What the feds could do

1)  As I mentioned in my last post, ‘big government’ can provide a measure of economic equity that doesn’t exist at the local level. It doesn’t much matter whether this responsibility is assumed at the federal or state level; either way, some leveling of the playing field has become a practical necessity as well as a moral imperative.

(Part of the ‘equity’ issue is that we haven’t always seen this as a problem.  So what if the poor didn’t get a quality education?  Not everyone needed one. There were plenty of factory jobs available that didn’t require a high school education; and even those kids had a chance to live better lives than their parents.)

2)  State and federal governments have the capacity to provide educational resources. For example,  many districts lack the ability to develop their own curriculum. Pennsylvania is actually doing a rather good job at this, with its Standards Aligned System. Need a good lesson plan for addressing a particular curricular standard?  There are several from which to choose; no need to reinvent the wheel.

3) One could argue that the federal government could be in the business of setting minimum standards, such as “Common Core” that 42 states have adopted (under some duress). I’m not opposed to this in theory, but here’s my concern.

We are at a point in our economic history that screams for a re-thinking of what we want students to know and be able to do when they graduate high school. It strikes me as a little premature to be setting national standards for geometry, for example, when we haven’t had a conversation on its relative importance – greater than probability and statistics? - since high school graduates were in the minority. Policy makers throw around terms such as “college and career ready” when there’s no consensus on what that means! 

Does every student need to be mathematically literate? Yes. (We’ve never tried this before, either.) Does every student need four years of high school math? Not necessarily – and what’s the opportunity cost?

What the federal government should be doing is facilitating a national conversation - and not just among policy wonks at the national level. There should be thousands of conversations  in communities across the country in which parents, teachers, community leaders and even students talk about what they want from their schools. What do business leaders have to say about this?  Has DOE talked to the Partnership for 21st Century Skills? 

4)  Research is the fourth area in which the feds could do a lot of good, and for which they have capacity. This gets to the heart of my issue with two of DOE’s ‘reform’ strategies – charter schools and incentive pay for teachers.  Charter schools remain a key part of Obama's plan, based on the reasonable theory that they provide opportunities for educational experimentation. As the President recently said, “what we have got to do is to look at the success of these schools (and) find out how we duplicate them.”

But where’s the research? We know that only about 17% of charter schools do any better than regular public schools, and incentive pay results are all over the map. (Unsurprisingly, a lot depends on how you do it – NYC recently abandoned their experiment.)  Before we mandate a “solution” that may do more harm than good, shouldn’t we have a better idea of what works, and under what circumstances?

One problem is that we’ve been running the exact opposite of a controlled experiment - every charter school does its own thing, with predictable consequences. Longer days, more homework, more structure or less, teacher incentives, teacher collaboration, smaller schools, more opportunities for students - or a focus on the ‘basics’, incentives for teachers (and/or students), an emphasis on science (or arts or language), etc., etc.. Which of these factors really matter, and which are secondary or completely unimportant?

How do we plan to find out?  Unless we know what we’re looking for, continuing to throw tax dollars at unfocused charter school experiments won’t tell us anything we don’t know already.

Finally, I think there could be a federal role in developing models that would help struggling schools create the ‘climate’ necessary for good education. A key example: if you want to attract the best teachers, you need schools that have stable and effective educational leadership and cultures in which learning is valued – where teachers can see the results of their efforts.  It’s a chicken-and-egg problem that’s well beyond the capacity of the schools that need it most. Another example: I would like to see more research on effective models for teacher training and mentoring.

While the work has to be done locally, the feds could develop usable models, and perhaps provide some seed money. This would be a lot less expensive than the current proposals.