Tourists making their way to the Washington Monument last month may have came across 857 neatly arranged student desks -- a symbol of the number of American students who drop out of school every hour of every school day.
The startling array was courtesy of the College Board, which wants President Obama and Mitt Romney to start debating fixes to the nation's beleaguered public school system.
Yes, education needs discussing. But guess what? These two candidates are already on the same page.
When Romney was governor of Massachusetts, that state distinguished itself by dramatically raising standards and making sure more students moved to a richer curriculum. Romney didn't launch those reforms, but he made sure they enjoyed a steady tailwind. Credit due to Romney.
Obama tacked right with Race to the Top, which offered financial carrots to states that designed real teacher evaluations and opened their doors for innovative charter schools. Defying the wishes of the unions is not easy for a Democratic president. Credit due to Obama.
Both candidates believe a high school diploma is not enough. Romney, in fact, chided his primary opponent Rick Santorum after Santorum suggested that Obama was a "snob" for believing more students should get college degrees.
I'm not seeing a lot of disagreement here. Okay, maybe vouchers, which Romney now touts, but that's a sideshow issue for professional arguers who spend far too much time in think tank cubicles. In the real world, vouchers are minor players.
Here's an alternative path the campaigns could take: Build a shared list of what needs to happen to improve education. Drawing on research from a just-published book on what's working in American public education, here's a starter list:
1. Increase coursework rigor and spread it around.
I was struck by school visits where educators almost overnight shifted gears and began moving far more students into college-preparation courses such as Advanced Placement.
Ask those same educators why they waited so long and you get a puzzling answer: Tradition. Top students post top scores, which reflect well on the teachers.
There are compelling reasons to challenge that tradition. The nation needs to prepare more students for post-high school study, especially students who come from parents who lack college experience. Like it not, college -- or at least some college -- has become the new high school.
2. Create more high-performing charter schools.
Hundreds of charter schools now educate roughly two million students. High-performing charters have finally emerged in the role of school innovators, passing their lessons along to traditional schools.
Just one example: Rocketship charter schools in San Jose, which pioneered "blended learning" -- where education software plays a significant role in handling basic skills, freeing up teachers to focus on higher order learning skills.
3. Dramatically improve teacher quality.
Last week, Teach for America unveiled its newest list of corps members headed out for two-year teaching obligations at some of the nation's most challenged schools. Here's what you won't see in that press release: Roughly 48,000 aspiring teachers applied for the 5,800 first-year jobs, nearly all of them seniors at some of the nation's best colleges.
Inspiring, yes, but here's the rub. Few of those who didn't make the TFA cut will apply directly to school districts for jobs.
Why not? Talented young people just don't trust school districts to nurture their careers and recognize and reward good work. That has got to change -- now.
4. Reduce college remediation rates.
On average, six of every 10 students entering community colleges need to take non-credit remedial courses. The same holds true for about a fifth of the students entering four-year colleges.
All across the country, we need to build far stronger partnerships between high schools and community colleges so that students can catch up before they arrive in college.
5. Finally, get parents genuinely involved in public schools.
There's nothing wrong with serving as class parent or helping plant shrubbery around the local school building. But they don't help kids learn science or read better.
Mothers and fathers want to be more involved. We found a program in Phoenix, Ariz., that reinvented parent-teacher conferences. Using parent-friendly data, teachers explain how each child is doing and pass along strategies for parents to help teach their kids at home. The result: increased student achievement.
There they are, five big points of consensus. True, that leaves no mud to throw, but let's be real here. On this issue, parents would prefer a mud-less consensus.
Perhaps BO should have kept his yapper shut and been President for all Americans.
I am working hard for his to squirm in his own mess.
As a researcher, I must point out that in reality, schools were creating very innovative practices on their own before the "shock and awe" attacks on schools began. Teachers have continued to innovate despite the oppressive climate at the moment. In fact, I helped with and watched a very innovative school start up within the Cleveland Municipal School District--an IB school with a long waiting list called Campus International School.
If anything, unions have done a very weak job of opposing the misguided policies that the last two presidents and the business community have promoted. High stakes testing, running schools more like businesses, carrot-and-stick motivation, standardized curriculum--these are not innovations, they are failed ideas from the past--on steroids. All of them have failed repeatedly, but their supporters keep trotting out the "Results Not Typical" exceptions and hope the public won't notice, for example, that we wasted $6 billion on a misguided reading intervention, or $300 million in Texas on a misguided plan to give teachers bonuses for student test scores. People who don't understand why these ideas reliably fail (i.e., most businesspeople and politicians) shouldn't be in charge of schools. A more accurate claim for the WSJ to make would be that teachers' unions have been obstacles to misguided but well-marketed ideas, but haven't opposed them nearly vigorously enough.
