What Do Active Citizens Need to Know?

Knowledge matters when it comes to supporting local schools.

School improvement has a disturbing tendency not to last.

Because of staff turnover, local school systems often have poor institutional memory. An education consultant tells a story that illustrates the problem:

Recently I was asked by a fairly large California school district to review their literacy programs for grades K-4. Not surprisingly, there were many different programs to examine…One longtime board member took me by surprise by mentioning a particular program that was very popular and well regarded in the mid-2000s…The school board member waxed rhapsodic about this program and he recalled significant outcomes for students in the district.

I went to visit one elementary school that had used the program and scored pretty well on the district’s literacy achievement index…And my education began. First, the principal had never heard of it. Second, of 37 teachers in the school, only two had even heard of it and neither of those two had trained to use it. No one had any idea if the program materials were even in the building any longer.

Often the success of schools and programs depends on individuals—the dynamic school principal, the talented department head, the energetic parent involvement specialist, the school district mental health service coordinator who finds the right nonprofit to do an excellent job of service delivery. The departure of such a person can set back years of progress.

Active citizens can play a role in helping local schools and communities keep what they have learned. By “active citizens” I mean people who are interested in improving education community-wide in addition to assisting the schools and students with whom they have a personal connection.[i] Many of those people may be found in these four groups:

1. Teachers, school leaders, and other professional educators.

2. Parents involved in PTAs and similar organizations.

3. Members of business and nonprofit organizations that partner with schools.

4. School board members and candidates.

Teachers and other educators carry much of the responsibility for improving student learning. But they need help from the other groups! On their own teachers cannot do everything that is needed to educate students and create the right community environment to support student learning.

Active citizens who are not teachers do not need to be instructional experts, but they need to know enough to judge whether local improvement efforts are headed in the right direction. They need to support efforts to turn education into a knowledge-based profession and to be aware of fads and misconceptions that hinder education progress.

To do so, they need basic background knowledge in these four areas:

1. Insights from the science of learning. These insights lead to certain conclusions: Curriculum needs to be knowledge-rich and use knowledge as the basis for applied learning and evidence-based reasoning.[ii] Student practice and review need to be spaced out over time and have students make an effort to retrieve information. Knowledge is the springboard to developing student interest. What people think of as general skills (“communication” “problem-solving” “creativity” and so on) depend on subject-specific knowledge. Students need to understand their cognitive biases in order to think well. Many popular ideas about education are attractive misconceptions.

2. Curriculum development based on the science of learning. If schools improve, most students will receive a better education than was available to their parents. But what does this better education include? Popular beliefs often point in the wrong direction: for example, many people believe that the ready availability of artificial intelligence (AI) allows people to know less, whereas in fact they will need to know more. The more information that’s out there—true and false—the better our future citizens need to be able to process and evaluate it.

Involved parents and active citizens should know about the characteristics of well-designed curriculum; how to evaluate existing curricula based on these characteristics; the relationship between goals, curriculum, and data; and how to conduct non-polarized conversations about curriculum.

3. School improvement. This includes the relationship between accountability, transparency, and school improvement; knowledge of how to improve; and increasing the availability and appropriate use of different types of data.

This should also include having a sense of past reform efforts. Most problems in American schools and popular ideas of how they should be solved are not new; most of today’s supposedly novel notions about education are a repackaging of old ideas.

4. Distinguishing research evidence from unsupported research claims. This includes a basic understanding of different types of education-related research and their strengths and limitations; the ability to ask the right questions when presented with claims about what “the research” says; and the ability to work with competent experts as they track down what research actually says.

That’s a lot to know about! Why do people need to pay attention to all of this?

Suppose you are asked to invest most of your life savings in a venture organized by a business partner. How much do you need to know about the risks and prospects of the proposed venture and about the decision-making abilities of your partner?

We owe a similar level of attention to our investment in the future of our children and our community.

Photo by Matthew Kirk on Unsplash

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[i] The word “citizen” here refers not to what is on your passport, but to your membership in and obligation to your community.

[ii] Evidence-based reasoning is the heart of critical thinking, as “critical thinking” with bad evidence is not particularly helpful.

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