Kenneth Ashworth, Local Contributor | Austin American-Statesman
Monday, Sept. 19, 2011
Gov. John Connally created the Higher Education Coordinating Board more than four decades ago to try to curb the intrusion of politics into Texas colleges and universities.
Upon appointing the board members, he asked them not to accept his appointment if they could not take a statewide overview and rise above politics, put aside regional loyalties, and curb their desires to promote the interests of their alma maters. As with the university regents he appointed to boards, he asked them to exercise their best independent judgment in giving policy direction to the schools they governed and to keep politics out of education.
Connally's charge to his appointees fit the American model for university governance. In Europe, universities are governed by their faculties. But the United States decided early on that the corporate model should be used to govern our colleges and universities. Ever since, boards of regents or trustees have been the supreme authority on our campuses.
But the trustees and regents of the nation's best and greatest universities promptly learned that they needed to share governance with their faculty members. Those colleges whose boards ignored and overrode their faculties saw their best faculty leave to join other schools more tolerant and accepting of their ideas. On the most outstanding campuses there developed among regents, faculties and administrators a close partnership of authority, consultation, mutual guidance and exchange of ideas.
Effective regents and trustees quickly learned they were not "top-down" directors put in place to unilaterally issue orders about how their campuses were to be run. They learned to consult with faculty on policies and management. The more enlightened boards came to see that they had a role to defend as well as to explain the university. They needed to serve on the one hand as a moat to protect the citadel of learning and on the other as a bridge to help the community understand the role of the university and its contributions to society.
As Connally said, "I want you to be the spokesman for higher education in Texas — to lend encouragement to our institutions, to praise their progress, support their steps toward excellence, to applaud their imagination and initiative in imparting knowledge."
Recent efforts to redirect and "reform" Texas higher education imposed from the top down, precisely the kind of politics Connally wanted to curb, have been introduced to the campuses. And the historical lessons of how to make universities outstanding through shared governance have been ignored or even ridiculed. The politics being insinuated from the governor's office and from regents the governor appointed is damaging Texas universities.
National rankings of universities is based largely on reputation. And nothing lowers the standing of a university faster than word spreading across the country that a school is losing its independence and autonomy, that outside politics is controlling the institution, that the faculty has lost its role in participating in campus governance, that thought is best in lockstep, that dissent is denigrated. Institutional reputations in the making over scores of years can be undone quickly, and they can take decades to rebuild.
In Texas, it is undeniable that campus faculties recently have been unjustifiably demeaned as being out of touch, criticized as selfishly involved in unproductive research and uninterested in students, and ignored when new policies and directions are adopted and promoted for running the universities. Among all states, Texas has the reputation for the most egregious and frequent political interference in higher education. Current intrusions merely underscore the bad record the state bears in this regard.
In the 1920s, Gov. "Pa" Ferguson insisted that professors he objected to be fired or he would veto University of Texas appropriations. Then there was Gov. W. Lee O'Daniel's insistence that the regents fire professors whose views he objected to, ending in firing the president. And regents whom the governors appointed carried out their orders and did their dirty work. Then the heavy-handed control of UT-Austin under board chairman Frank Erwin followed during the troublesome 1960s and '70s. Each of these episodes extended over years and eroded progress being made to develop nationally recognized universities.
Now, once again, Texas higher education is being watched and discussed by faculties and administrators on campuses across the nation. How damaging will this latest round of political incursions be? How deep and lasting will the interference be? How will campus reputations be affected? How badly will faculty recruitment and retention be hurt? How long will it take to rebuild?
Regents would do well to heed Connally's advice to his appointees: "Leave politics to the politicians and administration to the administrators."
Ashworth is a former commissioner of the Texas Higher Education Coordinating Board.
Showing posts with label editorial. Show all posts
Showing posts with label editorial. Show all posts
Wednesday, September 21, 2011
Monday, May 16, 2011
College Presidents Are Too Complacent
By Daniel Yankelovich | Commentary, The Chronicle of Higher Education
May 15, 2011
This issue of The Chronicle features two important surveys of higher education: one with college presidents and one with the public. These new data give us a chance to take a second look at some of the trends I discussed in an article for The Chronicle in November 2005. At that time, those trends appeared to be pushing higher education into a new era of turmoil, crisis, and challenge.
In sharp contrast to my 2005 article, the tone of the two new Chronicle surveys suggests to me the opposite of turmoil and crisis. Though some Americans grumble about not getting great value for their money, the vast majority are pretty well satisfied with the performance of higher education. Most Americans who have been exposed to higher education feel that their investment has been a sound one. A majority of college presidents believe that higher education is moving in the right direction. Almost four out of five (76 percent) say they are convinced that our higher-education system is doing a good or an excellent job of providing value for the money spent by students and their families.
The college presidents do acknowledge that higher education confronts many problems. For example:
* Troubling increases in student plagiarism.
