I went to a well-attended event in Boston, The Transforming Healthcare Summit 2009: Impact & Opportunity in the Obama Plan, with an illustrious panel who completely blew the most interesting question they were asked: If you were the new US Secretary of Health and Human Services, what is the first thing you would say to President Obama?
Let's ask the same question about education. I formulated my own panel of experts, posed the question, "If you are the new Secretary of Education, what is the first thing you would tell President Obama?", and here's what they said:
Jay Cross: Mr. President, primary and secondary education in our nation are broken. They are not preparing our citizens to live in the modern world. Primary schools shield children from communities and real life, walling them off from the subjects we want them to master. And as Bill Gates said, "All of the evidence indicates that our high schools are no longer a path to opportunity and success, but a barrier to both." Our great country has one of the lowest rates of high school graduation in the industrialized world.
Our nation's schools need to be re-thought, re-designed, and re-engineered from the ground up. We probably need to change them from being our many counties' schools, held back by the drag of parochialism, into a coherent, more unified arrangement. This takes fire in the belly. I am instructing every member of the Department of Education to read John Taylor Gattos's Dumbing Us Down and Ivan Illich's Deschooling Society.
Sir, you might put them on your reading stack, too. If schools are not preparing the citizenry to lead fulfilling, meaningful lives -- to be all that they can be -- what are they for?
The staff here is already working to undo the damage done by the absurd focus on testing and other bad baggage from the No Child Left Behind mess we inherited from the W regime.
Curt Bonk: I second Jay's notion of reading Ivan Illich's Deschooling Society (New York: Marion Boyars. 1970). Add to that Charles Wedemeyer's Learning at the Back Door: Reflections on Non-traditional Learning in the Lifespan (Madison, WI: University of Wisconsin Press. 1981) and Seymou Papert's Mindstorms.
Karl Kapp: President Obama, while I applaud your focus on "green" energy and job creation, these measures are being put into place only to address symptoms of a deeper and more pervasive problem. The problem is that our educational institutions are out-of-date with the realities of today's world. They have failed us by creating MBA students more focused on personal gain than the good of the country, they have failed us in keeping competitive in the world, they have failed us in creating organizations that are adaptive to change, they have failed us in preparing our students for the future.
Our current classroom-based teaching institutions are modeled after the traditional university structure which was appropriate 100 years ago but is inadequate for children who are carrying around cell phones more powerful than the super computers of only a few decades ago.
While in some cases, in class delivery methods have been "updated" with PowerPoint, animations and videos, the primary model for instructional delivery in elementary, grade and university level is lecture-driven with the instructor holding all the knowledge which he or she delivers to the students.
The seemingly universal instructional development model is one in which faculty members develop and deliver instruction they believe would be appropriate and of interest to their students with little input from outside voices - the employers who hire the graduates or the next level of school that further educates the students. Little effort is made to follow up on the outcomes of the instruction. No one knows if one degree from a particular college is better than another. There are no objective criteria except for price and the next bubble is the University and College cost bubble. I predict it will break within the next 5 years. The current cost structure and pedagogical models are unsustainable.
New models are needed - ones that focuses on measurable academic goals and targets a specific outcomes, encourages creativity, innovative thinking and appropriate application of technology. The new models must rethink the face-to-face classroom instruction and, instead, turn learning into a life long process.
Allison Rossett: So glad that you asked my opinion, President Obama. I've been wanting to speak to you, and here is my opportunity. Do please write back. I'll watch for it.
I am just back from Singapore. What I saw influences my thoughts. No, they are not deschooling or making learning particularly more authentic or even using all that much technology. What they are doing is being very, very clear about what is expected and measuring the heck out of their students in light of those outcomes. Then feedback, then options linked to performance.
I can hear my colleagues squealing. Sounds like test, tests and more tests. Have you lost your mind, Rossett? Don't you want students to be free to pursue their interests and creativity?
I do. I favor independence, problems, authenticity, projects, and collaboration as the heart of instruction. I wish we could deliver that to all students and that they would nutritiously and consistently partake of such a feast.
But it is not working well, not here, not now, not for many youth I see here in California. Jay Cross mentioned drop outs, just to point to one indicator.
I think we must invest in national standards and matching tests. Let the fight begin over how those assessments would look and what outcomes they would treasure. There would be disagreements about dead white male literature, memorization or aided performance, reading vs drama, one language vs many and so on and so forth.
While I don't care for bubble tests and weeks devoted to testing, I do know that we all work better when we have transparency about what is being achieved - and what is not. That means tests that are reliably interpreted by teachers, principals, parents, and taxpayers.
I do favor education that slowly increases freedom, choices and independence, over time, as skills and knowledge are acquired. If you don't read or write well or plan well or work well with a team, just how good are you going to be at problem based learning? Well, the group might "validate" you and the teacher might smile, but you know you have problems and you would rather be anywhere than where you are experiencing doubts about your competence.
That's it, Mr. President. Great universal tests and perhaps linked tutorials to prep students for success.
It's not smaller classrooms or even more money, not right off the bat. Let's start with establishing a shared definition of success at all levels, with room for local priorities and differences. Then we can talk about class size, technology, and money, yes, even incentives for teachers.
Mark Notess; Mr. President, I would like to offer a small but significant recommendation. Last year, the new post-9/11 GI Bill was passed and will fully take effect later this year. One provision of that bill prohibits payment of living stipends to veterans enrolled in wholly online programs. The notion that online or even correspondence study is inferior or requires less work is antiquated. The technology of instruction says little about its quality or the amount of work required. The Department of Education can identify standards of higher education, such as accreditation by reputable accreditation bodies, which will better serve to indicate true full-time study and the need for living stipends than does mode of instruction. Please work to amend the Bill, removing the penalty for fully online study.
It struck me recently that mobile learning (or m-learning) is no longer a discipline within e-learning because of the ubiquity, enhanced screen size, and improved display quality of mobile devices. Remember when it was worthy of a press release when a medical or law school decided to require the use of mobile devices? No more. The question now seems to be when can they be used and when students are asked to turn them off or drop them in a bin as entering the classroom. Of course, the lack of presence in an online classroom has always meant that, pajamas and bunny slippers notwithstanding, it is possible for students to use all sorts of devices without a teacher typically knowing where students' attention was focused.
Not only has technology "dramatically changed the way students experience university life," according to 
Each episode of Nip/Tuck starts off with, "Tell me what you don't like about yourself." In the award-winning show,