Young people must be given the opportunity and a reason to study

<a href=www.vheadline.com>Venezuela's Electronic News Posted: Thursday, May 08, 2003 By: Daniel Burnett

Date: Tuesday, May 06, 2003 4:40 PM From: Daniel Burnett dburnett1@nyc.rr.com To: Editor@VHeadline.com Subject: More thoughts on education

Dear Editor: I was pleased to see the letter by Mr. Campbell regarding how to reform the Venezuelan educational system. In my original letter on this subject I noted that my ideas were not exhaustive and that there would be many other ways in which to improve the educational system. In fact it was my hope to provoke a discussion on this subject where in others would contribute their ideas. On this score, Mr. Campbell's letter did not disappoint as he put forth a number of very helpful proposals.

The main idea put forth by Mr. Campbell was creating a two track educational system where there would be not only traditional "academic" schools but also more technically oriented vocational schools. I believe that this in an excellent idea and one which I completely overlooked in my original letter.

As Mr. Campbell pointed out, there are a great many students who are uninterested by a regular academic curriculum. Further, traditional secondary school curriculums have as their main purpose preparing students for university studies in spite of the fact that most students never go on to study in a university. Therefore such schools poorly serve many students by driving many to abandon school altogether and by leaving the large number who graduate but don't want to attend a university ill prepared for the labor market.

So creating vocational schools where students would hopefully be more motivated and learning practical skills would definitely be helpful. In the United States vocational schools were heavily used for the past 40 or 50 years. Of late they have been in decline but I think that is more the general decline in the quality of secondary than anything else. However, community colleges, which are the equivalent of vocational schools at the university level, have been quite successful and have been expanded. These community colleges offer a wide range of educational programs but concentrate on very specific technical training.

For example, in the city where I am from, Rochester, New York, the main industries are photographic equipment, optics, and machine tools. And guess what almost all the programs at the local community college pertain to ... photographic equipment, optics, and machine tools. The relationship between the community college and industry is very close. College administrators frequently consult with local industry to see what their needs are and gear their educational programs accordingly.

For example, in the late 1990s the Rochester area had a bunch of companies start up in the new area of Photonics. These companies needed employees trained to work in cleanrooms and with sophisticated etching equipment similar to what semiconductor manufacturers use. The response of the community college was to build its own cleanrooms. Area companies helped supply the needed equipment and loaned the college engineers to do the teaching.

The community college got new equipment and a valuable new educational program, companies got the type of well trained employees that they needed and, not least, a significant number of people got excellent training and well paying jobs. To some having such a close relationship between private industry and a public college may seem inappropriate. But looking at the results, it is a win-win-win situation for everyone involved. Given the demonstrated success of these types of institutions Venezuela may wish to devote some of its resources to creating similar types of colleges.

Another form of this collaboration between industry and universities is the co-op programs that many universities have. At one local university, the Rochester Institute of Technology, the academic calendar is made of three trimesters. For two of these trimesters students attend normal classes. During the third trimester they must work as an intern at local company in a field related to their area of study.

This benefits the students in several ways. It gives them practical experience in their chosen field. Also, they make contacts in industry which greatly aid their job search once they graduate ... in fact many times the companies where they intern wind up hiring them into full-time positions once they graduate. And it also helps the students economically in that they earn money to help support their studies. This program has been used by the university for about 20 years now and has proven very successful. These types of programs could be implemented in Venezuela and I believe they would be equally successful there.

Starting primary schooling at the age of 6 instead of 7 is also an excellent idea. First it would allow the education to be accelerated and allow for the development of the vocational tract that Mr. Campbell proposes. Additionally it would help families that are headed by either a single parent or where both parents work by alleviating childcare problems. Further, many studies conducted in the US have consistently shown that early childhood educational efforts are the most effective ones.

There are a few points were I am not in complete agreement with Mr. Campbell. For example, Mr. Campbell is in favor of leaving current fees that some schools have in place. He also questions the whether it is practical to implement nation wide exams for all grades and subjects.

In general, I am against any fees or tuition being charged for any level of education. Primary and secondary education should be both universal and compulsory which rules out charging fees for it. Further, we need to keep in mind that in a country with as much poverty as Venezuela even the most nominal fees are likely to be too high for many families.

University level education will indeed have to be rationed as there are limited resources. However, I believe that university education should be reserved for those who most merit it and show they will take full advantage of it. The way determine who those people are is through performance on entrance exams, not by how much money their parents have.

