The need for a new model of schooling that privileges expertise
A major purpose of schooling is to enable opportunities for every child to be embraced and be ready for the challenges of living in, working in, and enjoying the twenty-first century world and having the skills, dispositions, and ethics to contribute to this world. And let’s remember, this is not a prescription for their future, as it is their now. We are a fifth of the way into the twenty-first century, and young people starting school today will be leaders of the future, responsible for deciding on how best to prepare for the twenty-second century.
This book is about teachers: their work, the teaching profession, and their expertise. Our argument is that expert teachers are the drivers of change. Expert teachers change lives. Expert teachers see the potential in students, acknowledge and respect students’ abilities and potentials, inspire students’ passion for learning, and provide students with secure environments in which to set aside personal fears and any lack of confidence to allow students to see errors and not knowing as opportunities for learning. It is through expert teachers that we transmit the knowledge, the virtues, and the values necessary to understand, in some cases to preserve, and to carry forward our democratic society.
This book is also about schools. Schools need to evolve. They need to acknowledge, dependably identify, and know how to use the expertise among the teachers to raise the esteem of the profession, to create opportunities for these expert teachers to work with other teachers, and to develop structures such that expert teachers are key participants in the debates about the impact on students in and across schools.
As one example from the western world, Australia has a strong educational heritage and long history of committed educators. Since 2000, however, despite the successes and excellence previously noted for the majority of students, academic performance has declined when compared to other Organisation for Economic Co-operation and Development (OECD) countries. This suggests that Australian students and schools are not improving at the same rate as other countries, and many students across the full range of abilities are falling short of achieving their full learning potential. While this decline, both in absolute and relative terms, is heralded at the start of almost every review, there have been few policies that have stopped or reversed this trend. Perhaps the most serious problem is complacency, thinking that the schooling system has served Australians well, so all that is needed is some tinkering to make it a bit better.
There is a need to act now to raise aspirations, to reboot, to keep and esteem the effective, and to make a renewed effort to improve school education outcomes so that all students receive world-class schooling relevant to today’s fast-changing and interconnected world in which students are immersed (Hattie, 2017).
Over the past 10 years, the groundwork to esteem teacher expertise has been laid. Many countries now have professional standards for teachers and school leaders. In Australia, the federal and state governments are among the few in the world to legislate national standards for teachers, school principals, and teacher educators. All teachers are classified as either graduate, proficient, highly accomplished, or lead. There is a healthy emergence of a cohort of highly accomplished and lead teachers across the nation who have formed a network and who hold annual conferences, and there is a desire to greatly expand their number and influence. But more of this later.
There is also an almost opposite issue at hand. School education in many western countries is facing challenging times. One challenge is requests for evidence for the return on the incredible investment that is made into education, and a related challenge is the claim of overeducation. Students are asked to be qualified to do jobs that do not require the skills learned in the qualification. This has led many to proclaim investment in education should be reduced, or that firms should be encouraged to undertake their own specialized training. This is an alarming proposition.
Caplan (2018) has argued that gaining a degree is a form of signaling that a credential has been acquired rather than that skills have been learned, and that students are hungry for such signals, as these are what the labor market pays for. Caplan’s extreme argument posits that most education beyond the mastery of basic literacy and numeracy is a waste of time and money, and therefore governments should sharply cut back on subsidies for education and actively discourage its pursuit. Schooling is sometimes viewed as producing little valuable learning, that there is little need for the topics and content taught in most high schools or universities, and that students strive for the degree, not the content of the degree. Caplan asks the question: would you want the PhD (the credential) and not spend four years learning while you get it, or would you want the four years of learning but not get the degree? Most graduates want the former, as this is what the employers ask for; the degree is the signal, and the nature of content is almost irrelevant.
Caplan (2018, p. 23) summarized his “ubiquity of useless education” as:
Never-ending cosmetic changes create the illusion of fluidity. Schools adopt a new history book or add Mandarin to the course catalogue. They toy with technology. Instead of playing on their phones in class while the professor lectures, college students can play on their phones in their dorm rooms while the professor streams the lectures over the Internet. Yet no matter how many cosmetic changes accumulate, the essence of school endures: students spend over a decade learning piles of dull content they won’t use after graduation.
Maybe the issue is less of overeducation but rather an insufficient education of the right stuff. The reality is many of us forget what we learned in high school or college within five years. More than 50% of adults fail intermediate or proficient mastery of basic quantitative questions (an example of a task of this level is calculating the total cost of ordering specific office supplies from a catalog); and a third of science graduates do not know that atoms are bigger than electrons. While there may be overeducation for some, tell that to students who start so far behind and struggle to catch up or to those who do not have the chance to be part of the ‘credentialed’ and thus be eligible for employment.