* High schools doing an ever-poorer job of preparing students.
* Failure to do an "excellent job" of providing academic programs that meet the needs of today's economy.
* The increasing inability of students and their families to pay for a college education.
* The conviction that our system of higher education is losing ground relative to those of other nations.
* The likely failure of President Obama's goal to have this country achieve rates of college completion superior to any other country's by 2020.
But these decidedly nontrivial problems somehow fade into the background as the college presidents express their satisfaction with today's higher-education system. From the perspective of the trends that trouble me, this high level of satisfaction signals a lack of awareness of the dangers that lie ahead. The message I get from the survey of college presidents is, "We are doing just fine under difficult circumstances. If you send us more money and better-prepared high-school students, we can do an even better job." Neither the general public nor the presidents of our colleges seem conscious of the seriousness of the threat; they therefore lack the sense of urgency needed to confront it.
Both college presidents and the public seem to be reacting to what might be called "the old normal"—the world as it existed in the two decades before the deep recession of 2008-9. In the old normal, American universities were tops in the world; our economy was the undisputed world leader; the dollar was strong; income inequalities were much narrower than they are now; unemployment averaged about 5 percent; low-skill, high-paying jobs were commonplace; and our science and technology held undisputed world leadership.
In the old normal, higher-education credentials were seen by the public as desirable, virtually guaranteeing higher incomes and social status, but they weren't seen as indispensable to making a decent living. (In The Chronicle survey, Americans ranked having a strong work ethic, knowing how to get along with others, and learning new skills on the job as more important to success than achieving higher-education credentials.) And in the old normal employers valued higher-education credentials less for specific job skills than for a certain polish: being able to understand complex instructions, feeling socially comfortable, speaking fluently and grammatically, and making clear presentations. Companies felt that they could impart the specific skills they required to people whose college credentials proved that they were good learners.
That is not what higher education has to deliver in the world of the "new normal." In this emerging world, education beyond high school becomes indispensable to making a good living.
The threat, as I see it, is an impending crisis in this nation's powerful, if unwritten, social contract. Higher education is becoming the main battleground in a national struggle over how to keep faith with this contract.
At its core, the social contract that binds Americans together is amazingly simple. It is an implicit understanding that all citizens should be given a fair chance to achieve social mobility. It promises Americans the opportunity to better themselves and to improve their lot in life. Throughout much of our country's history, this social contract has functioned to the satisfaction of the public. Indeed, despite today's political polarization, we live with one another with a remarkable degree of social harmony.
The survey of the public shows that Americans don't believe that the lack of higher-education credentials has prevented them from getting the kinds of jobs, incomes, and social status they seek. But now all sorts of national and worldwide trends are merging to increase the importance of higher education. U.S.-government projections are that nearly eight out of 10 new jobs will require some sort of higher education, including work-force training.
It is not easy to discern to what extent structural change will reshape our economy. Some features of the new normal are all too clear. The era of low-skill, high-paying jobs is dead and gone. Many of those jobs are easy to export to countries with far lower standards of living.
Similarly, it is hard to imagine that we can quickly reverse the growth of economic inequality. The Institute of Policy Studies reports that CEO pay has soared from 30 times that of the average worker in the 1970s to more than 260 times today. The top sliver of the income distribution does better and better, while middle-class incomes stagnate.
We may not return to the old unemployment rate of 5 percent in the foreseeable future. Companies have learned how to make money even under recession conditions by laying off people and taking advantage of technology and manufacturing abroad. Asian countries are also determined to overcome our lead in science and technology, and their students excel in math and related subjects.
Put all those conditions together, and you get a far different world than the one that existed in even the recent past.
The survey of college presidents shows that our institutions of higher education are making some constructive changes to adapt to the new trends. Most recognize that today's students need far more flexibility than in the past. The lockstep pattern of going to college directly from high school and spending the next two to four years there without interruption is no longer a practical path for many students. Increasingly, students spread their higher-education experience over a decade or more after they graduate from high school, and our colleges are preparing to provide this flexibility.
The presidents are also aware of the potential of online methods for delivering course instruction. The public still believes that online instruction is second-best to personal instruction, without realizing that online instruction enjoys several extraordinary advantages. The most obvious one is flexibility: the ability to learn at your own tempo and at times of greatest convenience (especially if you are employed). A less obvious advantage is that with online instruction, it is possible to have the nation's greatest teachers as your instructors.
Colleges are also aware of the increasing burden of higher costs on students and their families. Many institutions are pursuing programs to increase student aid and make loans more available to students.
Those steps are positive, but they fall far short of meeting the main challenge—the new normal for the world economy. If the United States is to live up to its social contract of offering Americans a fair shot at social mobility, higher education must make transformative changes in at least three areas: becoming more affordable, doing a better job of linking two-year colleges to the world of work and to four-year colleges, and ensuring that the nation maintains its lead in science, technology, and other high-level skills.
