State School Superintendent Steve Paine’s recognition that “we’ve relied too heavily on standardized tests to improve student performance” and that standardized tests like WESTEST are “not good as a tool to improve individual student achievement” (Daily Mail, Jan.2) is a welcome start to making education relevant again for students.

Emphasizing fine arts, wellness, global awareness, critical-thinking, problem-solving, team-building, project-based learning, communication skills and real-world context to language arts, math and sciences is absolutely the right focus.

However, John Taylor Gatto, in his book, A Different Kind of Teacher, describes the current situation this way.  “Schools are intended to produce, through the application of formulas, formulaic human beings whose behavior can be predicted and controlled.  To a very great extent, schools succeed in doing this.  But in a society that is increasingly fragmented, in which the only genuinely successful people are independent, self-reliant, confident and individualistic, the products of school…are irrelevant.”

Today, education must prepare young people for the unknowable which means that “learning to learn” is far more important than “teaching to test.”  But our classrooms rarely work according to that principle.  Teachers are “experts” who “have answers” and want to make sure that students can mimic those answers especially on Test Day.  Richard Paul, director of the Center for Critical Thinking and Moral Critique, states what must happen.  “We need to shift the focus of learning from simply teaching students to have the right answer to teaching them the process by which educated people pursue right answers.”

Education Evolving (www.educationevolving.org), headed by Ted Koldiere, who was instrumental in the design and passage of the nation’s first charter school law in 1991, asserts that:

• 21^st-Century learning requires a search for different and better models of school/ing.  It is not a performance problem; our schools have a design problem.  “To improve learning further we must get beyond the bureau model of school and beyond schooling as teacher-instruction.  The notion has been that sanctions will motivate states, districts, schools, teachers and students to do-better.”  “Excellence through regulation” is suppressing innovation.
• Existing organizations don’t innovate well.  Most different schools will have to be created new. 
• States that have charter laws make it possible now to create new and different schools. “Prudence suggests we run a ‘two-bet’ strategy; creating new schools while improving the existing.  The chartering laws create essentially an R&D sector in public education.  Chartered schools are testing both new forms of organization and new forms of schooling.  To evaluate progress we will need new ways to describe and classify schools as schools.  And different definitions of ‘success’.
• In redesigning schools we should focus on motivating the workers: both students and teachers.
• We can now customize student learning using today’s digital electronics.
• Without new models of school K-12 might not be sustainable economically. 

How do we do this?  What needs to be discussed?  Why is this important?  The first two questions can be answered by reading Mr. Kolderie’s book, “Creating the Capacity for Change: How and Why Governors and Legislatures are Opening a New-Schools Sector in Public Education” (Education Week Press, 2005).  The Table of Contents and introduction are available at http://www.educationevolving.org/pdf/Kolderie_book.pdf.  The answer to the third question is found in a paper recently published by Education Evolving (http://www.educationevolving.org/pdf/Innovatingwithschooling.pdf) entitled “Innovating with School and Schooling”.

“Today large numbers of young people are almost certainly ahead of their elders in their desire for different and more challenging forms of school. The country needs their effort and their enthusiasm; their new skills. Teachers are disaffected; looking for a career that is both professionally and financially rewarding. Taxpayers would love an alternative to the endless cycle of tax increases and reductions in school offerings…Policymakers have it within reach to provide what the public and our educators want and need. All it takes is to explain how the obsolescence of the current models creates the need for different forms of school and schooling. And to show that the transition to the new and different system can be successfully and peacefully accomplished if we will arrange for the change to come gradually and voluntarily as organizations and individuals decide they are ready.”

West Virginia is ready