Meeting with GT

Earlier this month, superintendents and school board representatives from several Centre County districts had an opportunity for an extended chat with our Congressman from the PA 5th district, Glenn (GT) Thompson, at his office in Bellefonte.

I knew from prior conversations that the Congressman - himself a former school board member from Bald Eagle Area - appreciates the fact that if we are going to prepare our students for the future, they need a different education than the one most of us received forty years ago. He understands the importance of integrating “21st century skills” such as critical thinking, creativity, and collaboration into every school’s curriculum.

This again became relevant as a federal issue with the recent release of a draft of the Common Core Standards, which are intended to standardize what it means to have a high school diploma from state-to-state across the country. Hearings on these standards were recently held by the House Education and Labor Committee, on which Rep. Thompson is the ranking minority member.

In his comments preceding the hearing, GT acknowledged the broad support that exists for the creation of common standards - but he expressed a concern about the “coercive” nature of the Education Department’s proposal. Because state adoption of these standards has been tied to the “Race to the Top” funds, they will, in effect, be federally mandated. Few states or districts can afford to turn down federal money.

On this point, I think the Congressman is exactly correct. At our meeting, he reiterated his support for the concept of “local control”, based on the premise that local education leaders have a clearer understanding of the educational needs of the children in their communities.

One problem with education thinking at the national level is that it appears to be tied to the idea that we need to “prepare every child for college”. If you changed that to read “post-secondary education”, I would agree. As a perfect example of this, GT argues that using some of these “Race to the Top” funds in the support of trade and technical schools would be an effective way to create jobs in central Pennsylvania.

I suggested that part of the problem with federal educational policy is that it tends to focus on “fixing the problems of struggling urban schools”. This is understandable, particularly since both President Obama and Ed Secretary Arne Duncan have had a lot of experience with the Chicago public school system. But to me, this points out the danger of a one-size-fits-all federal education policy.

Another issue with the Common Core Standards, as they are presently drafted, is that they fail to explicitly address 21st-century skills – possibly because of how hard it is to measure them with standardized tests.

This lead to a brief discussion on the highly controversial issue of teacher “pay-for performance”.

No teacher wants to be evaluated on the basis of a single standardized test that measures just a fraction of what happens in a good classroom. But if teachers had input into the components of their evaluations, we might have a foundation for moving this issue forward.

Interestingly, a similar position was recently advocated by the president of the American Federation of Teachers (AFT): AFT: Education must change to move forward