I have a Dream - That Obama will have Vision

I'm not the only educator, it seems, on an Inauguration Day for which I worked and wrote tirelessly, and in which I passionately believed, to be strangely apprehensive, now that that day has come. Deborah Meier seems to feel the same way, and for the same reason: a fear that President Obama's education reforms will be "small-minded and stingy" - will lack imagination, ambition, and vision:

It’s any big sense of “possibilities” that seems missing in a lot of the current reforms—not just in education. The old “new deal” was much more refreshing than the one we seem embarked on today. It’s time to energize the discussion with some new big ideas. . . .

The “other guys” have had their little experiment with our kids. It isn’t working. How can we at least open the doors again—as they were for a short period in the 80s and early 90s—for those who want to really be experimental? I had hoped that charters would at least produce some fresh ideas. In fact, constrained as they are by the same set of shabby goals (higher test scores) they’ve mostly “pioneered” only more of the same.

In the Chronicle of Philanthropy, Mark Tucker, President of the National Center on Education and the Economy, gives some figures to show just how small the "big ideas" and "big names" in the education reform discourse are, in the grand scheme of things. "If education were a product and the United States were a corporation," he writes,

we would try and figure out how other nations manage to succeed where we have clearly failed, and then beat them at their own game. Instead, many of America’s leading donors are lavishing their money on social entrepreneurs whose small, innovative programs don’t have a prayer of dealing with the problem at the scale that is needed.

Among the best known of these entrepreneurs are people like Wendy Kopp, founder of Teach for America, which recruits graduates of elite universities to spend two years teaching at some of the country’s worst schools. The line of limousines gathered for a recent fund-raising benefit the group held in New York reportedly went around an entire city block at the Waldorf-Astoria hotel. Five million dollars was raised in one night. Other well-known entrepreneurs include Green Dot and KIPP (Knowledge Is Power Program), which operate charter schools.

Those are all worthwhile organizations, no question about it. Their leaders are smart, visionary, and very dedicated. But as exemplary as they are, small programs like these are not equal to the task. Teach for America accounts for just two-tenths of 1 percent of the new teachers entering our schools every year. The entire enrollment of the Green Dot schools is no larger than the enrollment of one typical high school in the Los Angeles Unified School District. KIPP schools, the object of enormous attention in the national news media, has an enrollment equal to three-hundredths of 1 percent of the 92,000 public schools in the United States.

Let's add Arne Duncan's Renaissance 2010 program to the list of small - and hotly contested - ideas with big media bling. And let's ask if this hodge-podge of reforms, of "trying this and that, and keeping what works and dropping what doesn't," to paraphrase the new President, is, as Meier asks, the best "new deal" we can Hope for.

And let's hope that, in keeping with his "cabinet of rivals, open to all ideas" ideal, President Obama will give a good look, for starters, at the vision which Tucker lays out - a vision not piecemeal and fragmentary, but systematic - for a more compelling New Deal:

Other countries have not built highly effective and very efficient school systems by financing a handful of small, disruptive interventions. Not at all. They have developed policies that get results. It is the structure of those systems that account for their effectiveness.

To those of us who have studied these nations in detail for years, there is no mystery about what has to be done. America, too, needs to recruit teachers from the top one-third to one-fifth of college graduates. To get them, we need to pay them as much as the other professions they could just as easily choose to go into: medicine, law, architecture, accounting, engineering, and so on. We need to make sure the best of them can do very well for themselves without leaving teaching. We need to give them the same kind of control over the way their services are delivered to their clients as the other professions have over theirs, and that will mean turning virtually all of the decisions as to how the schools are run over to them.

By handsomely rewarding school faculties that produce smashing gains for their students and closing schools that fail to make strong progress, we can ensure that handing over the decision making is a wise move. But, if we do that, we will be making a big mistake if we continue to measure student progress with the cheap, minimum-competency tests the states now use. We need instead to adopt high-quality board examinations like those the most successful countries use, which can measure a student’s grasp of the concepts underlying the subject, the student’s creativity and capacity for innovation, as well as the student’s knowledge and ability to apply what he or she has learned to real-world problems. As many other countries have done long ago, we need to shift our financing system away from a reliance on the local property tax and toward a system that makes sure each and every student has the resources needed to get to internationally benchmarked standards.