Affordability. Both the college presidents and the public agree that parents and students themselves should take the main responsibility of paying for college. But families can no longer meet those inexorably rising costs. Increasingly, students are dependent on financial aid or loans. In the public survey, only 39 percent of college graduates relied mainly on loans or financial aid to pay most of their costs. Among current students, that figure has soared to 65 percent, with only a minority able to rely mainly on their own or their parents' resources.
Clearly, higher education cannot continue its pattern of annual increases in costs without the system's becoming unglued. New initiatives to rein in costs and increase revenue are badly needed. For example, the desires of many baby-boom retirees to continue their college education opens a new market for colleges, especially among alumni.
Better integration of two-year colleges. Our system of community colleges is a national treasure, all too often taken for granted and undersupported. A significant and growing percentage of the nation's 12 million college students attend community colleges, and the number is likely to rise as the proportion of minority youths increases. Community colleges address the needs of our ever more diverse population, compensating for some of the failures of our K-12 system.
One of the country's most troubling societal problems is that the college-completion rate of students from low-income families is disastrously below that of students from middle-income families. The Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation and the Lumina Foundation for Education are devoting major resources to finding strategies for narrowing the gap, and we should be grateful for that effort, but it makes one wonder why the government and higher-education institutions themselves are not doing more to correct this potentially explosive problem. With the disappearance of high-paying, low-skill jobs, earning higher-education credentials becomes the only way that tens of millions of Americans can better themselves economically.
We cannot depend on our two-year colleges to alleviate that problem without helping them to create closer ties with employers and four-year colleges. A closer integration with employers will help to ensure that students have jobs waiting for them, and it will sharpen their focus on the skills that are most in demand in the workplace.
The relationship with four-year colleges calls for a subtler strategy. Many four-year institutions take a condescending attitude toward community colleges, regarding them as mere steppingstones to the "real education" that the four-year colleges provide. If they were to take a less patronizing attitude, they might find it easier to cooperate with community colleges in developing programs to meet the needs of today's economy. Such a strategy would enable the four-year colleges to keep faith with the mission that should mean most to them—a commitment to provide the broad-based education that promotes the intellectual growth of their students.
Imparting the higher skills that good jobs demand. I have saved for last the most complex area of necessary change—maintaining world leadership in science, technology, and related entrepreneurship. The issue here is not a matter of American hubris. It is a matter of economic common sense. Between them, China and India have populations of well over two billion people, many of them hard working, ambitious, smart, and talented. The Chinese, who have a long tradition of economic domination, are playing catch-up with the United States. If we are able to maintain our own entrepreneurial vitality, their successes will add to world growth. But if we lag too far behind, the Chinese will gobble up our high-level jobs as well as our low-level ones.
A survey by Public Agenda, a public-policy research group, shows that a major obstacle to better science-and-math education is that Americans simply don't see its relevance to their lives and believe that the training their children are getting in those subjects in the K-12 years is "fine as it is." Consequently, there is a lot of resistance to upgrading math and science instruction in the schools.
In my view, the single most effective form of intervention would be for the science and technology communities to prepare—and test with young people—persuasive online forms of instruction that communicate the relevance, importance, and magnitude of the opportunity that studies in science, technology, and math present, especially for women and minorities. Additionally, college science faculty should cooperate with local high schools to develop more-germane curricula and lesson plans.
If we do not act to prepare America's students to succeed in the emerging world economy, there simply won't be enough truly good jobs for them. Such a failure would violate the social contract and bring about the kind of unrest and resentment that plagues so many other nations.
Indeed, a huge responsibility rests on our institutions of higher education. A wake-up call is in order for the presidents who lead them.
Daniel Yankelovich is founder and chairman of three organizations: Viewpoint Learning Inc., a company that develops specialized dialogues on public-policy issues; Public Agenda, a nonprofit policy-research organization; and DYG Inc., a market- and social-research firm.
May 15, 2011
This issue of The Chronicle features two important surveys of higher education: one with college presidents and one with the public. These new data give us a chance to take a second look at some of the trends I discussed in an article for The Chronicle in November 2005. At that time, those trends appeared to be pushing higher education into a new era of turmoil, crisis, and challenge.
In sharp contrast to my 2005 article, the tone of the two new Chronicle surveys suggests to me the opposite of turmoil and crisis. Though some Americans grumble about not getting great value for their money, the vast majority are pretty well satisfied with the performance of higher education. Most Americans who have been exposed to higher education feel that their investment has been a sound one. A majority of college presidents believe that higher education is moving in the right direction. Almost four out of five (76 percent) say they are convinced that our higher-education system is doing a good or an excellent job of providing value for the money spent by students and their families.
The college presidents do acknowledge that higher education confronts many problems. For example:
* Troubling increases in student plagiarism.
* High schools doing an ever-poorer job of preparing students.
* Failure to do an "excellent job" of providing academic programs that meet the needs of today's economy.
