By Wavell Cowan
Public schooling as currently managed has been a failure. The frequency with which it returns to the Legislature as a subject for political reform action proclaims this fact. This can perhaps be explained by the Bossuet paradox – “God laughs at men who complain of the consequences while cherishing the causes.”
We complain that public school systems are failing to deliver quality education or to do so at sustainable costs. Nevertheless we cherish the government-controlled systems responsible for these failings.
A professional lifetime as an independent scientist using basic research to understand causes of fundamental industrial problems allowed me as an entrepreneur and businessman to successfully create new process equipment and test instruments now widely used throughout the pulp and paper industry. What these experiences taught was that when something doesn’t work well the usual approach is to come up with trial and error “patches.” However, these only shift problems, rarely solving them. Alternatively, asking the proper “why” questions and seeking scientifically valid answers typically identifies the need for fundamental “changes,” not “patches.” This in turn frees the imagination to come up with the ideas needed to implement such changes.
It should be clear to anyone that the frequency with which public education becomes a political issue strongly suggests that past solutions are best described as the patches referred to above – only shifting the problems, never solving them. Now we are at it again with Act 46 and the further patches deemed necessary.
After retirement I spent six years as a local school board member in a Vermont elementary school with a scientist’s interest in why schools operate the way they do. The presence in the school of a highly entrepreneurial principal and the support of fellow board members allowed me to pursue a number of interesting initiatives. Among these was the development of a proper database by which to assess student performance; the development of a proposal to change the manner in which the cost of special education was allocated, including the development of a comparative measure of the cost efficiency by which special education services are delivered in each of Vermont’s supervisory unions.
The adventures of these school board years provided me with insights as to why public education has become a perennial problem and what needs to happen if patching is to be replaced by the genuine reforms that will permanently remove public education from the political agenda.
I have described these school board adventures in my new book, Escaping an Evolutionary Dead-End.
Wavell Cowan lives in Moretown.
