This week the "The Nation's Report Card" showed no progress. That's really quite disturbing given aggressive federal policy (NCLB), a handful of cities like New York making real progress, states like Louisiana and Florida pushing hard, and national foundation efforts.
It suggests that tinkering won't come close to the president's goal of leading the world in college completion by 2020. We have 1950 schools (age cohorts slogging through textbooks) and employment bargains (job protection with back loaded benefits) struggling with 2010 students aiming at 2020 goals -- just doesn't add up. We'd need to see fulfillment of all the promises made in Race to the Top applications and then some to hit the target.
Flatline achievement and attainment suggests that we need an innovation agenda -- one quite different than the president's education blueprint which falls short on the national 'good school promise' (a common baseline school accountability system) and adds some competitive grants. Sadly, it may be the only deal this Congress could cut -- more flexibility for states and more money for things that a few key Republicans and Democrats like.
We've dug a big hole -- 15,000 districts have really bad policies intertwined with really bad employment bargains confounded by 50 convoluted state codes. We need to work on fixing and replacing simultaneously.
I'm a big fan of Race to the Top -- already the most successful grant program in history before a dime is spent. It encourages high common standards, stronger data systems, and better teacher preparation and evaluation. While the President and Secretary deserve a lot of credit for taking on historical alliances around teacher quality, their plans will require local renegotiation several thousand times over.
But this is all 'inside baseball' stuff that may bump the curve but won't hit the target. Missing ingredients in the President's blueprint include:
1. A sense of imagination for how personalized learning technology and new school formats can improve learning and financial productivity (there's a nod this direction in the national edtech plan but I don't see it in the Blueprint for reauthorizing federal policy).
2. Encouragement for private investment in new tools, schools, and services. Every other public delivery system relies heavily on private sector capabilities for producing and scaling innovation. Other than textbooks, testing and technology, education largely excludes the private sector. Rather than expanding private sector investment, the President's Blueprint suggests killing a successful private sector initiative providing free tutoring program serving 500,000 low-income students effectively putting hundreds of education entrepreneurs out of business.
3. An innovation agenda that encourages online learning options -- there is no way to offer high quality science and math options to every American student without full access to broadband and next generation online learning. There are still states (including the three I visited this week: NY, NJ, and CT) that virtually outlaw virtual learning. Others stop the Internet at county or district lines or limit competition from private providers.
In the last few years, the capability has been developed for anyone to learn almost anything online. Any prepared student anywhere in the world can go online and earn a college degree from a respected institution. Why do we still have 1950 elementary and secondary schools with most teachers laboring in isolation?
Leading the world in college completion will require a new generation of tools and schools; that will require an education sector open to investment and innovation. But perhaps even more important, it will take a sense of imagination.
Follow Tom Vander Ark on Twitter: www.twitter.com/tvanderark
Here's something that real teachers know. Kids who come to school not knowing their last name, or how to hold a pencil, or having ever had a book read to them, ever, are not going to be magically “cured” of their educational deficit even with wonderful teachers. They are likely to remain behind their peers, especially in an environment where money for education is in short supply and most states are made losers in cruel competitions like Race to the Top.
One more thing: The NAEP does NOT show that New York is making real progress. The NAEP's own Web site shows the percentage of proficient or advanced fourth-graders in New York virtually unchanged since 2002. For eighth-graders, scores are nearly identical to 1998.
When pre-K and kindergarten are guaranteed to students as rights, when parents – children's first teachers – are helped to help their children, when social services are provided which can consider the child in the context of a family's function or dysfunction, and advantage or disadvantage, when families are helped by whatever means necessary to break the chain of grinding poverty, helplessness, and hopelessness, when students everywhere have the same access to computers and textbooks, when reasonable class sizes are maintained everywhere, and when teachers are not just blamed, but properly mentored, nurtured, respected, and listened to, then, and only then, will you see “magic.”
I'm certainly not blaming teachers; the system isn't designed to do what we're asking it to do. We need schools where teachers have the tools, roles, pay, and leadership they need to succeed. I think that includes personalized online learning. Rocketship (www.rsed.org) seems to be making good use of early tools in elementary school. Schools like www.NYCiSchool.org are making use of early tools at the secondary level. We'll see more models this fall and ever better versions in 2011.
I'm big fan of technology, but I've always known that these were just tools that relied on my own skills and experience as a teacher, and the hard work of my students. I knew that they weren't a magic bullet.
And that's the point. People who are not teachers always seem to be looking for that magic bullet that will transform education. In a way, they are very much like some of my students, who want to think that they can magically succeed without hard work, without the the “slogging” that students have been doing for thousands of years. Psychologists call it magical thinking. Politicians, pundits, college professors, even education secretaries, without the benefit of a single day in front of a classroom, somehow have amazing educational solutions without having felt the need to consult the real experts – real teachers.
(continued in next post)
We need a greater sense of urgency to address the points that Tom has raised. Our children cannot continue to wait for solutions to a process that is failing so many of our young people today. If the level of failure in K-12 education were applied to health care, the death rate would certainly force more immediate change.