Editor's Note

The Challenge of School Reform

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January 7, 2010 RSS Feed Print
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The headline on the January print issue cover is meant to be provocative ["Will School Reform Fail?"]. I hope it's not predictive. The notion of failure might come as a surprise to those who follow the crucially important challenge of improving America's public education system. News over the past few years has been encouraging: more rigorous standards, a burgeoning charter school movement, private money and public talent focusing on a growing consensus about what works. And there are great suc­cess stories—some of which we tell in this issue. But they are mostly on an indi­vidual basis. Yes, the 100 best high schools we highlight are extra­ordinary institutions. But America has 22,000 public high schools, and too many of them are dreadful. The good news is that there seems to be general agree­ment among policymakers on how to make things bet­ter. The logjam of inertia has been broken, with broad acceptance of the need for ambitious national standards and ways to measure account­ability of schools and teachers; the need to train, deploy, and reward bet­ter teachers—while moving bad ones out—and the value of competition. At last, some big-city mayors have as­sumed the burden of fixing their schools and have struggled to cut through union and board-of-ed bu­reaucracies. On the national level, Arne Duncan, the education secre­tary, has an unprecedented pot of money to implement change and showcase best practices. This should be a moment of great promise.

That's when I get worried. Politics and self-interest are creeping back with a vengeance. Consider the No Child Left Behind law, a flawed but useful attempt to set national bench­marks, among other things, that is now dissolving into state-level games­manship and congressional bickering. Do we have a prayer of overcoming union opposition and getting a better bill out of a Democratic Congress? We've got some great commentary on the debate. Dynamism. For the third year, we're offering our own benchmarks via our high school ranking. With the gold medal list, and the silver and bronze winners featured online at www.usnews.com/highschools, we've taken a by-the-numbers approach to defining success. The results are a broad mix of schools from all over the country. Many are magnet and charter, but a lot are open en­rollment. And, reflecting the dynamism in education, the gold medal list has more than 20 new entrants this year.

Much of our method is based on performance: Does a school exceed expectations? To reach the top, it's not enough to just take in a bunch of smart kids and graduate a bunch of smart kids—as many prosperous sub­urban school districts do. So you'll see that schools from places like New Or­leans, Chicago, and Tucson, Ariz., can do quite well. And if they can, why can't others?

What's it going to take to raise the level of America's schools? Please share your thoughts with me here or email editor@usnews.com. We've all got a lot riding on the answers.

Tags:
education reform,
public schools

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What America's education systems need are examples or models of how a school should be run. Why not find schools on the List of America's Top 100 schools, document their operations and if proven successful, use their system as a model?

One such school where this has been done is Providence St. Mel in Chicago. A recently released film, The Providence Effect, documents the school's change and demonstrates the success of the system. A charter school was opened using the PSM system and has seen dramatic increases in test scores over just a few years.

More information can be found at:

http://theprovidenceeffect.com/

What The Providence Effect is trying to show is just what American Education needs. Businesses adopt industry-best practices; education systems should do the same.

Ben Kraus of IL 4:14PM February 23, 2010

As long as budget money goes to the top of the system with the Phd's, committees, panels and boards getting the lion's share, there will be little improvement in test scores, global competiveness or anything else.

Students learn from good teachers. Most good teachers are kept out of the classromm due to a too much reliance on Praxis scores, petty state paperwork or board politics.

The best teachers often act and behave differently than what educational scholars believe is appropriate. The theories of education usually are far different than the classroom realities yet because of the power, influence and educational levels of academic groups, pedagogical nonsense prevails.

We should open our minds and let a wide range of different teaching styles into the classroom. Value-added instruction generally resides outside of establishment views.

Norm North Jr. of AR 12:10PM February 15, 2010

President Obama and Education Secretary Arne Duncan reflect a great deal of positive concern toward strengthening America’s public schools. Enough concern that they are willing to confront unions over issues of tenure and level pay, which strangle schools by encouraging marginal effort, and support charter schools, which operate with less teacher stifling bureaucracy. However, it seems that their desire to impose more standardized testing, number crunching, and carrot/stick incentives will further mechanize the human qualities that should surround meaningful childhood learning.

Why must public education be so pressured, dry, and unfriendly? Do these qualities promote learning? Do they even nurture good citizens? Can public education do more to inspire rather than to force learning?

Many have the opportunity to learn and teach in non-bureaucratic family oriented settings. The administration should take more notice of home and religious school movements where schools are free to permeate education with the deep and compelling values held by their attending families. Here, they will find that information taught and discussed in the more meaningful contexts of faith and community inspires children to learn, builds stronger skills of independent reasoning, and nurtures compassionate moral character. Unfortunately, directly funded public schools, by law, can only provide a shallow and uninspiring “secular” context of meaning such as job preparation, basic civics, etc.

Surely, the public has an interest in assuring that every child has a good education, but must that education be secular? Perhaps the divorce of learning from the values and convictions of families is the cause of public education’s long-term decline. The current administration is doing its best to re-invigorate our schools, but it does not go far enough. The secular public education paradigm is faulty – even amidst the greater freedoms of a charter school.

Can these qualities of private schooling become available through public education? Yes, public education can constitutionally take on a religious nature through the indirect funding of lightly regulated private schools. Obama and Duncan may think they are blazing a new educational path, but historically, they trod the old rutted road of secular public education. Their policies (as those of their predecessors) will prove to be marginal at best.

Craig S. Engelhardt, Ph.D. is the director of the Society for the Advancement of Christian Education

Craig S. Engelhardt of TX 5:20PM January 26, 2010

Editor's Note

Brian Kelly was named editor of U.S.News & World Report in April 2007, nine years after joining the magazine. With more than 30 years of journalism experience, including covering Capitol Hill, politics, and the presidency both as a beat reporter and as an editor, Kelly is one of the nation’s most experienced magazine editors in steering national and international news content.

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