Education Reform

Education reform is a hot topic. The following is a critique of an article from the Washington Post that appeared on Sunday, October 10, 2010: How to fix our schools: A manifesto by Joel Klein, Michelle Rhee and other education leaders. The two lead authors are Joel Klein, former chancellor of the New York City Department of Education and Michelle Rhee, former chancellor of the District of Columbia Public Schools (they both tendered their resignations in November of 2010). I will use this post as a jumping off point for my research and thoughts on education reform.

In their article, Klein and Rhee come out swinging. Rhee is best known for her role in the “Waiting for ‘Superman’” documentary and her controversial tenure as chancellor of the DC Public Schools. The title itself suggests more than a whiff of hyperbole. Do 17 short paragraphs, signed by 16 public officials constitute a manifesto? The begin by stating

“As educators, superintendents, chief executives and chancellors responsible for educating nearly 2 1/2 million students in America, we know that the task of reforming the country's public schools begins with us. All of us have taken steps to move our students forward… but those reforms are still outpaced and outsized by the crisis in public education.”

This comes across as a bit self-congratulatory. The authors recognize a crisis, acknowledge their responsibility, have taken action, but are left out gunned. The culprit, they find, are

“…the entrenched practices that have held back our education system, practices that have long favored adults, not children. It's time for all of the adults -- superintendents, educators, elected officials, labor unions and parents alike -- to start acting like we are responsible for the future of our children. Because right now, across the country, kids are stuck in failing schools, just waiting for us to do something.”

Here the authors start to sound encouraging. Failing schools are not a simple problem, but are often the result of systemic dysfunction across social, economic, and government boundaries. “So, where do we start?” they ask themselves. “With the basics,” they answer. And for Klein et al. the basics are “the quality of [the] teacher.”

They devote the next eight paragraphs to either directly holding teachers responsible for the mess, or to blaming the systems that support teachers.

“…for too long… we have let teacher hiring and retention be determined by archaic rules involving seniority and academic credentials. A 7-year-old girl won't make it to college someday because her teacher has two decades of experience or a master's degree -- she will make it to college if her teacher is effective and engaging and compels her to reach for success. By contrast, a poorly performing teacher can hold back hundreds, maybe thousands, of students over the course of a career. The glacial process for removing an incompetent teacher… has left our school districts impotent and, worse, has robbed millions of children of a real future.”

This is pretty strong stuff. All other factors, in the opinion of the authors – demographics, economic, family, community – scarcely warrant a mention. The tone of the article centers the blame squarely on teachers, teacher assessment, and teacher labor practices.

Klein and Rhee close their manifesto with a hodgepodge of other ideas, including relying on a business model for education, technology, and school choice.
To advocate a private sector approach, they state that we should

“stop ignoring basic economic principles of supply and demand and focus on how we can establish a performance-driven culture in every American school. When teachers are highly effective -- measured in significant part by how well students are doing academically… we should be able to pay them more. There isn't a business in America that would survive if it couldn't make personnel decisions based on performance. That is why everything we use in assessing teachers must be linked to their effectiveness in the classroom and focused on increasing student achievement.”

They link teacher assessment to technology.

“Even the best teachers -- those who possess such skills -- face stiff challenges in meeting the diverse needs of their students. By better using technology to collect data on student learning and shape individualized instruction, we can help transform our classrooms and lessen the burden on teachers' time.”

And finally they rally for school choice.

We also must make charter schools a truly viable option. If all of our neighborhood schools were great, we wouldn't be facing this crisis. But our children need great schools now…and we shouldn't limit the numbers of one form at the expense of the other.

I don’t disagree with much of what Klein, Rhee, and their colleagues have to say. My main issue is where they place the emphasis and how they get there. Education is one of the most data-rich sectors in the public domain. The Chicken Little approach that the sky is falling in American education might be politically useful and ignite public discourse, but what purpose does it serve in identifying and addressing specific failures and issues? What does the data tell us? What doesn’t the data tell us? Is firing teachers and closing schools an effective and long-term solution to the problems in education? How can a private sector approach be best used to drive quality improvement? And what are the realities and costs of putting more technology into the classroom?
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Joel Klein, Initials. (2010, October 10). How to fix our schools: a manifesto by joel klein, michelle rhee and other education leaders. Washington Post. Retrieved from http://www.washingtonpost.com/wpdyn/content/article/2010/10/07/AR2010100705078.html