* The increasing inability of students and their families to pay for a college education.
* The conviction that our system of higher education is losing ground relative to those of other nations.
* The likely failure of President Obama's goal to have this country achieve rates of college completion superior to any other country's by 2020.
But these decidedly nontrivial problems somehow fade into the background as the college presidents express their satisfaction with today's higher-education system. From the perspective of the trends that trouble me, this high level of satisfaction signals a lack of awareness of the dangers that lie ahead. The message I get from the survey of college presidents is, "We are doing just fine under difficult circumstances. If you send us more money and better-prepared high-school students, we can do an even better job." Neither the general public nor the presidents of our colleges seem conscious of the seriousness of the threat; they therefore lack the sense of urgency needed to confront it.
Both college presidents and the public seem to be reacting to what might be called "the old normal"—the world as it existed in the two decades before the deep recession of 2008-9. In the old normal, American universities were tops in the world; our economy was the undisputed world leader; the dollar was strong; income inequalities were much narrower than they are now; unemployment averaged about 5 percent; low-skill, high-paying jobs were commonplace; and our science and technology held undisputed world leadership.
In the old normal, higher-education credentials were seen by the public as desirable, virtually guaranteeing higher incomes and social status, but they weren't seen as indispensable to making a decent living. (In The Chronicle survey, Americans ranked having a strong work ethic, knowing how to get along with others, and learning new skills on the job as more important to success than achieving higher-education credentials.) And in the old normal employers valued higher-education credentials less for specific job skills than for a certain polish: being able to understand complex instructions, feeling socially comfortable, speaking fluently and grammatically, and making clear presentations. Companies felt that they could impart the specific skills they required to people whose college credentials proved that they were good learners.
That is not what higher education has to deliver in the world of the "new normal." In this emerging world, education beyond high school becomes indispensable to making a good living.
The threat, as I see it, is an impending crisis in this nation's powerful, if unwritten, social contract. Higher education is becoming the main battleground in a national struggle over how to keep faith with this contract.
At its core, the social contract that binds Americans together is amazingly simple. It is an implicit understanding that all citizens should be given a fair chance to achieve social mobility. It promises Americans the opportunity to better themselves and to improve their lot in life. Throughout much of our country's history, this social contract has functioned to the satisfaction of the public. Indeed, despite today's political polarization, we live with one another with a remarkable degree of social harmony.
The survey of the public shows that Americans don't believe that the lack of higher-education credentials has prevented them from getting the kinds of jobs, incomes, and social status they seek. But now all sorts of national and worldwide trends are merging to increase the importance of higher education. U.S.-government projections are that nearly eight out of 10 new jobs will require some sort of higher education, including work-force training.
It is not easy to discern to what extent structural change will reshape our economy. Some features of the new normal are all too clear. The era of low-skill, high-paying jobs is dead and gone. Many of those jobs are easy to export to countries with far lower standards of living.
Similarly, it is hard to imagine that we can quickly reverse the growth of economic inequality. The Institute of Policy Studies reports that CEO pay has soared from 30 times that of the average worker in the 1970s to more than 260 times today. The top sliver of the income distribution does better and better, while middle-class incomes stagnate.
We may not return to the old unemployment rate of 5 percent in the foreseeable future. Companies have learned how to make money even under recession conditions by laying off people and taking advantage of technology and manufacturing abroad. Asian countries are also determined to overcome our lead in science and technology, and their students excel in math and related subjects.
Put all those conditions together, and you get a far different world than the one that existed in even the recent past.
The survey of college presidents shows that our institutions of higher education are making some constructive changes to adapt to the new trends. Most recognize that today's students need far more flexibility than in the past. The lockstep pattern of going to college directly from high school and spending the next two to four years there without interruption is no longer a practical path for many students. Increasingly, students spread their higher-education experience over a decade or more after they graduate from high school, and our colleges are preparing to provide this flexibility.
The presidents are also aware of the potential of online methods for delivering course instruction. The public still believes that online instruction is second-best to personal instruction, without realizing that online instruction enjoys several extraordinary advantages. The most obvious one is flexibility: the ability to learn at your own tempo and at times of greatest convenience (especially if you are employed). A less obvious advantage is that with online instruction, it is possible to have the nation's greatest teachers as your instructors.
Colleges are also aware of the increasing burden of higher costs on students and their families. Many institutions are pursuing programs to increase student aid and make loans more available to students.
Those steps are positive, but they fall far short of meeting the main challenge—the new normal for the world economy. If the United States is to live up to its social contract of offering Americans a fair shot at social mobility, higher education must make transformative changes in at least three areas: becoming more affordable, doing a better job of linking two-year colleges to the world of work and to four-year colleges, and ensuring that the nation maintains its lead in science, technology, and other high-level skills.
