According to the Department of Education, about a third of first-year students entering college had taken at least one remedial course in reading, writing, or math. The number is even higher for black and Hispanic students. At public two-year colleges, that average number rises to above 40 percent. And having to take just one remedial course is highly correlated with failure to graduate from college.
Engel’s point cannot be emphasized enough: We must close the gap between minorities and average whites, because there are virtually no jobs that will provide a decent standard of living anymore for those who can’t get some form of post–high school education, let alone a decent high school education that imparts critical thinking, reading, and basic math skills. But we also have to raise the whole American average, because even if the achievement levels of black and Hispanic young people can rise to the level of average white students but our average is in the middle of the world pack, we will not have the critical mass of workers necessary to do the best jobs, let alone invent new ones. Making a Harlem school perform as well as a Scarsdale school is necessary, but only getting both schools to perform as well as or better than a school in Shanghai is insufficient. We need to close the gap between our achievement and our potential today, but our long-term economic vitality depends on raising the potential of our entire society tomorrow. We need to lift the bottom faster and the top higher.
We also need more routes to the top. Many of the good jobs opening up in this country do not require four years of college, but they do require high-quality vocational training. Learning to repair the engine of an electric car, or a robotic cutting tool, or a new gas-powered vehicle that has more computing power in it than the Apollo space capsule—these are not skills you can pick up in a semester of high school shop class. It is vital that high schools and community colleges offer vigorous vocational tracks and that we treat them with the same esteem as we do the liberal arts or “college” tracks. Maybe we don’t have to channel students as formally as do Singapore, Finland, and Germany—where early in high school students move either onto a track for four-year college or into vocational training of two or more years—but we do need to make clear that everyone needs postsecondary education, that there is a range of opportunities, that students need to start preparing for those different opportunities in high school, and, ultimately, that learning how to deconstruct a laptop computer in the local community college is as valuable as learning how to deconstruct The Catcher in the Rye at the state university.
A high school education today, says Duncan, should prepare a student to attend a university or a vocational college “without remediation,” because that is the ticket to a decent job. Until now the goal has just been “to get people to graduate” from high school, he added. But graduation alone is not enough. There are too few decent jobs for such people anymore, and few or none for the young person without a high school degree. A high school education must prepare students for the next step of education or skill-building. “That’s the fundamental shift,” said Duncan. “We should have made that shift twenty-five years ago. But we didn’t, so we have to catch up.”
We do not know the exact mix of policies that is needed for “more” education, a subject on which there are many views. That is, we don’t know if we need more charter schools or just more effective public schools. We don’t know if we need a longer school day or a longer school year, or both or neither. We do not know which technologies or software programs are best at training students so that we see a rise in math abilities and test scores. We don’t know to what extent teachers’ unions are the problem, by protecting the jobs of mediocre teachers, and to what extent they are part of the solution, in rewarding great teaching. We leave to the educational experts the definition of what is sufficient in all these areas to produce more education for all.
We do, though, think we know what is necessary to produce what the country needs. We believe that six things are necessary: better teachers and better principals; parents who are more involved in and demanding of their children’s education; politicians who push to raise educational standards, not dumb them down; neighbors who are ready to invest in schools even though their children do not attend them; business leaders committed to raising educational standards in their communities; and—last but certainly not least—students who come to school prepared to learn, not to text.
If that list strikes you as including everyone in society, you’ve gotten the point. Our education challenge is too demanding for the burden to be borne by teachers and principals alone. Let’s look at each group.
