Pols Talking Education Change

Yesterday in the Wall Street Journal appeared an article, “In Education, a Chance for Change” by Gerald F. Seib. Mr. Seib starts by saying that the new Education Secretary, Arne Duncan has a chance to bring about real change in the way our kids are educated. “I see this as an extraordinary opportunity,” Mr. Duncan said in an interview. “We have a couple of things going in our direction that create what I call the perfect storm for reform.” Here are the elements Mr. Duncan points toward:

Consensus is building that America’s ossified education system needs a big shake-up. A bipartisan trail toward real change was blazed by the Bush administration (which gets too little credit for it).

He apparently thinks that Obama is willing to break some china to bring about education change.

Here is where it gets dubious for me. “Guess what? We have a little money to spend.” What an understatement, the $100 million in the stimulus package virtually doubles his budget. He admits it will take more than money to “coax, cajole and sometimes confront” state governments that have the lion’s share of control on education decisions.

On the plus side Obama has been calling for merit pay for teachers. While I support the concept of merit pay strongly for teachers, I also know that the current very weak leadership cadre in education can not do it well and will if given the mandate to do it create a debacle that will play into the hands of the opponents and set back real implementation of the concept for decades if not generations. Merit pay is great but only if it is done well. None of the concepts proposed for education that I have seen are worthy of being implemented.

He says that states will have to compete for the $5 billion (yes a tiny portion of the $100 million) they are allocating for change. The question then is how far will that go to bribe the states to change.

Sadly, past experience would say that we will throw money at the problems and talk up a storm but little if anything productive to benefit the kids will happen. This is where we come in. We need to have a unified voice to the state politicians and educators that we are NOT satisfied with the way things are going. They need to know that we know that the current state standards are ridiculously low, that the SAR reports are graded on the curve against those standards so that an excellent rating is worth a “best of the poor” rating nationally and especially internationally. We need to let them know we are sick of poor curricula designed to paper over the weak subject knowledge of teachers that harm our kids’ futures.

In other words it is up to us to help motivate the change here that is being talked about at the national level.