As of August 7, 2006 , Education News has issued a friendly challenge to concerned Americans under the heading of “Things That Are Hard to Fix” in our K-12 educational system. For what it's worth, here's my take on five of the ten topics that Delia Stafford and Michael Shaughnessy have very properly listed as worth serious attention from all of us, not just professional educators.

Teacher burnout . . . . Teacher burnout, sad to say, is far more of a publicly visible condition than, say, alcoholism or sexual deviance. Paralleling Alzheimer's (“three blanks and you're out of it”) cognitive burnout first shows up as blanking out on familiar proper names, followed by blanking out on ordinary words. Far more serious is third-stage burnout, which is signaled by a noticeable loss in overall speech connectedness: “what were we just talking about ?, ” etc. As might be expected, ten-year-olds in the classroom find slips like these very entertaining. But they are certainly horrifying to their victims, along with their long term destructive impact upon classroom learning and discipline.

There's nothing new about teacher burnout; teaching school has always been a high-stress job. Nor is there anything new about the propriety of taking personal-best action to strengthen deteriorating cognitive skills. Personal-best language study, e.g., a grammar and a box of Viz Ed cards, has always worked. So does memorizing poetry. And so does using the New York Times daily crossword puzzle as a “no burnt out teacher left behind” tool for measuring personal-best progress.

Richard Moore, when president of Santa Monica City College, went even further by requiring his faculty to spend at least one hour each day reading books in their offices. But I feel cognitive burnout is essentially a personal problem — for all of us, not just teachers — and calls for a personal best solution, not a bureaucratic one.

Money . . . . Commodity education, no doubt about it, is always going to have money problems. But learning (which is what students do, after all) is still a matter of time, measurably so in terms of extracurricular activities that can be assigned and tested. Traditionally, students who want to have a grade changed have been asked to demonstrate via test taking that they have read two or three additional books as a “fair policy” prerequisite for the privilege of having the grade changed. Along the same lines, many school have employed spelling lists as screening tools for determining student eligibility for participation in extracurricular activities (sports, student government, etc.).

Our current climate of high-stakes testing represents a wide-open door, I feel, to the use of motivated extracurricular study time as an instrument for solving the many money problems that bedevil American schools. If more money for special programs means less money for conventional classroom instruction, conventional goals can still be met via extracurricular learning activities, especially those whose impact upon external measures (NCLB, ACT, SAT, etc.) increases career mobility for students, along with reflecting credit upon their schools as a whole.

The long-term nature of education . . . . K-12 education marches to the same chronological drummer for all of our children and therefore favors those who conform to our conventional expectations regarding the age-time variable in physical, mental, and social maturation. Simply put, this means that early precocious bloomers have a temporary advantage in a competitive school setting, especially when it comes to sports and academic achievement. It also means that many late bloomers will outperform their precocious competitors in later life. Hence the reluctance of many professional educators to track later-life performance as indicated, say, by those who travel over a thousand miles to attend their 20 th high school class reunion.

Commodity education, as commencement speakers are fond of reminding us, is a perishable commodity: at best only a beginning, at worst a source of premature overconfidence and complacency. Professional educators should therefore tell their students again and again that low grades in high school must not be taken seriously as final judgments regarding a youngster's chances for long range career success and personal fulfillment. School by school, yearbook by yearbook, transcript by transcript, reunion by reunion — the evidence of income mobility in this nation still reflects credit upon our schools and our market economy. Better optimistic truth these days than the gloomy deceptiveness of establishment studies, especially where young Americans are involved.

Discipline . . . . School or home, prison or the army, discipline is fundamentally a matter of comprehensible rules explicitly promulgated for the collective benefit of what is essentially a rule-governed species. A child who doesn't understand and can't play by the rules doesn't belong on a school playground any more than a reckless driver belongs on a freeway.

Ideally, then, what we might call “regulatory literacy” should begin very early at home with simple card games and move on up to the complexities of chess and bridge (the “ultimate language game,” according to the British linguist, M.K. Halliday ).

Like the “broken window” element in law enforcement, levels of regulatory literacy are measurable, along with their presumptive impact upon levels of school-discipline literacy and actual social behavior. On the instructional level, for example, the rules of a students “learning game” are customarily set forth in a course syllabus: study materials, schedule of activities, grading policy, etc. Overall, the scope and clarity of these syllabi are usually a good indication of the overall regulatory literacy of a school, along with giving concerned parents a clear picture of what to expect from their children — and themselves.

Change . . . . The winds of change usually blow in upon us from outside. Hence the desirability of a common sense willingness to imagine the various forms that “maximum catastrophe” (an old aerospace term) can take. A well- planned syllabus, for instance, usually recognizes that student absences are unavoidable, enough so that a rational testing policy must provide for this contingency.

Hence also the need for school administrators and school board members to have a vivid picture in their minds of earthquake, flood, sickness, or social unrest forcing across-the-board school closure upon them (public funding, by the way, is premised upon schools that are actually operating). Far better to write out our worst case scenarios in advance, I'm sure most of us will agree, than to have them catch us unawares — along with those who trust our good judgment.

Worst case scenarios like these do not entail a dismal vision of our future as a whole. Far from it. Rather, it's our ability to imagine the unimaginable, brightly shining or gloomy, that sets us apart from other creatures on this planet, along with being part of the “prudent man” requirement in fiduciary matters, which in turn goes back to the classical virtue of Prudence (along with Temperance, Fortitude, and Justice). Risk taking for movie producers, prudence for parents and educators — isn't this an appropriate balance to strike when it comes to fixing things?

TO CONCLUDE. . . . I feel Delia Stafford and Michael Shaughnessy have done us all a great service by doing what great teachers have always done, namely, raising good questions: in this instance centering upon Things That Are Hard to Fix. Here's hoping Delia and Mike continue to strike sparks and maybe even light a few fires here in the corridors of power!