Personally, Eduflack prefers the words of baseball philosopher king Yogi Berra, who eloquently said that if we don’t know where we are going, we will never know if we get there.  Both are applicable to life, and both are certainly applicable to education reform.  In an our current era of “change,” we are all looking to do something different with the schools.  But for those who have been around the block a time or two, they are seeing reforms that are simply retreads of ideas past.  We put a new wrapping on them or give them a new name, but they are the same failed ideas, with no indication that we have learned from their participation in that first rodeo.

What does it all mean?  For the most part, it demonstrates that we have little sense for our current standing or what it has taken to get us there.  We still believe we have the best higher education system in the world, even though our college graduation rate has slipped from first place to 15th in 10 years.  We still believe our K-12 system has no match, even as schools in India and China manage to turn out more and more students to take our jobs.  And we still embrace an educational model that was developed nearly a century ago, a model built on the notion that 1/3 in college, 1/3 high school grad, and 1/3 dropout is acceptable, and the three Rs remain the king.

Put simply, we are getting by on our reputations, not on our current actions.  We often hear carbuyers talk about their desire to buy a Volvo because of its unmatched safety record.  Let’s forget, for a moment, that the safety record in question is now a few decades old and not applicable to the current models.  In education, we sell our superiority based on an outdated model and outdated comparisons, believing that tinkering around the edges today will make us stronger, and that no one can match what we really have to offer, because they couldn’t three decades ago.

Exams like NAEP, TIMSS, and PISA obviously tell us otherwise.  The growing national push for STEM (science-technology-engineering-math) tells us otherwise too.  But how do we really learn from our educational past, in a way that lets us strengthen our educational future?

On Monday, PBS will debut its “Where We Stand: America’s Schools in the 21st Century” program.  Hosted by The NewsHour’s Judy Woodruff, this program was developed to provide “an historic assessment of U.S. Schools in where we stand.”  Premiering at 10 p.m. on Monday, September 15, the program will tell the stories of a number of individuals and communities affected by the current state of public education, focusing on issues such as teaching foreign languages (like Mandarin classes in Ohio), addressing high-poverty, low-performance issues, and using STEM education programs to lift all boats and empower all students.

The program will address the issues in urban, suburban, and rural schools, recognizing our successes and our challenges are not limited to a sliver of our demographic.  More importantly, producers promise a “frank” discusses of public education’s strengths and weaknesses, an adjective that rarely finds its way into media coverage of education and education reform these days.  The show will focus on Ohio, as it is the microcosm of our nation, both politically and educationally.  

Kudos to PBS for taking up such a challenge and producing such a piece (and it isn’t even a John Merrow piece!).  And kudos to the Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation for funding this effort, lending its resources to educating and teaching us, in addition to empowering us to change the classrooms.  Hopefully, “Where We Stand” will provide some important lessons for the reformers, the status quoers, and all those in between to learn from and model as we move forward.

Every GPS out there requires you to enter you start point in order to track your path.  Maybe, just maybe, “Where We Stand” can provide those many educators and policymakers lost out there in the wilderness with a reliable start point on which to plot a new course.