System, not educators, needs reform

The small-town teacher had listened to Jamie Vollmer, former president of the Great Midwestern Ice Cream Company, executive director of the Iowa Business and Education Roundtable and popular lecturer. She heard him outline all the lessons schools should learn from business.

Then she asked him: If he received a shipment of rotten blueberries, would he use them in his famous ice cream?

Of course not, Vollmer answered. He'd send them back.

“That's right! You send them back,” he remembers the teacher's reply. “We can never send back the blueberries our suppliers send us. We take them big, small, right, poor, hungry, abused, confident, curious, homeless, frightened, rude, creative, violent and brilliant.”

That moment changed forever Vollmer's thinking about education. And in his new book, “Schools Cannot Do It Alone,” he makes a strong case: Before most of us can weigh in on school reform, we, too, have a lot to learn.

The problem isn't that educators are lazy or incompetent, he argues, but that they're overwhelmed - stretched thin across the gap between nice-sounding theories and classroom realities.

He argues that reform efforts that tinker around the edges of the system distract us from the real problem: Schools are becoming “dangerously out of sync” with our time.

Our Industrial Age education system was designed to sort students as much as teach them. To separate the workers from the thinkers.

Vollmer argues, compellingly, that the real barrier to educational excellence is that our schools simply are not designed to teach everyone to the highest possible level.

Pile as much as you'd like on that old antique - make curriculum tweaks, generate a mountain of data, add a few more high-stakes tests. The essential problem remains unchanged.

Overhauling the fundamental structure of our public school system would demand herculean effort. And, Vollmer adds, community understanding, trust, permission and support. Schools truly can't do it alone.

That's why he's calling for what he calls the Great Conversation - a positive, ongoing discussion between educators and their communities.

That's right. He just wants us to talk.

Because until we do, we voters and taxpayers will keep falling for “reform” proposals that just heap more work on our overburdened system.

We'll never get to the heart of the issue: That it's the system, much more than the people working in it, that demands reform.

Comments: (319) 339-3154; jennifer.hemmingsen@sourcemedia.net