In my January 13 post, I made a plea for higher education standards for the nation's teachers and students. Developments at the federal level since then further calls for, I believe, major changes in the way we measure the effectiveness of K-12 education.
The economic stimulus plan signed recently by President Obama includes approximately $100 billion for public education. Secretary of Education Arne Duncan argued that besides preventing the loss of thousands of teacher jobs in this terrible recession, the monies should also be used to develop a 21st Century education system that works. For those of us that have been either involved in or close observers of public education for many years, we have never seen that kind of money spent on education, but we have heard that refrain before.
The National Commission on Excellence in Education's 1983 report, A Nation at Risk: The Imperative for Educational Reform, identified many serious problems with American education. Highly critical of the nation's schools, the report linked a decline in U.S. economic competitiveness to a decline in the quality of public schooling. "A rising tide of mediocrity...threatens our very future as a nation and a people. We have, in effect, been committing an act of unthinking, unilateral disarmament." The report emphasized the importance of rigorous academic programs, proposed that teacher preparation programs be strengthened, and promoted the introduction of more sophisticated school management procedures.
The extremely influential Nation at Risk report can be considered the start of the modern "accountability" or, if you will, "reform" movement in education. This movement eventually led to the 2001 No Child Left Behind legislation requiring states and school districts to test low-income and minority students annually to assess their academic skills in grades 3 through 11. States expanded the definition of those being tested to include almost all school-age children. The NCLB law, in the words of Chester E. Finn Jr, president of the Thomas B. Fordham Institute, was an "impossible dilemma for states. It admonishes them to bring all their students to proficiency in reading and math by 2014." How is this going to be done when there is such a huge variation in student proficiency standards from one state to the next? A student can be considered "proficient" in one state and literally be failing in another.
Secretary Duncan is an astute educator who has made significant improvement in the Chicago Public schools while serving as its superintendent for many years. Now he wants to use the billions in dollars to build on Nation at Risk and NCLB to "stimulate a race to the top." This is not possible with 5o different standards for 50 different states.
Raising academic standards and performance so that all children are proficient in their grade level by 2014 or any date necessitates, I believe, establishing national standards as well as a national test for reading and math. The national tests would be relatively simple to implement by expanding the extremely reliable National Assessment of Education Progress (NAEP) tests that have been used by the federal government for more than 30 years to evaluate the progress of 4th, 8th and 12 grade students.
National standards and national assessment would not diminish state control of schools. Chester E. Finn and Frederick Hess are correct when they say that, "Washington should trust states to turn around their own schools, but all schools should be measured against a single set of national standards and uniform national test, at least in the core areas of math and reading." The states, utilizing national experts, could together create national standards, particularly in reading and math. There is no reason the federal government would be involved.
We are going to continue put patches on our educational system and never realize the goals of The Nation at Risk or NCLB unless the states and federal government work together to create a single set of national standards and a uniform national test. If we can set national standards for a myriad of other products and activities, it is certainly possible and imperative for the most important resources we have--our children.
Coming attractions...
End of the Coffee Stops: Serving coffee to constituents at a street corner is deemed illegal.
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