President’s Remarks / David Beeson / Friday November 11, 2011
Oregon School Boards Association Annual Convention, Portland, Oregon
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Good afternoon - and welcome to our 65th annual Oregon School Boards Association Convention. It’s wonderful to see all of you - both new and familiar faces - on this beautiful fall day.
We have put together a convention this year that we hope you will find both stimulating and deeply thought-provoking. This weekend we’re going to be talking about, and hearing about, various facets of accelerating change in our world - including communications, trade and national economies, globalization, education reform - and how all this impacts our lives, our future, the future of our youngsters - and our work as leaders in public education.
To help understand where we are now, and how fast this change has occurred, it’s sometimes useful to examine this change from the perspective of our personal history. My grandmother, whose parents crossed the continent with a wagon to settle in the west - and who rode her horse to teach school as a young woman in a one-room schoolhouse, grades 1-12 - remembered seeing her first motorcar. My father, who loved new technology, bought one of the very first televisions seen in the little town where I was raised. I recall our living room being filled with people (some of whom we didn’t know ) every evening for awhile, all waiting for the snowy black and white broadcast from Klamath Falls - 2 hours each evening - to come on air.
My brother and I used to lie out on the lawn on summer nights waiting to see Sputnick pass overhead, while we listened to our transistor radios. Imagine - a radio so small that it could fit into your pocket. As a student at Oregon State University in the early 1970's, I saw my very first computer. Housed in a city-block sized building, it was engulfed in steam from its massive cooling system.
The president of IBM is said to have stated in the late 1950's, that there would probably be a worldwide market for only a dozen or so of these computers. How fast our world has changed.
Today, the multifaceted communications device which you hold in the palm of your hand, and which many of you feel that you couldn’t live without, is thousands of times more complex, more powerful, than the giant machine at Oregon State in the 1970's, and it links you instantly to anyone, anything, anywhere in the world.
Education, more than almost any other realm, has been quick to embrace the tools of the communications and information revolution of our time. The internet has forever replaced the encyclopedia, and has augmented and extended the library as the source of every information about everything, past and present, all in an instant. But along with the promise, and the benefits that we have already realized, have come enormous challenges.
A world shrunk and sped up - what we call globalization - and the intensified competition of a new kind of global community has seen, in the last few decades, increasing scrutiny of our institutions of public education, calls for change, and dramatic reform initiatives. The great American businessman John D. Rockefeller once said “I want a nation of workers, not a nation of thinkers." In my darker moments, I sometimes think that his ghost must have been one of the architects of No Child Left Behind.
" ... we must free our teachers and support them to truly teach. Our task is to oversee and make possible the development of future generations of creative, thinking people."
We are by now all too familiar with No Child Left Behind, supported by some who were very well-intentioned, and as we have learned, others who plotted the destruction of public education. Arne Duncan, federal Secretary of Education, recently noted that at this point in time fully 82% of public schools in the United States have not met required benchmarks under NCLB, and must be considered failing. And "teaching to the test", once considered taboo, has reluctantly become the norm along with the educationally destructive consequences of narrowed curriculums - abandoning the arts, music, literature, history, civics, personal finance and life-skills - all key elements of what we have historically regarded as a classical education. And we see the morally corrosive effects of high-stakes testing, as witnessed by now-frequent incidences of institutional cheating.
Hopefully, we may be seeing the beginning of the deconstruction and disappearance of NCLB, and hopefully, we may have learned some hard and lasting lessons from this sad, brutal, narrowly focused, and top-down reform initiative as we move forward. In Oregon, we see the beginnings of our own major public education reform initiative with the passage this year of Senate Bill 909, and the creation of the new Oregon Education Investment Board.
This bold initiative, certainly the most seeping reform of public education ever seen in the history of our state, holds great promise in some of its major aspects. Tearing down "silos" and ending barriers between institutions to provide for a smooth or seamless upward transition for the learner, and encouraging a rate of advancement based on individual ability, seem very good ideas.
So, for example, is the proposed reallocation of resources focusing on making sure that our youngsters are ready to learn when they start school. Both experience and common sense tell us that students do not learn when they are hungry, sick, or lack basic necessities of life such as clothing, shoes, or shelter, or the basic need for every child for a stable and nurturing home life. As we work out the critical details and implement reform of Oregon public education we must, as democratically elected local governance, be vigilant about preserving - indeed reasserting - the values in public education that drove our incredible progress and prosperity of the last 150 years or so.
We can and must nourish the broad curriculum - science and mathematics, arts and music, literature and history, high development of critical thinking skills - and we must free our teachers and support them to truly teach. Our task is to oversee and make possible the development of future generations of creative, thinking people.
The question is not either-or, but one in both. We need citizens who are workers AND thinkers. This was the basis, the driver, for the American success that changed the world, and will be again if we embrace and restore these values, this approach.
As leaders in our respective communities, we have to guard against the erosion of our long-cherished democratic approach of locally elected, community governance of our schools. We reject the idea that its time is somehow past - that someone, somewhere else knows what’s best, that top-down is somehow smarter and better. Our Oregon reform initiative is in every sense "local" within our state. We have the opportunity, the power, and the responsibility as locally-elected leaders to guide it and to shape it, as we go forward together into the future.
Please stand with me, with our association, and with each other, to ensure that public education reform in Oregon gets it right this time; that we truly work toward creating generations of workers AND thinkers, for the future of our world, of our state and nation, and for the future lives of individual Oregon boys and girls.
Thank you.