Welcome to 2002. Allow me to open it by recalling nine great obstacles to serious education reform in America - and the (mostly obvious) changes we must make to break through them. You may, if you like, regard the latter as New Year's resolutions.
- We know more about the quality of our dishwashers than the quality of our children's schools. Most Americans have little understanding of the effectiveness of their children's education or don't think the achievement gap has much to do with their own schools. Despite lots of testing, we face an astonishing dearth of accurate information about school results vis-??-vis academic standards. Reliable outside audits are scarce. For the most part, the system controls - and vigorously spins - the data about its own performance. Poor and minority families sense that their kids' schools are failing to educate them, sometimes even to keep them safe. But much of America's vast middle class is smug about its suburban schools. Complacency is a potent reform retardant.
Remedy: Make schools transparent institutions that pump out clear, reliable, prompt, comparable information about what they're doing and how well they and their students are performing.
- More emphasis is placed on what goes into education than what comes out. Despite much talk about standards and results, the bulk of our reform efforts have focused on school inputs: more this or that poured into the system, more dollars, more teachers, more technology, more staff development, more homework - all this despite a conspicuous lack of evidence that pumping billions more into schools has yielded stronger results and notwithstanding plentiful research showing no clear link between a school's resources and its outcomes.
Remedy: Schools should be strictly accountable for their results - whether their students are learning what they should - but not for complying with a thousand rules or running a hundred programs or spending their budgets in fifty prescribed ways.
- Adult feet don't get held to the accountability fire. Even when we focus on results, there are few consequences for not producing them, at least not for the grown-ups in the education system. In the name of "accountability," many states and districts now come down hard on youngsters who don't meet standards or pass tests, but teachers and principals (and superintendents, board members and state officials) generally keep their jobs and suffer no great embarrassment, hardship or inconvenience. Indeed, it is still true in America that the likeliest policy response to a failing school is to send it more money.
Remedy: A proper accountability system doesn't just crack down on non-performing kids (and reward those who meet standards). It confers suitable rewards and sanctions on everyone involved, especially the adults who work in schools.
- Consumers lack clout. In the eternal struggle for control of key decisions, education's producers - the system's employees, managers and suppliers - hold far more power than do parents and students. Only well-to-do consumers, armed with the power of their own checkbooks, can navigate around bad schools and cartel-like arrangements for teacher training, curriculum and textbooks. Members of that cartel are superbly organized to cling to power and repel reform. Education's consumers, by contrast, are poorly represented in policy councils. School children employ no lobbyists.
Remedy: Along with school competition on the "supply side" must come consumer choice on the "demand side." That will shift power from those who run schools to those who decide which schools to attend.
- Weak competition encourages weak performance. Few public schools face competition - and few families have meaningful choices about where to educate their children. American K-12 education operates as a quasi-monopoly. We know that monopolies do badly at efficiency, productivity, and customer service. Though cracks in this one can be glimpsed - e.g. charter schools, the outsourcing of some troubled public schools to private managers - these are, as yet, tiny openings through which few can escape.
Would-be teachers face a monopoly, too. The system's fear of competition and innovation leads it to deny entry into teaching by people without state certification (even as private schools hire whomever they like). Some states have "alternative" paths for teachers but the cartel is doing its best to give them the same hairpin turns as the regular path.
Remedy: Encourage educators and policy makers to differentiate schools from one another, to cherish institutional diversity, to make schools compete for students (and resources) and to enable all sorts of well-educated people to enter the classroom without needless hurdles.
- Too few of the best and brightest come work in schools. For a host of reasons, public education does not attract enough of our ablest people, much less our keenest entrepreneurs and innovators. Mediocre pay is one factor, but red tape and monopoly are at least as important - and they intersect with pay through such absurd practices as uniform salary schedules that don't distinguish between highly effective and terminally mediocre educators. Working for the school system more closely resembles a civil service job than one in the private sector. Not surprisingly, it tends to attract people with the drive and imagination of civil servants - and then gives them lifetime tenure at the age of twenty-five so that actual performance never again affects their job security. It's a wonder that we have as many dedicated, energized teachers and principals as we do.
Remedy: Reconstruct the personnel system around different rewards and incentives, different assumptions about compensation and tenure, different arrangements for making decisions. Educators should be paid - and retained - according to the scarcity of their skills, the value they add to their pupils and the difficulty of the challenges they face in school.
- The education profession is awash in fads and bad ideas. It favors curricular and instructional strategies grounded in ideology and wishful thinking over those based on scientific proof. In the crucial area of reading instruction, for example, colleges of education continue to induct new teachers into "whole language" methods despite decades of evidence that phonics-based methods work better with most youngsters. Diane Ravitch and E.D. Hirsch have brilliantly traced the profession's abiding affinity for "progressive," "child-centered" methods that accord with its beliefs even though they don't work very well for children. If physicians behaved similarly, hospitals would still feature leeches, incantations and mustard plasters.
Remedy: Out with the snake oil. Only research-based practices should be tolerated in our classrooms - and only bona-fide scientific research should be tolerated by the leaders of this profession and those who run our schools.
- Even Houdini couldn't escape the red tape. Public education's governance structures are uncommonly hard to alter, even to penetrate. Five levels of decision-making - federal and state governments, the local district, the individual school, and the teacher with her door closed - shape what happens in the classroom. Each can effectively block changes launched from another level. This system's innate response to any problem is to devise more regulations, impose more procedures and demand more resources. The only change it welcomes is more dollars.
Remedy: Rethink public education's governance arrangements, with fewer layers of decision makers and clearer alignment of authority with responsibility. The federal government should trust states (while verifying their results); states should work directly with schools - which should also be accountable to their customers. The "local school system" as we know it is an anachronism.
- Schools are expected to solve all of society's problems. School occupies just nine percent of most children's lives. The other 91% is spent under the sway of family, peers, neighborhood, television, etc. Lots of academic skills and knowledge can be imparted during the schools' 9% if the 91% cooperates. But when the 91% pushes in other directions, 9% offers too little leverage to counteract it. And when society decides that the failings of the 91% must also be solved within the schools' jurisdiction - thus adding character education, drug education, sex education, tolerance education and whatnot to their curriculum - there is simply no way that this relatively weak system can produce all the desired results.
Remedy: For kids who need it, expand the school's 9% to confer greater leverage in their lives, whether through pre-school, extended days, reconfigured years, or cyber-education that breaks through the school-home barrier. An education system that is expected to do more for its young charges needs more scope in which to do so.
It's no wonder our recent education reform efforts have accomplished so little. They're not nearly as powerful as the forces that resist them. Breaking through that resistance is the main work of serious education reformers in 2002 and over the next decade. While the needed breakthroughs are easily described, they're politically arduous to put into place. Some will say they're pipe dreams. Yet so long as these (or kindred) changes remain unmade, the education status quo will continue to prevail, our schools will remain unfixed and our children will continue to be poorly educated.
