Commission proposes changes to shake up public education
An independent commission has proposed dramatic changes that would shake up American public education in an effort to make the nation more competitive globally. The National Center on Education and the Economy’s (NCEE) New Commission on the Skills of the American Workforce, a bipartisan group of scholars and business leaders, school chancellors and education commissioners, and former cabinet secretaries and governors, concludes that America's public education system, designed to meet the needs of 100 years ago when the workplace revolved around an assembly line, is unsuited to today's global marketplace. Already, the group warns, many Americans are in danger of falling behind and seeing their standard of living plummet.
Among the controversial reforms proposed: offer universal pre-kindergarten programs and opportunities for continuing education for adults without high school diplomas; create state board exams that students could pass at age 16 to move on to either community college or a university-level high school curriculum, reallocating the $67 billion saved from the lowered enrollment to other needs; dramatically improve teacher salaries in exchange for reducing secure pension benefits and pay teachers more to work with at-risk kids, for longer hours, or for high performance; and create curricula that emphasize creativity and abstract concepts over rote learning or mastery of facts. "We've squeezed everything we can out of a system that was designed a century ago," says NCEE president Marc Tucker. "We've not only put in lots more money and not gotten significantly better results, we've also tried every program we can think of and not gotten significantly better results at scale. This is the sign of a system that has reached its limits." The report also proposes scrapping local school funding in favor of a state-funded system that offers more to the needy districts but doesn't diminish the resources of wealthy districts. In addition, it calls for giving schools far more autonomy by making them, in essence, contract schools run by teachers or others who are monitored by districts but no longer owned by them.
Many of the ideas are likely to encounter opposition. Even the group's proponents insist the report isn't an exact blueprint, but a framework-one they hope will be used to jumpstart a national conversation and entice a few states to experiment with overhauls inspired by these ideas, much the way states led the way with welfare reform in the early 1990s. Anne Bryant, executive director of the National School Boards Association, applauds the goals and some recommendations, but she is concerned that the financial aspects don’t add up. Decentralized school districts would weaken the system, she says. "It's a groundbreaking report, but how much ground can you afford to break before you start rattling what's really working in order to fix what is not? There's a leap of faith here in about 10 different areas." She also criticizes the proposed hiring of contractors to run the schools, saying it would create "a huge new set of enterprises that we have no evidence will work." Dr. Bryant argues hiring contractors would negate the administrative economies of scale provided by a central office and "add a great deal of costs to a school," which she notes "[w]e've seen … to an extent with charter schools." But proponents insist reforms this drastic are necessary. "I think we've tried to do what we can to improve American schools within the current context," says Jack Jennings, president of the Center on Education Policy, who says the commission has sparked an important debate. "Now we need to think much more daringly."
Christian Science Monitor
By Amanda Paulson
[Full story]
Washington Post
By V. Dion Haynes
[Full story]
[Editor’s Note: The executive summary of the report is below, as is Dr. Bryant’s written statement. The summary indicates the role of school boards would be to write school performance contracts for private operators of schools, monitor their operations, cancel or not renew contracts for providers that are not performing, and collect, verify, and disseminate data on school performance. For more reporting and more reactions, see the BoardBuzz posting.]
[NCEE report executive summary]
[NSBA statement on NCEE report]
[BoardBuzz on reactions to report]