Celebration of Teaching & Learning

It is now obvious to even its most ardent supporters that the Obama administration will not be able to deliver the “change we need” quickly. The problems confronting the country are too vast to be resolved by bold executive action or quick fixes. The President will not follow Bush’s strategy of attempting to revive the economy through bailouts alone. His administration is poised to offer a major recovery plan for infrastructure, for new technologies, and to rescue state and local governments in fiscal crisis.

It is also clear that we need more than money to fix the nation’s schools.  We need a change in direction that will make it possible for education to play a central role in rebuilding the US economy.

The challenges confronting our nation’s schools are complex and cannot be solved by a few sweeping reforms or a few major investments in discrete initiatives.  New approaches to educating children and managing schools and districts are needed to bring about the kinds of changes in educational outcomes that the nation so desperately needs.

More than seven years after the adoption of No Child Left Behind (NCLB), we are still leaving many children behind.  In many of our nation’s urban school districts drop-out rates exceed 50%, and are considerably higher for African American and Latino males.  Several indicators suggest that large numbers of children, including many white and affluent children, are not performing at levels commensurate with children in most economically advanced nations.  In a comparative study of the 25 wealthiest nations last year Unesco ranked the U.S. 24 out of 25 on a broad set of indicators related to the well being of children.

Education is implicated in the causes and potential solutions to several major social and economic problems confronting American society.  If the nation is to move forward, the Obama administration will need a bold new strategy for reforming public education.  The sooner we realize that the distribution of economic rewards is tied to the state of our schools, the sooner we will see that urgent action is needed in the way we go about educating our disadvantaged children and preparing them for the workforce.

However, before the administration can “fix” the schools we must recognize that our troubles in education are inextricably related to the deep and profound inequality that characterizes most aspects of life in our society. Any serious attempt to reform public education has to be based upon a clear understanding of how the policies enacted should interact with other efforts to further equity (e.g. housing, wages, healthcare).  We must no longer expect schools to respond to the needs of our children alone.  We must create a social safety net for children, and to expand access to opportunity and mobility if America will achieve its enormous potential in the 21st century.

To do this the administration will have to address three crucial dimensions of inequality in education:

Funding. Our public schools are characterized by profound disparities in quality and resources because we fund schools largely through local property taxes and we consistently spend more money to educate affluent children than poor children.  In states like New York, New Jersey and Texas, efforts to equalize funding between school districts have been hurt by the recession, budget shortfalls and political opposition in affluent suburban communities.  In addition, there are even larger funding disparities among the states, with southern states like Mississippi and Louisiana consistently spending far less on educating children than wealthy states like New York and Massachusetts. If the Obama administration is to have a major impact on public education it needs to insure that the effort to set educational standards will also include a commitment that all schools meet basic “opportunity to learn standards” regardless of where they are located.  This will mean taking a more active role in ensuring access to qualified teachers, adequate learning facilities and supplies, and a curriculum that prepares students for good paying, 21st century jobs.

Segregation. More than 50 years after the Brown decision, we continue to send children to schools that are segregated on the basis of race and class.  While there appears to be very little commitment to old remedies like school busing to further the goal of racial integration, the administration must do more to make sure that initiatives like charter and magnet schools are not allowed to exacerbate existing patterns of segregation.  Many of these new schools have adopted admissions policies that allow them to exclude the neediest children, particularly those with limited proficiency in English and special needs.  Additionally, the administration can support efforts to reduce residential segregation by supporting the development of low income housing in middle class communities as a way to bring about increased integration in schools. Finally, the administration must engage intermediaries with a track record of success in turning around failing schools to improve the quality of schools in high-need areas. The inclusion of high quality pre-school and after school programs are just some of the enticements that could be used to lure middle class children to integrated schools.

Unmet Needs. Although one child out of five is poor in the United States (another fifth come from households that are struggling financially), thus far, school reform initiatives have largely ignored the non-academic needs of poor children — including health, nutrition and housing.  These needs have an impact on the ability of children to learn in school.  In the name of equity, NCLB has been used to hold poor children to the same academic standards as privileged children in affluent school districts, even though we know they are not educated under equivalent circumstances.  Today, large numbers of poor children do not have access to adequate health care and miss far too many days of school because they are sick. Moreover, when we consider the fact that family income and parental education continue to exert powerful influence over student academic outcomes, it is not surprising that our schools rarely serve as a vehicle for poor children to escape poverty. The administration can provide support to schools so that they can do a better job of helping children to overcome these social and economic handicaps by expanding access to critical social services for students in need — including helping schools to provide such services when no other agencies have stepped up to the plate.

Finally, under NCLB, schools have been preoccupied with teaching basic skills that can be assessed on standardized tests. As it contemplates what it will do to reform NCLB the administration will have to restore the proper balance between assessment and instruction in order to insure that schools are developing higher order skills — creativity, fluency in a second language and problem solving — among their students.  These are intellectual traits that are not easily tested but they are the kinds of abilities that our society will need most if education will play a role in expanding opportunity and reviving the economy.

The Obama administration is in a position to take advantage of the opening created by the Bush administration, which significantly expanded the federal government’s role in education, with an expanded vision and a more ambitious set of policies to move the nation forward.  A broader view of education is needed to achieve success in bringing sustainable reform to public education.  This broader view must be rooted in recognition that children need to be well fed, healthy, intellectually challenged and stimulated in order to thrive and achieve.