The Future of High School Reform

Education experts voiced their ideas at U.S. News's education summit

By U.S. News Staff

December 4, 2008 RSS Feed Print

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How is all this playing out in terms of what's happening at the state level?
DANE LINN of the education division at the National Governors Association: This is about trying to put all the pieces together that if you're going to impact all your schools across the state, you have to have a systemic strategy and that begins, of course, with the standards and the assessments. But it's much more than the standards assessments. I think some of our greatest challenges as we move forward are really around trying to create these multiple pathways, how we break away from the one-size-fits-all model and maintain the same level of high expectations.

KEN JAMES of the Arkansas Department of Education: You have to begin early. And to the great extent that we've had some effect in the state of Arkansas, I think it goes back to the bottom line that we started at the elementary. We started with what we call our "smart start." Then we move to the middle school—we call that "smart step." We move to the high school, which we call "next step." And now we're moving to what we call Smart Leadership Leading to a Smart Arkansas. So, we've built from the ground up, and I think that's the essential component that you have to understand that you cannot do this in isolation, that we have to build—you have to provide the kind of professional development and literacy and math, especially across those grade levels, so that when kids get to that high school level, they are ready and capable of preparing themselves to take that rigorous course of study.

What do you see here as some of the real challenges that aren't getting addressed and the issues that people aren't talking about?
RICK HESS, director of education policy studies at the American Enterprise Institute: One of the problems that we've had is, because we've got this infrastructure of schooling as Mike pointed out, a century ago, only 1 American in 10—1 American in 20 even finished high school. The notion that everybody should finish high school is really a post-World War II phenomenon.

The second problem we have is that not only do we tend to overestimate our ability to be smart and figure out how we're going to fix these things, but we tend to overestimate the utility of the machinery we have.

The third obstacle that I just want to lay out is what we call—what we now call the human capital challenge—the age-old dilemmas of identifying teachers, recruiting them, training them, inducting them, evaluating them, and paying them. Well, we've been talking about this stuff for decades. Calling it human capital hasn't changed the game.

What Mike pointed out, which I think is very, you know, it is important to keep in mind, is we built our public school system in the 20th century at a unique historic period. It was the first window in the history of the world when a large labor force of college-educated women was available to teach. Previously, that had never been the case in the history of the world. And what happened was we built a school system based on the assumption that loads of talented, educated women were going to be happy to come in, work in our schools and classrooms for 30 years, and our problem is solved.

What happened was, as the labor force evolved starting in the last 1960s and 1970s, we've seen that labor pool dry up. We haven't yet figured out how we are going to retool the profession or retool our approaches to recruitment and evaluation and compensation that we're going to tap into the new labor force that might want to teach in our schools.

How much of this is 'we need to do what we're doing better' and how much of this is a fundamental structural problem, that we need to rethink some of the basic structures here around high schools?
MICHAEL COHEN: This is actually a tough question. We don't have a system that is designed, that is set up, that is governed and managed to make rapid, dramatic, effective change. We just don't. And what we have—you know, we have 50 states, 15,000 school districts. By the way, we also separate our education systems between K-12 and higher ed. Nobody in their right mind would have designed the system that way if they wanted it to change rapidly. They just wouldn't. I don't have a solution to that, to tell you the truth.

Tags:: education,; high school

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It never ceases to amaze me that we allow people to design educational programs who either have never taught in a classroom or haven't been there for a really long time. As I read the article in which "experts" gave their opinions on what is wrong with public education, I just kept waiting to for someone to say something about the challenge of directing classrooms of 25-35 children with varying backgrounds and abilities. Of course, it never happened.
I have been teaching high school for ten years and the issues that I have witnessed are:
1.Poor support and training for educators
2.Unrealistic child to teacher ratios
3.Attempts to lump children with overwhelming challenges and need for remediation with average to above average students. This creates one of two situations - a class that must move so slowly that the more advanced students get bored, or a significant percentage of the class that just can't keep up. Either way, those not receiving appropriate attention become tuned out and often become behavioral problems.
4.The unrealistic expectation that every child will go to college. Not all students aspire to become an academic. What ever happened to trade school training? Students want and need this in their middle and high schools. I know this because they tell me so.
5. The overreliance on standardized testing. Teach a child to bubble, and that is all they will know how to do. What ever happened to teaching them to think and to be independent?
In short, we have to stop trying to streamline education. It is not a business, it is a social institution.
Finally, and this is the saddest fact of them all, our country does not value education and it does not value children. What we seem to focus on as a culture is production and fast results. This attitude that we can churn out little academics if we just find the right system is archaic. We are no longer dealing with the Industrial Revolution, it is the age of Technology and Innovation. We need a variety of thinking styles and aptitudes.
When America finally decides to start investing in the big picture and the long-term future of its citizens, we may see change. Until then,the jargon will change but the dance will remain the same and we will continue ignore the obvious - that people are not all the same and the work force needs that diversity. There is a place for everyone and a way to fill every job with well-trained, competent people, but it is going to take more than throwing money and tests at the problem. It will take a change in the attitudes of the entire population.

Amy Utley of AK 1:15AM May 05, 2009

brown vs. board of education still exist today in a world of plenty and the race card is a precursor to acceptance. I left the teaching arena because i got tired of the expectations being lowered based on race and geography, I got tired of my graduate education being undermined because I was not white or hispanic so I left and now my I am on a crusade for the betterment of my grandchildren. I am traveling across the states teaching humanness so that we can find equity education for the masses still in the margins.

jacqueline anderson of CA 11:00PM April 22, 2009