Affordability. Both the college presidents and the public agree that parents and students themselves should take the main responsibility of paying for college. But families can no longer meet those inexorably rising costs. Increasingly, students are dependent on financial aid or loans. In the public survey, only 39 percent of college graduates relied mainly on loans or financial aid to pay most of their costs. Among current students, that figure has soared to 65 percent, with only a minority able to rely mainly on their own or their parents' resources.
Clearly, higher education cannot continue its pattern of annual increases in costs without the system's becoming unglued. New initiatives to rein in costs and increase revenue are badly needed. For example, the desires of many baby-boom retirees to continue their college education opens a new market for colleges, especially among alumni.
Better integration of two-year colleges. Our system of community colleges is a national treasure, all too often taken for granted and undersupported. A significant and growing percentage of the nation's 12 million college students attend community colleges, and the number is likely to rise as the proportion of minority youths increases. Community colleges address the needs of our ever more diverse population, compensating for some of the failures of our K-12 system.
One of the country's most troubling societal problems is that the college-completion rate of students from low-income families is disastrously below that of students from middle-income families. The Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation and the Lumina Foundation for Education are devoting major resources to finding strategies for narrowing the gap, and we should be grateful for that effort, but it makes one wonder why the government and higher-education institutions themselves are not doing more to correct this potentially explosive problem. With the disappearance of high-paying, low-skill jobs, earning higher-education credentials becomes the only way that tens of millions of Americans can better themselves economically.
We cannot depend on our two-year colleges to alleviate that problem without helping them to create closer ties with employers and four-year colleges. A closer integration with employers will help to ensure that students have jobs waiting for them, and it will sharpen their focus on the skills that are most in demand in the workplace.
The relationship with four-year colleges calls for a subtler strategy. Many four-year institutions take a condescending attitude toward community colleges, regarding them as mere steppingstones to the "real education" that the four-year colleges provide. If they were to take a less patronizing attitude, they might find it easier to cooperate with community colleges in developing programs to meet the needs of today's economy. Such a strategy would enable the four-year colleges to keep faith with the mission that should mean most to them—a commitment to provide the broad-based education that promotes the intellectual growth of their students.
Imparting the higher skills that good jobs demand. I have saved for last the most complex area of necessary change—maintaining world leadership in science, technology, and related entrepreneurship. The issue here is not a matter of American hubris. It is a matter of economic common sense. Between them, China and India have populations of well over two billion people, many of them hard working, ambitious, smart, and talented. The Chinese, who have a long tradition of economic domination, are playing catch-up with the United States. If we are able to maintain our own entrepreneurial vitality, their successes will add to world growth. But if we lag too far behind, the Chinese will gobble up our high-level jobs as well as our low-level ones.
A survey by Public Agenda, a public-policy research group, shows that a major obstacle to better science-and-math education is that Americans simply don't see its relevance to their lives and believe that the training their children are getting in those subjects in the K-12 years is "fine as it is." Consequently, there is a lot of resistance to upgrading math and science instruction in the schools.
In my view, the single most effective form of intervention would be for the science and technology communities to prepare—and test with young people—persuasive online forms of instruction that communicate the relevance, importance, and magnitude of the opportunity that studies in science, technology, and math present, especially for women and minorities. Additionally, college science faculty should cooperate with local high schools to develop more-germane curricula and lesson plans.
If we do not act to prepare America's students to succeed in the emerging world economy, there simply won't be enough truly good jobs for them. Such a failure would violate the social contract and bring about the kind of unrest and resentment that plagues so many other nations.
Indeed, a huge responsibility rests on our institutions of higher education. A wake-up call is in order for the presidents who lead them.
Daniel Yankelovich is founder and chairman of three organizations: Viewpoint Learning Inc., a company that develops specialized dialogues on public-policy issues; Public Agenda, a nonprofit policy-research organization; and DYG Inc., a market- and social-research firm.
Tuesday, November 30, 2010
Teaching for America
By THOMAS L. FRIEDMAN | MY Times Op-Ed
November 20, 2010
When I came to Washington in 1988, the cold war was ending and the hot beat was national security and the State Department. If I were a cub reporter today, I’d still want to be covering the epicenter of national security — but that would be the Education Department. President Obama got this one exactly right when he said that whoever “out-educates us today is going to out-compete us tomorrow.” The bad news is that for years now we’ve been getting out-educated. The good news is that cities, states and the federal government are all fighting back. But have no illusions. We’re in a hole.
Here are few data points that the secretary of education, Arne Duncan, offered in a Nov. 4 speech: “One-quarter of U.S. high school students drop out or fail to graduate on time. Almost one million students leave our schools for the streets each year. ... One of the more unusual and sobering press conferences I participated in last year was the release of a report by a group of top retired generals and admirals. Here was the stunning conclusion of their report: 75 percent of young Americans, between the ages of 17 to 24, are unable to enlist in the military today because they have failed to graduate from high school, have a criminal record, or are physically unfit.” America’s youth are now tied for ninth in the world in college attainment.