Teachers and Principals
While teachers and principals cannot be expected to overcome our education deficits alone, outstanding teachers and principals can make a huge difference in student achievement. So we need to do everything we can as a society to recruit, mentor, and develop the best cadre of teachers and principals that we can. Bill Gates, whose Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation invests heavily in studying and improving K–12 public school education, says its research shows that “of all the variables under a school’s control, the single most decisive factor in student achievement is excellent teaching. It’s astonishing what great teachers can do for their students. Unfortunately, compared to the countries that outperform us in education, we do very little to measure, develop, and reward excellent teaching. We need to build exceptional teacher personnel systems that identify great teaching, reward it, and help every teacher get better. It’s the one thing we’ve been missing, and it can turn our schools around … But the remarkable thing about great teachers today is that in most cases nobody taught them how to be great. They figured it out on their own.”
Eric A. Hanushek, a senior fellow at Stanford University’s Hoover Institution, summarized some of the findings of his research on the importance of quality of teaching in Education Week (April 6, 2011):
Studies examining data from a wide range of states and school districts have found extraordinarily consistent results about the importance of differences in teacher effectiveness. The research has focused on how much learning goes on in different classrooms. The results would not surprise any parent. The teacher matters a lot, and there are big differences among teachers. What would surprise many parents is the magnitude of the impact of a good or bad teacher. My analysis indicates that a year with a teacher in the top 15 percent for performance (based on student achievement) can move an average student from the middle of the distribution (the 50th percentile) to the 58th percentile or more. But that implies that a year with a teacher in the bottom 15 percent can push the same child below the 42nd percentile … Obviously, a string of good teachers, or a string of bad teachers, can dramatically change the schooling path of a child … The results apply to suburban schools and rural schools, as well as schools serving our disadvantaged population.
Why doesn’t this issue get more attention? “First,” answers Hanushek, “it is likely that ineffective teachers are generally hidden, in the sense that few kids get a string of bad teachers. Principals know very well who the ineffective teachers are, so they can balance a bad teacher one year with a good teacher the next. This implicit averaging process also means that it does not look like schools can do much to alter family background and what the child brings to school. Second, parents do not quite know how to interpret results on achievement tests. The teachers’ unions have, since the advent of the No Child Left Behind Act in 2002, conducted a campaign to convince people that these scores do not really matter very much. Here they are flatly contradicted by the evidence.”
Achievement in school matters, and it matters for a lifetime. “Somebody who graduates at the 85th percentile on the achievement distribution can be expected to earn 13 percent to 20 percent more than the average student,” writes Hanushek. “This applies every year throughout a person’s working life, yielding a difference in present value of earnings of $150,000 to $230,000 on average … By conservative estimates, the teacher in the top 15 percent of quality can, in one year,
add more than $20,000 to a student’s lifetime earnings, my research found … For a class of 20 students, we see that this very good teacher is adding some $400,000 in value to the economy each year.” A bad teacher in the bottom 15 percent is subtracting the same amount.
What are the best school systems in the world doing to attract and retain the best teachers and principals, and how do we introduce similar reforms here? To answer the question, McKinsey produced a study entitled How the World’s Best-Performing School Systems Come Out on Top (September 2007). It looked at the world’s ten best-performing school systems, such as Finland’s and Singapore’s, and compared them to less accomplished ones. The study’s key findings are these: Most people who become teachers in these successful countries come from among the top 10 percent of their high school or college graduating classes; university students see the teaching profession as one of the top three career choices; the ratio of applications to available places in initial teacher-education courses in these countries is roughly ten to one; starting salaries for teachers in the successful countries are in line with other graduate salaries; teachers in these successful countries spend about 10 percent of their time on professional development—far higher than in America—and these same teachers regularly invite one another into their classrooms to observe and coach; finally, there are clear standards for what students should know, should understand, and should be able to do at each grade level.
The report’s conclusions: The quality of an education system cannot exceed the quality of the teachers. The only way to improve outcomes is to improve instruction. Achieving universally high outcomes is only possible by putting in place mechanisms to ensure that schools deliver high-quality instruction to every child.
