Our current “system” of education is actually hodgepodge of different competing organizations layered on top of each other. It’s not actually a system at all.
If you compared our system for professional learning to a relay race where each organization in a teacher’s career should pass the baton of learning to the next organization, it’s instead like a race with people running in different directions and there’s no baton in sight.
Our system for student learning is slightly better, if only because students tend to stay within the same school for a number of years and schools tend to be a bit better about internal consistency across year levels. Still, in most schools what a child knows about a topic from the year before is almost always lost by the time the related topics come up in the following year. In fact, despite the fact schools collect mountains of information on each child in a year, most of it is discarded before the following year. Remember, every worksheet a child does contains information about their performance at a moment in time.
Our systems for connecting educator learning to student learning are at best aspirational, with almost no schools anywhere linking the two. When was the last time you heard in a staff meeting, “We see students need support with ____ so we need to learn ____”? It’s just not done. In the best schools, teachers get autonomy to decide what to learn based on reflecting on their work with students, and in the worst, educator professional learning is neither professional nor does it result in learning.
We need a stable set of goals for students, so that we can measure student progress toward those goals and make decisions from that information. We need agreement on the relative importance of those goals, so that we stop shifting goalposts year after year. We need to create our system by working up from student learning and not down from ministries of education, so that every link in the chain of the system is built carefully based on evidence of impact.