If It's Broke, Fix It: Repairing America’s School System | Katie O'Leary | TEDxBrownU
I am one of four kids raised in the Central Valley farming community of Northern California in my family there are three generations of public school teachers and administrators that's ten plus people four of whom who have been in the business for thirty years or more one of those being my father on my mom's side of the family were Dutch immigrants my OMA was a substitute teacher and my oppa was a milkman and my mom after being a homeschooling mom for twenty years has been a public schoolteacher for the past four we're very interested in education but do you see that odd balance my family is entrenched in the public school system and yet us for kids hardly set foot in one in reality we started homeschooling because my oldest brother would have been heavily medicated for a DD or ADHD had he been put in a public school but with time it became much more than that every year my mom would plan our curriculum and lesson plans and she would give us assignment sheets something like this and we would follow those each and every day but we're also allowed the freedom to work ahead so that maybe on Friday we could go outside and build the tire swing and somehow independent of the public system we learned things like independence time management social skills the combination of these factors built in strengthen the minds that graduated at least two of us from an Ivy League school thus far it's incredible and this opportunity has been amazing for all four of us kids now not one of us spent more than four years in a traditional setting and the results my oldest brother is in med school after graduating from Yale my second brother graduated from UPenn with honors and works in communication my sister goes to UPenn and is studying Fine Arts and me I go to Brown University and I study Geoscience now this is incredible and I'm so thankful our little home system fostered what we constantly aim for in Brown's open curriculum Brown's open curriculum is a student based pursuit of education where we have no general education requirements we are forced into nothing that isn't part of our declared concentration but are also encouraged pursue all of our academic interests but I was doing this at 10 years old our family was constantly pursuing was personally fascinating but also important for future success now this is what gives me a unique perspective on the public education system I've learned a lot through personal experience and family history and what I've learned there flaws there's little creativity freedom things that meet the needs of childhood cognition broadly but there are far more people with much more experience that have highlighted these same issues our very own Brown University professor Kenneth Miller gave a TEDx talk several years back on Browns open curriculum he points to how it promotes classroom involvement and is a better mode of higher learning which is the saying that the standard system lacks this freedom to the negative impact of Education Sir Ken Robinson in 2006 in the most viewed TED talk ever spoke on how the education systems squander the natural creativity and talent of children he points to issues like hierarchical rankings of subjects how music and dance are exceptional for the brain yet not nearly as valued as math or science this doesn't have to be the case but occurs out of the structure of our system even further back in 1994 Emily Manning wrote an academic essay on the cognitive development of a person throughout childhood he talks about how people need integrated holistic learning with personalized Association and meaning now it was a full academic paper but my takeaway is this the anti-intellectualism is not battled against in university its defended against in primary school to teach someone to be curious and pursue answers you teach this during early cognitive development and quite frankly the public system is just not performing in this area to give these points a little spice of data let me share with you at the National Center for Education Statistics has to say in the u.s. school system's eighth grade math and reading we have been historically stagnant meanwhile a high school friend an international student from China who went to public school in eighth grade learned calculus concepts that's a lot but what's more disturbing is that the issues I'm talking about go back over 20 years we don't lend ourselves to achieving our own goals now we know we need to make changes but those being implemented are so incremental as to seem ineffective we are afraid of an overhaul it's too risky and people are afraid of making changes to highlight how intimidated people can be let me share with you what I read from an academic paper from 1949 can you imagine what would happen tomorrow morning if the contribution and the public schools in reading writing and arithmetic were to cease we would go back to the dark ages in one generation can I provide a little reminder that the first public school in the United States started in 1790 in Philadelphia and was intended only for the poor can I also remind you that Alexander Hamilton wrote the book of the Federalist Papers in 1788 intended them for everyday farmers to ratify the US Constitution but how did they know how to read there were no public schools it's ridiculous to assume that public schools are the blench pin to society they are important but not everything free public schooling is not the same thing as widespread education but people confuse the two and then get scared of changing the public system today we settle for mediocrity curricular changes we settle for subpar but that seems to fly in the face of what education is about so I've thrown out a lot of ideas about the flaws that we have but what about solving them I think that it helps to look at things from a different perspective and for me I like to look at them in economic terms so if you bear with me the public schools are a government subsidized business with a compulsory product aimed at a market that doesn't really want to consume it anyway if the public school systems were an independent private business they would have failed years ago but if it weren't private business what would we do to save it well we could throw out all sorts of ideas what if we made public education non-compulsory what might happen well we would save money on trying to track down the people that don't want to be there anyway we have more effectively allocate resources to the families that do choose to go to school we would decrease class sizes and distractions but more importantly the flux and student population would indicate whether or not the consumers of the products thought that our product was a good one all right well what if we made public education not entirely free now I know what you're gonna say it's discriminatory against the poor and in a way I agree but we could have a graduated education tax where families pay a percentage of their income the purpose of education I know that there are flaws in that but my point here is that people tend to value and take care of what they pay for more than what is given to them for free ok so what if we just changed the modality how we do school if you look internationally countries like Japan or Sweden explore other options they give no homework or extensive playtime this is similar to my own experiences where we were required to work but could also go outside and make that tire swing I also realized that they're falling this because we need secure campuses and to do that so broadly is really difficult but it is a potential way in which we can improve our product what if we kind of would go local trend and decentralized control by giving States communities autonomy with their schools they could individualize them to the personal needs of that community and then if standards aren't met and a tie then we shift funding or administration is removed while this punishment reward system isn't as pleasant to imagine it would incentivize the schools the producers of the products to produce a good one because there are immediate consequences if they don't so I know I've thrown out all of these ideas with a business mindset and I'm fully aware that pause do not go away overnight but each one of these ideas is an overhaul it's high risk it's high reward it's a new way of thinking about something I think it's really important to do that because instead of doing a patchwork job on a leaky pipe it's removing the system and it might be a lot of work at one time but it will run more effectively and for longer afterward I also realized that there are plenty of people with much more expertise than me that have much better ideas but my point remains that the incremental is it's ineffective for kids of two teachers in a blue-collar farming community succeeding because they made the drastic shift necessary I'm not any smarter hard-working intelligent than anyone in the audience I was just given what the public system systematically does not provide the creative license and quality instruction that met my cognitive and emotional needs at five and at 14 I was taught to pursue excellence and to not settle my family is not that special to be honest we were just made aware and cared enough to make a change it's time the public system did the same thank you [Applause]