“Other folks have passed us by, and we’re paying a huge price for that economically,” added Duncan in an interview. “Incremental change isn’t going to get us where we need to go. We’ve got to be much more ambitious. We’ve got to be disruptive. You can’t keep doing the same stuff and expect different results.”
Duncan, with bipartisan support, has begun several initiatives to energize reform — particularly his Race to the Top competition with federal dollars going to states with the most innovative reforms to achieve the highest standards. Maybe his biggest push, though, is to raise the status of the teaching profession. Why?
Tony Wagner, the Harvard-based education expert and author of “The Global Achievement Gap,” explains it this way. There are three basic skills that students need if they want to thrive in a knowledge economy: the ability to do critical thinking and problem-solving; the ability to communicate effectively; and the ability to collaborate.
If you look at the countries leading the pack in the tests that measure these skills (like Finland and Denmark), one thing stands out: they insist that their teachers come from the top one-third of their college graduating classes. As Wagner put it, “They took teaching from an assembly-line job to a knowledge-worker’s job. They have invested massively in how they recruit, train and support teachers, to attract and retain the best.”
Duncan disputes the notion that teachers’ unions will always resist such changes. He points to the new “breakthrough” contracts in Washington, D.C., New Haven and Hillsborough County, Fla., where teachers have embraced higher performance standards in return for higher pay for the best performers.
“We have to reward excellence,” he said. “We’ve been scared in education to talk about excellence. We treated everyone like interchangeable widgets. Just throw a kid in a class and throw a teacher in a class.” This ignored the variation between teachers who were changing students’ lives, and those who were not. “If you’re doing a great job with students,” he said, “we can’t pay you enough.”
That is why Duncan is starting a “national teacher campaign” to recruit new talent. “We have to systemically create the environment and the incentives where people want to come into the profession. Three countries that outperform us — Singapore, South Korea, Finland — don’t let anyone teach who doesn’t come from the top third of their graduating class. And in South Korea, they refer to their teachers as ‘nation builders.’ ”
Duncan’s view is that challenging teachers to rise to new levels — by using student achievement data in calculating salaries, by increasing competition through innovation and charters — is not anti-teacher. It’s taking the profession much more seriously and elevating it to where it should be. There are 3.2 million active teachers in America today. In the next decade, half (the baby boomers) will retire. How we recruit, train, support, evaluate and compensate their successors “is going to shape public education for the next 30 years,” said Duncan. We have to get this right.
Wagner thinks we should create a West Point for teachers: “We need a new National Education Academy, modeled after our military academies, to raise the status of the profession and to support the R.& D. that is essential for reinventing teaching, learning and assessment in the 21st century.”
All good ideas, but if we want better teachers we also need better parents — parents who turn off the TV and video games, make sure homework is completed, encourage reading and elevate learning as the most important life skill. The more we demand from teachers the more we have to demand from students and parents. That’s the Contract for America that will truly ensure our national security.
November 20, 2010
When I came to Washington in 1988, the cold war was ending and the hot beat was national security and the State Department. If I were a cub reporter today, I’d still want to be covering the epicenter of national security — but that would be the Education Department. President Obama got this one exactly right when he said that whoever “out-educates us today is going to out-compete us tomorrow.” The bad news is that for years now we’ve been getting out-educated. The good news is that cities, states and the federal government are all fighting back. But have no illusions. We’re in a hole.
Here are few data points that the secretary of education, Arne Duncan, offered in a Nov. 4 speech: “One-quarter of U.S. high school students drop out or fail to graduate on time. Almost one million students leave our schools for the streets each year. ... One of the more unusual and sobering press conferences I participated in last year was the release of a report by a group of top retired generals and admirals. Here was the stunning conclusion of their report: 75 percent of young Americans, between the ages of 17 to 24, are unable to enlist in the military today because they have failed to graduate from high school, have a criminal record, or are physically unfit.” America’s youth are now tied for ninth in the world in college attainment.
“Other folks have passed us by, and we’re paying a huge price for that economically,” added Duncan in an interview. “Incremental change isn’t going to get us where we need to go. We’ve got to be much more ambitious. We’ve got to be disruptive. You can’t keep doing the same stuff and expect different results.”
Duncan, with bipartisan support, has begun several initiatives to energize reform — particularly his Race to the Top competition with federal dollars going to states with the most innovative reforms to achieve the highest standards. Maybe his biggest push, though, is to raise the status of the teaching profession. Why?
Tony Wagner, the Harvard-based education expert and author of “The Global Achievement Gap,” explains it this way. There are three basic skills that students need if they want to thrive in a knowledge economy: the ability to do critical thinking and problem-solving; the ability to communicate effectively; and the ability to collaborate.
If you look at the countries leading the pack in the tests that measure these skills (like Finland and Denmark), one thing stands out: they insist that their teachers come from the top one-third of their college graduating classes. As Wagner put it, “They took teaching from an assembly-line job to a knowledge-worker’s job. They have invested massively in how they recruit, train and support teachers, to attract and retain the best.”
