A11
Public Record
Excerpt From article.
The Education Reform Act: A retrospective.
[…] This essay will examine the faults of the preERA education system, the adoption of the ERA, and the challenges that arose during its enactment. […]
Specifically, this essay will focus on the previous education system’s inability to anticipate its students’ needs, and, by extension, its failures. It will examine the oppressive nature of a school system whose funding was based on standardized testing scores, and the steps the ERA took to resolve these inconsistencies. While not perfect, a school based on interest-based analytics is more effective, more beneficial, and more engaging for its students on all accounts. […]
The Board of Re-Education recognized the challenges involved in making such massive nationwide changes, but they were adamant that the progress made by the ERA would far exceed the difficulty of adjusting to its conditions. One of these hurdles was the choice to discontinue teaching “the imperial measurement system” — a preERA standard for spatial measurements, based on feet, bushels, and furlongs — in favor of the otherwise universally-adopted metric system. The citizenry was not eager to learn a new measurement system, but the following generation adapted to it quickly. This split in measurement caused a larger cultural rift between generations than was at first anticipated. Durgle Tirade’s essay How many feet is that?: A failure to adapt. explores this division in great detail. According to Tirade, “Large adjustments such as these require a significant mental shift, which many people were — physiologically speaking — incapable of making.” […]
The children who were immersed in it from the start, however, adjusted to its changes without struggle. […]Despite these high-level adjustments, at its core the Education Reform Act was a complete restructuring of the existing public schooling system. The preERA education model expected students to discover their own strengths and weaknesses, then make decisions based on these discoveries that would impact the rest of their lives; and all of this during the most volatile point of their personal growth and development. By age 18, students were expected to have a clear understanding of how their assumed skillsets aligned with possible career requirements, and then gamble their potential future salary on a best guess.[…] Pertrisha Brandish, the Director of Re-Education, believed that the major fault of preERA education was its general ignorance of interest. This, she believed, was the greatest contributor to poor information retention, high dropout rates, and low student morale. At the signing of the bill, Brandish addressed her national audience by stating, “From five to thirteen years old, I went to this makeshift school which was started and run by very kind, extremely loving, volunteers. That was where I received by formative education. I believe that four of the teachers had actually gone to college. My first day of first grade was the first day the school opened. I always felt very connected to that. Mine would be the first class to have been totally raised by those hands. I learned to memorize things at that school. The bold words, memorized the bold words. The bold words were the important words; those would be on the test. Our teachers would tell us that. And then we’d get homework where it’s fill in the blanks and you find the matching bold word and write it in the blank. Or we’d write about the bold words — their impact on the other bold words, the bold words’ overall importance to the greater picture, how the bold words came to be, etc. Then the test would come and it would check to see if we remembered what the bold words were. That was science and history.
Literature and language was the same idea, but it was a bit more difficult because those books didn’t bold the important words, generally. So you’d read the back cover, look things up on the Public Record — plot, important themes, key quotes — and then you’d be ready for the test or the essay or whatever it was. Each year, the teachers would raise the difficulty of this silly game by doubling the bold words we had to memorize, making the bold words harder to pronounce, and making the themes and quotes harder to find. The same principles still applied, though.” She went on, “I could ask anyone here, ‘What lessons do you best remember from elementary school?’ Whatever your answer might be, I can make a safe bet: either it is something that is tangentially related to your inherent interests, or you learned it in such a way that resonated with your inherent interests. […] We have the ability to follow people’s interest; we’ve been using it for years. Until this point, however, the only value anyone saw in following interest has been in categorizing consumers for effective advertisement. Our proposed system uses this same type of technology to track students’ individual, evolving interests, and presents them with information catered to their interests. The content they learn from is directly associated with at least one Useful Skillset, meaning they inadvertently learn about their potential future career by just following their interests.” […]
In addition to following student interest, the ERA aimed to tackle student engagement by creating a system to perpetuate the most effective teachers. In the career space, top performers in their field can apply to teach the future students of their career, and are incentivized to excel in their fields by the lucrative salary awarded to teachers. Teachers and students are then matched based on how much of their interests overlap, as this has proven to be the best predictor of student-teacher communication. […]
Brandish said that her inspiration for the directive came from a letter written by her sister and addressed to her daughter. This letter was included on the third page of the Education Reform Act. […]
Murv Hullins, Creagan Tresslewood, & Pethe Purgel