There's some good stuff there. Obviously, higher standards are a good thing. So is less remediation in college.
But then there are some prescriptions for making things worse. You praise RTTT? It's made teacher evaluations less accurate and introduced other impediments to education into schools. Charter schools? They're less effective than traditional public schools. We should be getting rid of the ones we've got, not creating more. Raise teacher quality? Probably not necessary, but we certainly wouldn't manage that with TFA "teachers"; when you allow someone who's only really qualified to be a sub or a classroom aide to pose as a teacher, that represents a LOWERING of standards.
Obama and Romney do seem to agree greatly on public education. Both of them seem eager to degrade or destroy it. And most of your recommendations would be an effective way to go about doing that.
The reason why few TFA-ers who don't get a job through TFA will apply anyways is, well, THEY ARE NOT QUALIFIED TO BEGIN WITH.
All his talk about improving teacher quality and nothing about raising salaries. If you want to make education a market commodity, you have to obey one of the first rules of the market "you get what you pay for." Aside from the absurdity of making education a market commodity, he goes on to the land of hypocrisy by espousing the idea that all kids have to succeed in school (one of the hallmarks of the free market is that there will be winners and losers).
There is no consensus on all these points, at least in the rest of the world.
BTW, this is coming from a teacher who teaches at a charter school that has rejected the idea that tests assess teacher effectiveness.
That's the issue. They shouldn't have to give up on going to college because their parents don't make enough and they have to work crummy jobs instead. If they choose to, that's fine, but we should be giving our citizens the freedom to choose to educate themselves.
1) Make kids memorize more faster, call it "rigor," and claim that prepares kids for the 21st century. 2) Use carrots and sticks to push students and teachers, despite ample evidence that this is a second rate approach.
3) Make high-stakes tests the centerpiece of it all, despite its longtime failures.
4) Keep claiming that market-based policies will create widespread excellence in something as complex as education, despite ample evidence to the contrary. Heavens, McDonald's can't even reliably deliver hot and crispy french fries!
Whitmire lauds TFA and charter schools, despite no evidence that either improves learning in real apples-to-apples comparisons. Scale up either approach and quality likely goes down noticeably while further de-stabilizing public education. I posted a longer piece today at EdWeek Online, on why dramatically scaling up charters will hurt more than it helps. The public sector simply does some things better than the private sector does, including educating the masses.
So, what we really need is vigorous disagreement about the continuation of failed policies such as NCLB and RttT.
P.S. When you control for poverty, American kids in 0-10% poverty schools would have been #1 in the world on the 2009 PISA reading test, outperforming all other nations. American schools are actually performing very well, considering the much harsher conditions they face. Thus, there is no reason for radical policy changes.
The author seems to be shilling for those who see public education as a business. Seeking profits.
Your comments about poverty tell the real story. Poverty is the single most reliable predictor of educational outcomes. With over 20% of US kids in poverty we have quite a challenge before us.
The "elites" who run our economy have failed miserably.
1) Acorns don't deliver consistently high oak trees, coaches don't create consistently excellent teams, and even the same CEOs end different years with very different profit levels. Half of all students and doctors and violin players are always below average, because that's what average means.
2) Market forces not only do not deliver consistent quality in human outcomes, they tend to create inequalities where none existed before, and amplify existing inequalities. It's built into the system.
3) The overwhelming reason educational outcomes are uneven is that we have chosen to operate this nation with high levels of inequality. SES explains 60-80% of variance in educational outcomes: Countries with less poverty and inequality do better on average. When you adjust for our much higher rates of child poverty, kids from US schools are #1 in the world or in the top 5 on international tests.
4) Conservatives are quite right that individual decisions play some role in winding up in poverty, but we have also chosen public policies that play a massive role in creating and increasing inequality. Furthermore, as David Brooks has pointed out, we know from research that poverty and the stresses of poverty actually change mental functioning--people make better decisions when they are calm and well off than when they are stressed and poor. So, poverty is also implicated in poor individual decisions.
Looking more broadly, for-profit schools tend to pay teachers less and offer fewer benefits and less job security, so privatization weakens the middle class. Because consumers are the real "job creators" in the economy (corporations are sitting on $2 trillion they'd be happy to spend if only there were more customers), weakening the middle class directly weakens the economy and weakens America. It's appealing to the 1% to privatize schools because it looks like they'll profit in the short run, but that would set in motion structural problems that hurt everyone in the long run.
The most needy students will be hurt the worst because there will be no one left to pay for their education.
We need systems solutions that improve education while simultaneously sustaining a strong economy and helping us meet other goals for our country. Privatization fails these criteria. The public sector simply does many things better than the private sector, including educating the masses.