Obama Effect on Education Will Be a Mirage Without Real Change
Feel-good story about making education cool is a dead end without pathways for minorities and the poor
Bottom line: Doesn't matter how many three-pointers Prez sinks.
A revolution in teacher quality would have to bloom. Knowing what we know about the value of a high quality teacher, we should be on the verge of delivering those teachers to inner-city students. But we're not. The House stimulus package has bonus money for high-performing teachers, and that's a good step forward. But only when principals are given the same authority charter school operators enjoy to hire teachers drawn from all walks of life, not just teachers' college graduates, and fire ones who can't help kids, will conditions truly improve.
Bottom line: Expect incremental improvements that will move the dial only slightly.
I want to apologize for being the picnic skunk. Really, I want to believe. One reason I elbowed my way onto a Metro to go to the Mall for the inaugural celebrations was to witness the Obama effect. I think I saw it in the faces of the families there, but touchy-feely evidence doesn't count. I try to look for positive signs. The stimulus proposal offers more money for Title I programs aimed at poor students, which may help more disadvantaged students become college-ready—but only if reading programs improve. And there's money for improving K-12 tests so educators can track individual students through the grades—but that's relevant only if Congress keeps a tough school accountability system.
I've been reporting on schools too long to operate on faith alone. In the real world, inspirations need well-lit pathways. And I'm just not seeing those pathways opening up for the Obama effect children. I wish I saw this differently, really I do.
Richard Whitmire, president of the National Education Writers Association, blogs at whyboysfail.com.
- Read more about standardized test scores.
- Read more about paying for college.
Reader Comments
Education Reform
I think Berry Stern's insights are valid. I am 27 years-old and finishing my third year of teaching art to 9th graders in a Houston public school. I was an "exceeds" teacher my first year after a very good graduate program and a determination to do well. Each year I am declining in quality as I get more and more tired between students I am informed I must constantly control and poor administrators who run the school like a military jail combination. Trying to standardize education is a huge mistake. Our students are much more talented and creative then we give them credit and I'm all for making education more organic. Please stop blaming teachers and start listening to them. Listen to students too.
Needs of secondary students neglected nationwide.
Richard Whitmire has hit the literacy nail on the head for secondary students. That is only half the picture. The other half of the story is the need for remedial/developmental math in combination with reading instruction for secondary students. Half the students should be secondary. We cannot give up on teaching them what they need.
There is great emphasis nationwide on pre-school education. This is all well and good. The only problem is that nationwide the public schools have essentially given up on helping those secondary students who need to read/cipher better. Secondary students who need special help do not get better with no focus on their problems, and they do not even stay the same. What they do is regress in reading/math.
So with the lack of emphasis on remedial reading/math at the secondary level, the extra help given to students in preschool programs becomes less beneficial. In other words, an emphasis/focus on preschool education is almost useless if there is no emphasis/focus on remedial reading/math for those secondary students who need it. All the work on getting students ready to read when they enter kindergarten is lost if there is not continued help for many of these students who need it in the secondary levels of education.
Adults can be taught to read/cipher better. So can secondary students. It will be costly to educate enough college teachers to do the job in a reduced teacher/pupil setting at the secondary schools. Then it will be costly for the school districts to hire these specialists to teach secondary students and provide them with the materials and low teacher/pupil ratios that are needed for them to be successful. But it is absolutely essential to do so to meet the needs of the secondary students. Many students need an emphasis on reading/math year after year after year with no stop when they reach the secondary grade levels.
Take a good look at the disparity between the test scores of black/white students. The disparity in test scores gets larger as the students get older and into the secondary schools because there is a lack of emphasis on reading remediation at the secondary level. In the early 1970s this disparity was near 30 percentile. But since the lack of focus on remedial reading in secondary schools year after year the disparity is currently between 45 and 50 percentile.
Also take a look at the remediation percentage of freshmen students at the colleges/universities. There is one college in the country where over 94 percent of the freshmen have to take remedial courses before they can take college courses for credit. The average percentage for remedial classes for all the freshmen students who go to public colleges/universities in some states is over 50 percent. These numbers are horrible.
Perhaps going to an extended day calendar or a year-round calendar might be beneficial to the students. Year-round or extended day calendars do cost a district more money, but it might be worth it
Obama Effect
Whitmire is on the mark, particularly about the high schools. If we could get the high schools and middle schools right, the other issues of college accessibility,literacy rates, and rescuing black boys would likely take care of themselves.
High schools, and to a lesser extent middle schools, are unlikely to improve with the century-old structure of six-period days where students change what they do and with whom every 50 minutes in response to a bell. Too many students get lost in this chaos. Certainly, industry doesn't educate that way, nor does the military, nor do most of our competitors around the globe who bring teachers to where the students are rather than have students dash from class to class. Even in its best days, the "assembly line" comprehensive high school hasn't worked for half the students, including those who graduate yet need remediation when they get to college.
There are other approaches that seem to engage students more and make them want to get what their teachers can offer -- for example, intense, courseware-assisted, cross-disciplinary, team taught courses that use technology to save time and accelerate learning while emphasizing career guidance, workplace discipline and time management and blend the "soft" teamwork, customer service and interpersonal skills with the "hard" reading and math skills. In such programs students and faculty form a high performance work team that stays together for most of the school day and requires members to improve their collective as well as individual performance.
Certainly, teachers would need to be retrained to work in these computer-assisted, team-oriented, multi-disciplinary,continual feedback environments where they would work closely with other teachers to blend their curricula and talents(just as they would at top performing companies in industry). Yet converting schools into high performing work organizations is the key to engaging students and attracting and keeping the best teachers. To achieve high performance, high schools must replace linear assembly-line thinking with whole child thinking that integrates minds and bodies, academic and technical disciplines, multiple types of intelligence – in other words, our beings--with the way the world really is. When we are willing to embrace such changes, we will create a new generation of students who will want to expend their best efforts to get what their teachers can offer.
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