Is Education Too Important to be Left in the Hands of Educators?

The executive summary for Tough Choices for Tough Times was released sometime this week. The "report" by political think-tank National Center on Education and the Economy blasts us with the standard Cassandra-like warning of the inadequacies  of our current educational system. (For a couple of very interesting alternate views, read Dennis Fermoyle's Here We Go Again: Another Nation At Risk asking why our economy hasn't tanked since A Nation At Risk was published 23 years ago, and Paul Tough's November 26, 2006 New York Times article "What It Takes to Make a Student" that smacks down the effectiveness of NCLB and reveals the hard facts of what closing the achievement gap will actually entail.)

After the usual litany of warnings of the impact of globalization and automation on the American workforce, the report recommends ten steps be taken to fix our "educational system." These are:

1. Assume we will do the job right the first time. (Initiate Board Exams that all students must pass. Since testing has worked SO well as a part of NCLB.)
2. Make much more efficient use of the available resources. (Follow our plan and we will save taxpayers $60 billion a year.)
3. Recruit from the top third of the high school graduates going on to college for the next generation of school teachers. (We dumb folks currently in the classroom are why we are in the current mess. By starting new teachers at $45,000 a year, we'd get the smart folks in education instead of in investment banking.)
4. Develop standards, assessments, and curriculum that reflect today's needs and tomorrow's requirements. (Start testing creativity and innovation. Go beyond assessing the basic skills. This one I like. But I  doubt filling in the ovals with a number 2 pencil is going to do the trick to doing this.)
5. Create high performance schools and districts everywhere - how the system should be governed, financed, organized and managed. (Every school a charter, oops, make that contract school. Vouchers. Choice. Yada, yada, yada... Competition will solve all education's problems.)
6. Provide high-quality, universal early childhood education.  ("For decades, researchers have almost universally concluded that high-quality early childhood education is one of the best investments..." For decades? For decades? What does this say about what politicians think about research? Only the results that don't cost money are valid?)
7. Give strong support to the students who need it most. (Equitable school funding by shifting school financing from local property taxes to state revenues. Redistribution/equalization of current school funding. Do "wealthy" districts have a surplus of funds now? Why does spending more on the kids who really do need additional help always mean spending less on other kids?)
8. Enable every member of the adult workforce to get the new literacy skills.  (Turn those unemployed old-economy factory workers into college grads ... who can't get jobs.)
9. Create personal competitiveness accounts - a GI Bill for our times. (The government making it easier for you to pay for your own training through payroll deduction. Awful kind of them.)
10. Create regional competitiveness authorities to make America competitive. (Another layer of bureaucracy between the Feds and the states. Sounds good to me.)

Do I sound cynical? No!  This document is not about improving education but about shifting the power for making educational decisions. Don't get your hopes up looking for real answers to real problems.

Oh, and still not a single mention of the growing need for BS Literacy. 

Comments

[Miguel Guhlin]

Careful! Cynicism ensures that your next job will be difficult to find, demands that you stick to your current job with single-minded determination, and never be happy with what lies ahead.

Got any more room on that lifeboat?

[Doug Johnson]

My cynicism keeps me narrowing what I consider my "circle of influence." I tend to pay more attention to things local on which I can have an impact. Not sure if that is good or bad - only practical and sanity-saving.

All the best,

Doug

[Pat Carson]

Well....! Nuts. Can a Democratically controlled Congress rid us of this cursed NCLB monkey on our backs? Can we ignore this report and pay people to throw it out??

Tune in again next week for another chapter in "We know more than you do!"

[George DeMarse]

It's those darn teachers' unions I tell ya. Demanding decent pay and working conditions, baa hum bug!
They also demand protection from getting shot by anti-government extremists. The nerve!

And still our kids are global dummies.

More math and science is the answer! If we keep feeding STEM to these kids, eventually they will be forced to get a C and move on. More math and science is the answer for these darn kids who will not or cannot pass algebra and geometry.

It takes a worried man, to sing a worried song, dont cha' know.

[Doug Johnson]

Hi George,

Do note that this report was published 7 years ago.

My question is if things have really improved?

Thanks for the comment,

Doug