignite political firestorms and fear in some of the populace.

On the other hand, such upheaval will portend to something far more extraordinary, the emergence of a transforming system of mass education and individualist life time learning, born from innovation of communities looking towards the future. It will go beyond national agendas and boarders; the PhoenX Event is global organic revolution.  Technology companies in the private sector have plowed and planted the fields ready to reap a harvest of tools for a global learning systems far more democratic then those controlled by the State.   This is a natural phenomena of regeneration all system undergo. Birth into vitality of young growth, maturity, aging and then decay to make way for the next cycle.  But unlike cycles in nature, humanity intervenes and has the capacity to builds anew the world’s resources and manifest into the open space an infrastructure beyond what we have see before.

It is my hope that this will catalyze thoughtful and vigorous conversations across the dinner table, at morning coffee at a local Starbucks; in our churches, synagogues, mosques, community centers, and maybe even on the daytime and night time cable shows. It is time to imagine something other than a certain and predicable future for mass learning in America. We can design a new world of learning, education and human capacity building beyond anything humanity has seen in it’s history. This is the PhoenX Event for education.