Top Five Public Education Controversies

While the Federal Government only funds between eight and ten percent of public schools nationwide, it has greatly increased its influence in states and localities via the mandates of the 2002 No Child Left Behind act (NCLB). The law sets annual test-score goals for "sub-groups" of students based on race and class, and can impose sanctions on any schools failing to meet "adequate yearly progress" (AYP) goals ranging from school reconstitution to mandatory student transfers to complete closure. These NCLB mandates exert considerable pressure on states to shape their schools to please Washington - but they don't seem to be succeeding.

Thirty thousand of America's roughly 95,000 public schools failed to satisfy NCLB's AYP targets for the 2007-2008 school year - an increase of 28% over the previous year. One fifth of the nation's schools face sanctions for failing to meet AYP for two or more years.

While NCLB is not the only problem facing public education, it looms as the largest one for the Secretary of Education in the Obama administration. The law is overdue for reauthorization, and heated debate is expected over how to improve it. The battle lines are drawn primarily between proponents of anti-union, pro-standardized testing privatizers on the one hand, and advocates of school restructuring, teacher quality and educational equity on the other. Understanding the main controversies around which these camps will contend is critical for parents, community members, policy-makers, and anyone else with a stake in the nation's future.

1. High-Stakes Testing instead of Investing

NCLB's focus on test scores ignores the glaring inequalities in public school funding. Expecting poor schools operating with budgets one-third the size of affluent schools to perform as well as the higher-funded schools on standardized tests is both unrealistic and unjust.

If NCLB continues to demand equity in its test scores, it must also demand equitable investment in at-risk schools to meet that demand. The current reliance on property taxes for local school revenues, if left unchanged, will only perpetuate an educational apartheid into the next generation. Poor districts will continue to operate against overwhelming odds in crumbling, under-resourced schools with crowded classrooms. Teacher turnover will continue to be high, elective classes and extra-curricular activities will continue to be reduced or eliminated, and learning will continue to be dumbed-down to little more than test-prep to meet AYP goals.

The "Broader, Bolder Approach" movement urges such investment in:

• comprehensive school improvement
• early childhood, pre-school, and kindergarten
• health services for underprivileged students, from pre-natal care onward
• longer school days, after-school and summer programs, and school-to-work programs with demonstrated track records

2. Improved Curriculum, Instruction, and Assessments

Rich and poor alike suffer from the rote-fact, lower-order cognition measured by NCLB's high-stakes tests. Instead of seeking ways to improve scores on these tests, ways should be sought instead to improve the tests themselves. Higher-order skills such as inquiry-based problem-solving, critical thinking and creativity, collaboration and social intelligence - all qualities essential for personal well-being, informed citizenship, and the modern work-place - should be incorporated.

To paraphrase Neil Postman, we need our future adults to be not just "good answer-givers, but good question-askers" - because the future poses a host of questions to which there are no ready answers. This means, in the end, that the debate should shift from the test to the curriculum, instruction, and improved assessments. Models exist in the very countries that are outperforming the U.S. in academic achievement: Finland, Australia, the U.K., New Zealand, and more. If America would look abroad and learn, it would find more successful models than NCLB. (It would also, returning to point one, find more equity in school funding across all socio-economic levels. Perhaps it's no coincidence that 18% of American children live in poverty, and 20% of its schools are failing.)

3. School Choice, Vouchers, and Charter Schools

Charter schools, touted by the privatizing camp as the lifeline to higher-quality education for underprivileged students, are being shown by recent research to make

little to no difference in student learning. Worse still, since charters are public-funded, but not beholden to public school admissions policies, they are free to "cream" - that is, to refuse admission to low-performing students who would damage their standardized test averages and thus their "market attractiveness" -  relegating the neediest students to the schools with the lowest admissions standards.

A recent UCLA study argues that, rather than support privatized charter schools, we should support public magnet schools that offer both higher performance and less segregation and inequity, and are thus more worthy of support.

4. The Teaching Profession

One-third of new teachers quit the profession within three years; one-half quit within five. In other words, the new teacher dropout rate is higher than the high school student rate.

In 2003, an average of one thousand teachers quit their job each school day (source). Clearly, teaching is a tough profession, and the age of high-stakes testing and charter schools has only made it tougher - especially in the least privileged school districts. Low standardized test scores are the chief measure by which teachers are evaluated; charter schools created to replace closed schools hire non-union teachers, often for lower pay and benefits. Programs like Teach for America fill at-risk schools with graduates from elite colleges with less than six weeks of training, the majority of whom leave teaching as soon as their two-year contracts expire, which deprives the schools that need it most of the staff longevity central to reducing the achievement gap.

Teacher unions themselves are criticized for protecting teachers deemed inadequate: less than a third of public school administrators and principals polled in 2001 felt they had enough power to dismiss "bad teachers." Yet there is no consensus that a valid method of teacher evaluation exists to identify "good" and "bad" teachers.

One thing is clear: until the teaching profession is attractive enough to better attract and retain able teachers, the achievement gap will not go away.

5. The Purpose of Education

Critics of public education during the NCLB era insist that the emphasis on high-stakes testing and "workforce readiness" obscures the most important question: what is the purpose of public education? They argue that the narrow focus on reading, math, and science serves the interests of corporate culture more than those of student well-being and democratic citizenship. The current economic framing of education diverts it from its higher callings: producing students who are politically informed, intellectually and culturally engaged, environmentally conscious, capable of critical thinking and skeptical inquiry.

If such "education for well-being" is the proper function of schools, then schools should be run by educators, not businessmen, and accountable not to "market forces," but to the public.

Photo:
"Jungle Book" by fatdeeman