Duncan disputes the notion that teachers’ unions will always resist such changes. He points to the new “breakthrough” contracts in Washington, D.C., New Haven and Hillsborough County, Fla., where teachers have embraced higher performance standards in return for higher pay for the best performers.
“We have to reward excellence,” he said. “We’ve been scared in education to talk about excellence. We treated everyone like interchangeable widgets. Just throw a kid in a class and throw a teacher in a class.” This ignored the variation between teachers who were changing students’ lives, and those who were not. “If you’re doing a great job with students,” he said, “we can’t pay you enough.”
That is why Duncan is starting a “national teacher campaign” to recruit new talent. “We have to systemically create the environment and the incentives where people want to come into the profession. Three countries that outperform us — Singapore, South Korea, Finland — don’t let anyone teach who doesn’t come from the top third of their graduating class. And in South Korea, they refer to their teachers as ‘nation builders.’ ”
Duncan’s view is that challenging teachers to rise to new levels — by using student achievement data in calculating salaries, by increasing competition through innovation and charters — is not anti-teacher. It’s taking the profession much more seriously and elevating it to where it should be. There are 3.2 million active teachers in America today. In the next decade, half (the baby boomers) will retire. How we recruit, train, support, evaluate and compensate their successors “is going to shape public education for the next 30 years,” said Duncan. We have to get this right.
Wagner thinks we should create a West Point for teachers: “We need a new National Education Academy, modeled after our military academies, to raise the status of the profession and to support the R.& D. that is essential for reinventing teaching, learning and assessment in the 21st century.”
All good ideas, but if we want better teachers we also need better parents — parents who turn off the TV and video games, make sure homework is completed, encourage reading and elevate learning as the most important life skill. The more we demand from teachers the more we have to demand from students and parents. That’s the Contract for America that will truly ensure our national security.
Monday, July 19, 2010
Closing schools' achievement gaps
Five school systems across the country, with differences in location, funding and demographics, all have raised achievement notably using five common-sense steps.
By Heather Zavadsky | LA Times Editorial
July 7, 2010
While the Obama administration, with its federal Race to the Top program, is setting up a host of new rules for schools, five large urban school districts have raised achievement and closed achievement gaps using approaches that make such obvious sense, it would amaze parents to know that these aren't the norm everywhere.
The Broad Prize for Urban Education is awarded to large school districts that show the most progress. I had the opportunity to closely observe the innovations at five winning districts during the four years I spent working for the Los Angeles-based Eli and Edythe Broad Foundation, overseeing the process for selecting winners. That included visiting schools, analyzing test data and other statistics, and conducting follow-up interviews with teachers and parents.
Two of the districts are in Southern California — the Long Beach and Garden Grove unified school districts. The others are the Boston Public Schools, Norfolk Public Schools in Virginia and the Aldine Independent School District outside Houston. As different as the five school systems are in location, funding and, to some extent, demographics, all have raised achievement notably using five common-sense steps.
First, all developed a challenging, clear and specific curriculum. In these districts, every teacher and student knows exactly what academic content students should know and what skills they should be able to demonstrate in each subject and grade. While this might seem almost ridiculously obvious, the reality is that many districts never clearly articulate the skills that must be taught in a given grade, or consider the overall arc of the curriculum from kindergarten through senior year of high school, ensuring that there are no gaps or unnecessary repeats in instruction. It's also surprising how many teachers are unaware of the curriculum requirements for the grades just below and above the ones they teach.
These districts also set no more than six long-term strategic districtwide goals, and used them to drive practices in every school. For example, Garden Grove has had the same two goals since 2003 for students who attend the district for at least five years: Students would meet or exceed state standards in core academic subjects, and English language learners would gain a certain amount of proficiency in the language. Rather than continually changing goals, these districts stick to them, drilling down and refining them each year to ensure that all students, teachers and schools are able to move in that direction. From 2006 to 2009, the increase in the percentage of English language learners in Garden Grove who scored well enough on tests to be reclassified as proficient was more than twice as large as in Los Angeles Unified.
Third, the five districts developed smart strategies to attract and retain effective teachers, support them and cultivate a collaborative working environment. Boston Public Schools trained teachers to coach one another; teachers reported that it helped them to learn from experienced peers how to carry out particular classroom strategies.
Fourth, these districts asked staff to evaluate regularly whether each approach or program was improving achievement. The key to this strategy: data. The districts used data to select, pilot and monitor programs, and eliminate those that weren't working. Boston used a committee-created rubric to score the merits of various instructional programs and select the one that best met student needs. Aldine and Garden Grove required educators to demonstrate how programs or materials were tied to educational goals before they could buy them.
Just as important, data also helped these districts tailor their efforts to meet individual student needs, by revealing areas of improvement for each child and identifying which instructional approaches yielded the best results.
