Marion Brady
Cocoa, Florida USA
http://home.cfl.rr.com/marion/mbrady.html

Anyone who's ever tried to lose weight, squeeze out more miles per gallon or attract customers to a business knows something about The Law of Diminishing Returns. The first few pounds usually come off fairly easily. A little more air in the tires will make an immediate difference in mileage. A half-page ad in the newspaper may bring in 50 new customers.

After that, it gets tougher. The closer a system gets to its peak performance, the harder it is to make a difference. After awhile the payoffs aren't worth the additional money, time or trouble. When that happens, a whole new approach may be necessary -- exercise to go along with the diet, buying a different car, moving the business to a better location.

As it does in other dimensions of life, the Law of Diminishing Returns operates in education. Reformers push magnet schools, charters, vouchers, choice, new technology, flexible scheduling, tightened graduation requirements, school ranking, constant testing.

But not much happens. Even the schools we point to with pride -- well-financed institutions in upscale suburban neighborhoods supported by caring parents and offering all available Advanced Placement courses -- aren't doing anything spectacular. They're still loaded with kids who aren't even close to realizing their full potential, still turning out mostly Grade-C students, still sending out graduates who, in a few months or years, can't pass the exams they aced as students.

America's educational system has about peaked out. Notwithstanding the hype and the No Child Left Behind threats, pressures and promises, there have been no significant gains in performance. The main "reform" strategy? "Work harder, or else."

Unfortunately, working harder is no longer the answer. We have to work a whole lot smarter. Working smarter means doing things differently, and doing things differently isn't easy. Ideas long held settle into grooves. Eventually the grooves turn into ruts so deep it's hard to see over their sides, much less climb out of them.

The beliefs and values that drive America's system of education have been in place for so long that they've become articles of faith, and around articles of faith protective bureaucratic and emotional walls get built. It isn't just the education establishment that resists change; it's everybody -- parents, politicians, policy makers -- even students.

But, as H.G. Wells reminded us, "Civilization becomes, more and more, a race between education and catastrophe.'' If we still hope to be around to celebrate the end of another millennium, we've got to drag ideas we take for granted out into the open and begin to poke and prod them to see if they're up to the task of saving us from ourselves. Just one fallacy, tightly held, has the potential for doing us in. We hold tightly not just to one but to several, and we're not even aware of them, much less talking about how to break their hold.

When a society stops questioning why it's doing what it's doing in education, "reform'' boils down merely to putting a higher polish on familiar rituals. If the world didn't change, maybe we could afford to coast along on the wisdom of our parents and grandparents. But it IS changing, and at a rate unparalleled in human history. What we're doing isn't good enough. If every student in America was doing as well as the best students in the best schools are doing, it still wouldn't be good enough.

If we hope to survive as a society, kids have to be taught how to sort out mentally and make sense of a volume of raw information undreamed of a generation or two ago. They have to be taught how to use what they learn to track changes in the world around them, changes that are exceedingly complex and often beyond human ability to control. And then they have to be taught the enormous range of skills they need to control the changes that can be controlled, and adapt to the changes that can't be controlled.

That's doable, but we're not doing it.