By Candace Wofford
If you have been paying attention at all, you would know that the current education system is not ideal. The system we have now was put in place a century ago and is no longer a viable option for learning. Everyone knows that, but what can be done about it?
A panel at SXSW EDU 2023 facilitated by Kumar Garg of Schmidt Futures discussed the history of research and development in education and what sustainable changes could be made. Garg was joined on stage by Dr. Pamela Cantor (Founder of Turnaround for Children), Dr. Joanna Cannon (Walton Family Foundation Fellow), and Roberto J. Rodriguez (Assistant Secretary for Planning, Evaluation, and Policy Development at the U.S. Department of Education).
Research and Development is a priority and receives a significant amount of funding when it comes to the biomedical field, defense, and issues surrounding climate and energy just to name a few, but what about education? According to a study by PCAST, federal funding spends less than one tenth of 1% on education R&D. The potato chip industry spends more money on inventing new potato chips – spending 3% of sales on R&D – which means that education is starting at a very low base.
Dr. Cantor shared how she started her mission to change the narrative. As a former practicing physician, she had taken the time to visit a few schools after 9/11 to check in on the children. While she was there, she was struck by the fact that the schools did not have knowledge about the science of learning and development. They did not have knowledge about how the brain is the learning organ. So, she left medicine and founded Turnaround for Children to figure out how to answer the question of how learning happens.
Dr. Cannon has been in the education field since college, but she has worn many hats in her career. She has been a policymaker for school districts, philanthropist who funds education, and now an advocate for education R&D. Her work focuses on designing new education R&D infrastructure as well as building the capacity to carry out the work and disseminate it for all.
Rodriguez has had the privilege of being on the side of education polity for many years and supports the big leap forward surrounding education R&D, noting that we need to build a learning system that is well resourced, well rooted, and is relevant for the time we are in. This should be not only at the federal level, but at the state and local level as well. Of course, people want to close the achievement gap and the opportunity gap in the different communities. Of course, there is a focus on accelerating progress in reading and math.
However, as he explains, “Today we’re talking about the mental health needs of our kids. We’re talking about a teacher shortage that has just ballooned in magnitude relative to the last 10 years. I’m excited about this agenda because it’s R&D that’s put into practice that is going to help us redefine the playbook for how we solve some of these big challenges in our system. And the one thing that is very clear in the moment we’re in today is that we cannot afford to go back to the same solutions that we had in March 2020 pre-pandemic.”
One could argue that even the solutions used pre-pandemic were not efficient anymore. Cantor explained that the learning system we use today was built on 5 assumptions that we have determined to be false and those include:
1) We believed that genes were the drivers of intelligence, and now we know that context in kids’ lives drives their performance.
2) Academically, we believed that talent was scarce, so we had to have a system that would select and sort.
3) We thought that an average stood for an individual, and now we know an average rarely stands for an individual.
4) We believed that a factory model was a good and efficient way of educating kids, and now we know that their engagement and their agency matter far more.
5) Finally, we believed that the potential of a child was knowable in advance, but we won’t know the potential of a child unless we design the environments to reveal it.
We have false assumptions and not a great knowledge base. In medicine, we can get individual people healthy and cured, but only because we look at them as individuals, not as groups and not as population norms, as Cantor puts it.
Unfortunately, the budgets have not put education on the same pedestal as medicine, agriculture, or defense. But education should be as dynamic of a field as the others if we want our country to thrive. We can’t afford not to invest more in the agenda of how to support R&D. With the knowledge base, we can take the learnings and leverage them into a bigger learning system. If education has the resources, support, building of the evidence base, testing of the evidence, and putting things into practice, then education could be all that teachers, students, and families want it to be.
So what do they want? Todd Rose has a think tank called Populace, and every four years he does a study on different subjects. One of his studies asked what American parents, kids, and educators feel about the purpose of our education system. Key findings from the study include (a) practical skills and outcomes should be the priority of education, (b) individualized education is the future – one-size-fits-all is the past, and (c) college should no longer be the end goal of K-12 education. The people have spoken, so how do we make education mirror what people need it to be?
To answer that question, Cantor shared a story. “There is a story that began in the late nineties where the head of Dana-Farber at the time realized that if they were ever going to crack the back of cancer and generate really big breakthroughs that their data sets were too small, so what the then head of Dana Farber did, was he set in motion a way for six cancer centers to share their data about what was going on with patients and what was going on in cancer. This level of dataset [the diversity of it, the scale of it] led to a whole new level of visibility of new patterns in cancer mechanisms that you couldn’t see in a smaller data set. Once they understood those patterns, it started to open up new therapies, one of the biggest, most of you have probably heard of, which is immunotherapy. That’s how the field of immunotherapy was born because prior to that, the complexity of our immune system didn’t lend itself to small data sets. You had to see giant patterns.”
This is what we should be doing for learning. There are millions of learners. It’s time to research large data sets to understand the science of learning. We need to build an educational R&D infrastructure. Cannon added, “There is just so much technology that’s available that makes it far easier than it was 10-15 years ago to create greater access to data sets and do that in a secure fashion. We can do that now. We can make these data sets much more accessible to not only researchers, but policymakers, families, and students who also have questions about those data… We need to devote the resources to increasing that access and providing those public goods in a way that hasn’t really been the mode of how we’ve approached education in the past.”
The change needs to happen. Students know it. Parents know it. Teachers know it. Administrators know it. Since the Department of Education sent a representative directly involved with the budget to contribute to the panel discussion, it appears that they know it too. As educational R&D funding continues to grow, we can only hope that our understanding of learning and what students need will grow too. Surely the status of our country’s future is more important than the next potato chip flavor, right? Only time and the practices implemented from knowledge learned through educational R&D will tell.
Candace Wofford graduated from The University of Texas, from which she earned her undergraduate and graduate degrees. She has her MS in Marine Science with a focus on Reproductive Endocrinology. She is an expert in the Social and Emotional Learning Field and shares her passion to teachers and high-school students to inspire them to become the best versions of themselves. She is a mother of two beautiful children, Jace (5) and Piper Beverly (1.5) so together they are PB&J, and she is happily married to her Action Sports Expert Hubby, Jade.
