April 23, 2008

Prominent Educators Urge Greatly Expanded Federal Role in Improving Schools

A panel of well-known education experts today called on the federal government to take a much bigger role in overhauling elementary and secondary education, partly by establishing large new training programs for teachers and principals and by pumping much more money into education research.

In a report timed to commemorate the 25th anniversary of the issuance of the landmark “A Nation at Risk” study, the panel of educators, who call themselves the Forum for Education and Democracy, argues that the nation’s schools are farther behind now than they were when the National Commission on Excellence in Education issued that widely publicized 1983 document calling for sweeping education reform.

“While other countries have made strategic investments and transformed their schools to produce results, we have demanded results without investing in or transforming schooling,” Linda Darling-Hammond, a professor of education at Stanford University and co-author of the report, said in a news release.

The report urges the federal government to adopt a sweeping plan for training educators, to include new scholarships for prospective teachers, the establishment of the equivalent of a West Point for principals and other school leaders, and the creation of new professional-development schools that would work with universities to ensure that both prospective and veteran teachers learn new skills.

“For an annual investment of $4-billion, or less than what we are currently spending per week in Iraq, the nation could underwrite the high-quality preparation of 40,000 teachers annually (enough to fill all the vacancies that are filled by unprepared teachers each year), seed 100 top-quality urban teacher-education programs, ensure mentors for every new teacher hired each year, provide incentives to bring expert teachers into high-need schools, and dramatically improve professional-learning opportunities for teachers and principals,” the report says.

The report calls for the share of the federal research budget devoted to education research to rise from 0.2 percent to 1 percent, with much of the additional money to be spent ensuring that educators know of promising new practices.

Among the leading members of the forum are John Goodlad, president of the Institute for Education Inquiry; Sharon Robinson, president of the American Association of Colleges for Teacher Education; Ted Sizer, founder of the Coalition of Essential Schools; and Angela Valenzuela, the University of Texas at Austin’s associate vice president for university-school partnerships. —Peter Schmidt

Comments

1. The report released today also recommends using performance-based assessments that require students to conduct research, solve complex real-world problems, and defend their ideas – in other words, to “show what they know.” Educators and policymakers have an opportunity to see exactly this kind of assessment in action during the month of May, when the Coalition of Essential Schools sponsors National Exhibition Month. Take a look at this page for more info and to see a sample performance-based assessment: http://www.essentialschools.org/exhibitionmedia.html

   — Isobel White    Apr 23, 02:49 PM    #

2. How many more failures will it take before we learn that “incentives” devised by the Federal government are always inferior to the natural beauty and creativity of a flexible, responsive marketplace? Our long history of “incentivized” public schools has shown that we need choice and competition, not more guidance from Walter Mitty bureaucrats and their professional compadres at the money pipeline.

   — S. Britchky    Apr 23, 04:25 PM    #

3. I’d be interested to know what S. Britchky has in mind when he/she refers to “the natural beauty and creativity of a flexible, responsive marketplace.” He/she can’t possibly be thinking about anything in the world of education.

   — Don Langenberg    Apr 23, 04:35 PM    #

4. Just a bit of rewriting to remove polemics and focus on needs:
   “For an annual investment of $4-billion, the nation could underwrite the high-quality preparation of 40,000 teachers annually (enough to fill all the vacancies that are filled by inadequately prepared teachers each year), develop and extend top-quality urban teacher-education programs, ensure mentors for beginning teachers, provide incentives to bring expert teachers into high-need schools, and improve professional-learning opportunities for teachers,” the report says.

   — R Werner    Apr 23, 04:38 PM    #

5. Good luck replacing inadaquately prepared teachers – don’t forget, they were once inadaquately prepared students who now have teaching jobs! You can throw all the money you want at education, and it won’t change a thing until we come to grips with the following.

   1. Who is going to mentor these teachers when good teachers are so difficult to find?

   2. Who is going to mentor these teachers when schools in general are afraid of excellence, and reduce faculty to mediocrity so nobody gets his feelings hurt?

   3. What are we going to do when we have amnesty for millions of students who don’t even speak English, and won’t even with 12 years of bi-lingual ed because nobody forces them to assimilate?

   As long as sensitivity overrides competency, NOTHING will change even if we throw 100 billion dollars at the problem.

   — Muap Conners    Apr 23, 05:07 PM    #

6. well I’m glad to see that the last set of educational reforms that htese same “experts” created now only need 4 billion a year to undo and clean up; we have done nothing except throw money at education; the problems are these these very”‘educators,” what they propose and conducting education the way we know it should be done which entails getting rid of the pc ideology and pc mafia now telling us what needs to be done educationally. Time for these experts to fess up that they are a big part of the problem if not the problem; how much more data do you need and particvularly when no one else in the world is doing it (education) like we do; but of course everyone else is out of step; talk about creating a teacher education feather bedded industry.

   — jc    Apr 23, 08:02 PM    #

7. It is fairly easy, I submit, to identify factors and strategies that have consistently enabled students in other countries to surpass ours. We need to overpower the self-serving groups that keep us from emphasizing those factors and strategies here (with necessary modifications, of course) and that force us to pour endless money into US “reforms” that produce meager improvements at best, and often none at all—“reforms” like more extensive teacher training, for example, when we have never demonstrated the capacity to produce teachers as capable as their counterparts in other nations.

   — Don Erickson    Apr 24, 01:27 AM    #

8. We have had “market-based” and “competitive” strategies for years – charter schools. They have been a cheap-fix and miserable failure.

   Educated children are not pumped out like a widget on an assembly-line.

   I agree you can’t throw money at things, but I also agree you need adequate financial commitment to address serious inadequacies and
   gross inequities in our current school system.

   …And scapegoating teachers, well that’s not only non-productive, it’s dumb!

   — michelle    Apr 24, 08:09 AM    #

9. The idea of establishing an academy, similar to the US Military Academy at West Point, is very troubling, and I can’t believe no one else has addressed it. I wonder, would it increase the number of qualified principles, or decrease it? Would it be a requirement for principles to go through this academy? Would prospective principles even want to go to such an academy? Is inadequate training of principles even a problem?

   Why do we want the federal government to anoint principles in the first place? What’s really scary is that the federal government can increase its role in education.

   Does anyone really want any of this to happen?

   — Tracy G.    Apr 24, 10:03 AM    #

10. I highly recommend you take the time to read more of the report than is quoted in this short article. Responding merely to the price tag without considering the cost already of NCLB implementation is a red herring. Education does cost money. The purpose of the report is to create a conversation to consider how best to spend that money and how to educate students so they will participate in our democracy and continue to affect our government, not be passive agents of “the federal government”.

    And, re: comment #6—these are NOT the same architects of NLCB. Read first. Comment later.

    — E. Newbury    Apr 24, 09:42 PM    #

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