That is not a list of modest changes; taken together, they constitute a major redesign of the American education system, a system that got its last redesign some 100 years ago.
Social entrepreneurs are no match for such a comprehensive approach. Imagine if the United States relied on elite, committed, but mostly short-tenured twenty-something volunteers to help solve comparable national crises such as the search for sustainable energy, or if the nation had done the same thing in response to the challenge posed by Sputnik. The idea is laughable. Yet that is precisely how we have dealt with the problem of our inadequate education system.

Entrepreneurs are not the solution. The solution is to completely change our education system in the United States as we know it today.

Tucker closes by talking cost:

When the entire system is put in place, the net increased cost will be almost zero. To get there, an initial investment of about $60-billion a year is required—roughly a tenth of the cost of the war in Iraq since 2003. Among other things, this level of investment would enable us to pay our teachers about $100,000 annually, start school for most children at age 3, and greatly increase the amount of money available to educate our most disadvantaged students. The report shows how, as these investments are made, the country could reduce other expenditures now being made on our schools in an almost equal amount, saving enough to virtually offset the additional expenses.

There you have it: good value for a fair price, something education donors want as much as any other American. To get it, they must shift their attention from supporting cameo programs to influencing public policy. That’s where the payoff is.

Caveats: I'm sure there is much to contest, and for many, to suspect, in Tucker's positions, and I don't endorse them like revelations from on high. What I do admire, though, is the coherence and comprehensiveness that seems absent from the current reform discourse. I admire one more thing, as well: the call to take schools back from the free marketers and return them to the public servants in government. It's no secret that the private sector couldn't be trusted with the economy, so it takes no genius to doubt it will do any better with the education sector.

On a more hopeful note:

I can't close so pessimistically, because I do believe Obama has both the integrity and the intelligence to improve things. Beyond that, I find his championing of science, poetry, jazz, and classical - of culture - like water after an eight-year crawl across the Sahara. As I wrote elsewhere,

I know he won’t be perfect, and is possibly farther right than Nixon in several ways, but by god, I just almost choked up watching Obama say these words in his Meet the Press interview with Tom Brokaw:

MR. BROKAW: You’re going to have a huge impact, culturally, in terms of the tone of the country.

PRES.-ELECT OBAMA:  Right.

MR. BROKAW:  Who are the kinds of artists that you would like to bring to the White House?

PRES.-ELECT OBAMA:  Oh, well, you know, we have thought about this because part of what we want to do is to open up the White House and, and remind people this is, this is the people’s house.  There is an incredible bully pulpit to be used when it comes to, for example, education.  Yes, we’re going to have an education policy.  Yes, we’re going to be putting more money into school construction.  But, ultimately, we want to talk about parents reading to their kids. We want to invite kids from local schools into the White House.  When it comes to science, elevating science once again, and having lectures in the White House where people are talking about traveling to the stars or breaking down atoms, inspiring our youth to get a sense of what discovery is all about.  Thinking about the diversity of our culture and, and inviting jazz musicians and classical musicians and poetry readings in the White House so that, once again, we appreciate this incredible tapestry that’s America.  I–you know, that, I think, is, is going to be incredibly important, particularly because we’re going through hard times.  And, historically, what has always brought us through hard times is that national character, that sense of optimism, that willingness to look forward, that, that sense that better days are ahead.  I think that our art and our culture, our science, you know, that’s the essence of what makes America special, and, and we want to project that as much as possible in the White House.

Jazz. Poetry. Classical. Science. Reading - these things have been objects of scorn and smirks by the outgoing regime for the last eight years. I shouldn’t be close to tears that America’s incoming president understands the beauty and wonder of the mind and the creative spirit. I shouldn’t be.

But I am.

Here's  wishing you the best, Barack.

Image by Chuckumentary