That brings me back to our second area of disagreement ... standardized testing. Mr. Campbell's main objection seems to be that it would cost a lot. However, if it is implemented on a nation wide basis, which is what I propose, the cost of it relative to the overall cost of the educational system would be small.

Mr. Campbell also says that nationwide tests would require a standard nationwide curriculum. That is also precisely what I propose. A nation wide curriculum would be beneficial for various reasons but the main benefit is that it reduces bureaucracy and saves money.

Why should every state in Venezuela be wasting resources devising its own curriculum?

Is there any difference between what primary school students in Lara and students in Bolivar should be learning?

Of course not. And as I mentioned in my original letter the state of New York (with a population of 19 million) has a standardized curriculum so Venezuela (with a population of 24 million) shouldn't have any problem implementing one.

But there is a much more important reason why I think standardized testing is absolutely crucial and cannot be postponed as Mr. Campbell proposes. In any undertaking there must be ways to measure success and failure. When running a company it is profit or lack thereof that indicates success or failure; in health care system it is the life expectancy of the population that tells us if the health care system is well run or not; if you are running police department you measure murder rates and other crime statistics to see how effective your policing is.

In education the main question is how much are the students learning. And the best way of measuring that is through exams. The educational reforms that Mr. Campbell and I are proposing would require that increased resources be dedicated to education. Of course, in Venezuela financial resources are very limited and therefore extremely precious and not to be squandered.

For that reason, there must be some ensuring that those resources are used effectively and not wasted.

If you fly a plane with no instruments to tell you how fast you are going, what your altitude is, or what direction you are traveling in you are said to be "flying blind." Well, without regular exams you are you are "educating blind" ... you will simply have no way of knowing if you are going in the direction that you want to go in.

The fact is, regular examinations are the best way of determining if educational reforms are working. If they are indeed working we will see that reflected in significantly improved performance on these exams. If they are not working that too will be reflected in the student's performance on the exams and we will know we have to change course and try something else. The point is if we are doing something wrong the sooner we find out the better.

This is why testing must be implemented right from the beginning. If we wait until some years on to implement it we may find we have wasted much time and money on ineffective educational reforms without even realizing it. I know that I have belabored this point to such an extent that most readers are probably tired of hearing about it. My reason for being so insistent on it though is that without such a testing scheme all other reforms, now matter how well intentioned, will likely fail. For this reason I would definitely ask that Mr. Campbell reconsider his position on this point.

Mr. Campbell also took exception to my saying that most parents don't have significant educational aspirations for their children. However, that isn't what I said in my original letter. My point actually was that most children's educational attainment does not surpass that of their parents. And that is most definitely true throughout in the US, England, Germany, Venezuela, indeed throughout the world.

Most professionals with a high level of education come from families where their parents had a high level of education. On the other end, most children who drop out of school without completing their primary education have parents who did not complete their primary education. Of course, there are certainly exceptions to this ... children of illiterate parents who come to have doctorates and children of professionals who never complete their formal education ... but as a general point it is true.

It is for that reason that countries like Venezuela, where the majority of the population has a relatively low educational level, need to come of up innovative plans to get poor families to put more of an emphasis on education. That was the impetus behind my idea of keeping schools open additional hours and providing three free meals to all students. The idea is to make sure children spend most of their day in a place where education and studying is being promoted.

I would like to add an additional point regarding free meals in schools. Reflecting on it a little more I now realize this program is even more important than I originally indicated. The reason is this: as I have pointed out in other letters the time for any economic development plan to work is likely to be long ... decades not years.

During the first ten or fifteen years, most all of the population will actually see their standard of living go down. The poor will also be hard hit as there will be almost no new public works that benefit them ... no new public housing, no new paved roads and sewer system, and no new hospitals.

The reason for that is that the government will need to devote all of those resources funding new companies in building up their industrial infrastructure. So the program of free meals for all schoolchildren will be important in that it will be pretty much the only way in which the government will be showing that it has not abandoned them.

It will be the one tangible thing given by the government to the most marginalized sections of society that will show that it values them and that they will have a place in the "new" Venezuela. So although it will be a costly program to carry out I think it is very worthwhile as it will serve multiple purposes.

A final point that bears mentioning is that for educational reform to have success the economy must also be successfully reformed and the country must enter a period of sustained growth.

Education and the economy are very much intertwined.

Without a skilled workforce the economy will not be able to grow. But without a growing economy it will be impossible to sustain improvements in the educational system.

Students will not continue to exert themselves in their studies if after studying for many years to become engineers or scientists there are no jobs that utilize their hard earned skills.

Young people must not only be given the opportunity to study ... they must be given a reason to study.