The Aldine schools match student needs with teacher strengths. Even in elementary school, students move to different classrooms when another teacher is better suited to work with them on a particular skill. For example, tests might have shown that one student is having trouble grasping fractions; he or she will be paired with a teacher who has demonstrated a particular talent for teaching fractions.
Finally, leaders in these districts have successfully built relationships with parents, community organizations, area businesses and others who have a stake in student success. In Norfolk, community engagement is so important that it appears as a performance indicator in the district's accountability system. The community in turn has helped the district carry out its plans; one corporation underwrote a leadership development program, and a foundation funded a large preschool initiative.
California is applying once again for Race to the Top funds. Whether or not its bid succeeds, its plan for the future should include prodding troubled urban school districts to adopt the sensible, student-centered efforts that have worked in the nation's most improved districts.
Heather Zavadsky is director of policy and communication for the Institute for Public School Initiatives at the University of Texas. She is the author of "Bringing School Reform to Scale: Five Award-Winning Urban Districts."
Copyright © 2010, The Los Angeles Times
By Heather Zavadsky | LA Times Editorial
July 7, 2010
While the Obama administration, with its federal Race to the Top program, is setting up a host of new rules for schools, five large urban school districts have raised achievement and closed achievement gaps using approaches that make such obvious sense, it would amaze parents to know that these aren't the norm everywhere.
The Broad Prize for Urban Education is awarded to large school districts that show the most progress. I had the opportunity to closely observe the innovations at five winning districts during the four years I spent working for the Los Angeles-based Eli and Edythe Broad Foundation, overseeing the process for selecting winners. That included visiting schools, analyzing test data and other statistics, and conducting follow-up interviews with teachers and parents.
Two of the districts are in Southern California — the Long Beach and Garden Grove unified school districts. The others are the Boston Public Schools, Norfolk Public Schools in Virginia and the Aldine Independent School District outside Houston. As different as the five school systems are in location, funding and, to some extent, demographics, all have raised achievement notably using five common-sense steps.
First, all developed a challenging, clear and specific curriculum. In these districts, every teacher and student knows exactly what academic content students should know and what skills they should be able to demonstrate in each subject and grade. While this might seem almost ridiculously obvious, the reality is that many districts never clearly articulate the skills that must be taught in a given grade, or consider the overall arc of the curriculum from kindergarten through senior year of high school, ensuring that there are no gaps or unnecessary repeats in instruction. It's also surprising how many teachers are unaware of the curriculum requirements for the grades just below and above the ones they teach.
These districts also set no more than six long-term strategic districtwide goals, and used them to drive practices in every school. For example, Garden Grove has had the same two goals since 2003 for students who attend the district for at least five years: Students would meet or exceed state standards in core academic subjects, and English language learners would gain a certain amount of proficiency in the language. Rather than continually changing goals, these districts stick to them, drilling down and refining them each year to ensure that all students, teachers and schools are able to move in that direction. From 2006 to 2009, the increase in the percentage of English language learners in Garden Grove who scored well enough on tests to be reclassified as proficient was more than twice as large as in Los Angeles Unified.
Third, the five districts developed smart strategies to attract and retain effective teachers, support them and cultivate a collaborative working environment. Boston Public Schools trained teachers to coach one another; teachers reported that it helped them to learn from experienced peers how to carry out particular classroom strategies.
Fourth, these districts asked staff to evaluate regularly whether each approach or program was improving achievement. The key to this strategy: data. The districts used data to select, pilot and monitor programs, and eliminate those that weren't working. Boston used a committee-created rubric to score the merits of various instructional programs and select the one that best met student needs. Aldine and Garden Grove required educators to demonstrate how programs or materials were tied to educational goals before they could buy them.
Just as important, data also helped these districts tailor their efforts to meet individual student needs, by revealing areas of improvement for each child and identifying which instructional approaches yielded the best results.
The Aldine schools match student needs with teacher strengths. Even in elementary school, students move to different classrooms when another teacher is better suited to work with them on a particular skill. For example, tests might have shown that one student is having trouble grasping fractions; he or she will be paired with a teacher who has demonstrated a particular talent for teaching fractions.
Finally, leaders in these districts have successfully built relationships with parents, community organizations, area businesses and others who have a stake in student success. In Norfolk, community engagement is so important that it appears as a performance indicator in the district's accountability system. The community in turn has helped the district carry out its plans; one corporation underwrote a leadership development program, and a foundation funded a large preschool initiative.
California is applying once again for Race to the Top funds. Whether or not its bid succeeds, its plan for the future should include prodding troubled urban school districts to adopt the sensible, student-centered efforts that have worked in the nation's most improved districts.
Heather Zavadsky is director of policy and communication for the Institute for Public School Initiatives at the University of Texas. She is the author of "Bringing School Reform to Scale: Five Award-Winning Urban Districts."
Copyright © 2010, The Los Angeles Times
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