The McKinsey report did not evaluate principals, but they, too, are vitally important to student achievement. And finding ways to evaluate principals has to be part of any educational reform program. A principal’s ability to recruit and retain great teachers, improve the effectiveness of all teachers, and, most important, to serve as an inspirational leader to bring out the best in teachers and students must be part of any evaluation process for any school system. As any teacher can tell you, the difference that a good or bad principal can make for an entire school is enormous. Tony Wagner, the Innovation Education Fellow at the Technology and Entrepreneurship Center at Harvard, argues that America should create a West Point for would-be teachers and principals: “We need a new National Education Academy, modeled after our military academies, to raise the status of the profession and to support the R and D that is essential for reinventing teaching, learning, and assessment in the twenty-first century.”
Colorado, Here We Come
America cannot introduce needed reforms with one wave of the wand from Washington—not with our decentralized system of public education, which is composed of some 14,000 independent school districts. We can, however, produce successful local and regional models for education that can be imitated nationwide, models that can overcome the tension between teachers’ unions, school administrators, and politicians to raise students’ educational attainment. One such reform model is Colorado’s.
To learn more about public education in Colorado, we interviewed Michael Johnston, the state senator who helped to found New Leaders for New Schools, an organization dedicated to training and recruiting leaders for urban schools, and who played a leading role in his state’s reform initiative. In 2005, he co-founded Mapleton Expeditionary School of the Arts, a public school for disadvantaged youth in Thornton, Colorado. As the school’s principal, he oversaw substantial progress in the school’s performance, taking a school with a dropout rate of 50 percent and turning it into the first public high school in Colorado to have 100 percent of seniors admitted to four-year colleges. In a state that has a 25 percent dropout rate—50 percent among blacks and Hispanics—every little bit helps, but the need to scale the programs that work is urgent.
A unique feature of Johnston’s public school was that the district gave him a free hand to put together his own teaching staff. In 2010, after being appointed to the Colorado state senate, he sought to build on that experience and teamed up with the governor, community leaders, and some members of the teachers’ union to shepherd through a pathbreaking teacher quality act (SB 10-191), known as the Great Teachers and Leaders Bill. While many social and economic factors shape student performance, Johnston’s approach begins with the conviction that within the schools themselves, nothing is more important than the quality of the teachers and principals.
“When I am talking to teachers,” Johnston says, “I always begin by saying, ‘First, we all share the same mission: We all want to close the achievement gap, graduate all of our students, and send them to college or a career without the need for remediation.’ But we know that we’re talking about a problem, an education deficit, of massive proportion. If you’re going to solve a problem that big, you need a lever as big as the problem. And what we now know is that the single most important variable determining the success of any student is the effectiveness of the teacher in that classroom. That impact is so significant that when you talk about curriculum, professional development, or even class size, those changes are literally rounding errors compared to the impact of a great teacher.” He goes on to say: “If you take our lowest-performing quartile of students and you put them in the classroom of a highly effective teacher, we know that in three years you have nearly closed the achievement gap. And we know that the opposite is true. If you take the lowest quartile of students and put them in the classroom of our least effective teachers and principals, you will blow that achievement gap open so wide you’ll never close it.
“As in all professions, we know there are real differences in the effectiveness of teachers from classroom to classroom,” Johnston says. “We know that people spend endless hours in the real estate market shopping for houses based on the school their kids might attend. But what actually matters is not what school you walk into but what classroom you walk into. Because we know that the difference in performance between teachers in any given school is twice as large as the difference in performance between schools. You could buy a house in the worst neighborhood in Denver and have a highly effective teacher for your child and you would be much better off than someone who bought a house in the wealthiest neighborhood of Denver and their kid was assigned to an ineffective teacher.”
We now have the data to identify teachers who are making three years of gains in the classroom in one year’s time. But we don’t have a pipeline—from college, to school placement, to teacher evaluation, to pay and promotion systems—that delivers anything like the number of good teachers that we need. The superb ones we have, says Johnston, “are more like flowers that have willed their way up through concrete,” rather than flowers grown in abundance in “hothouses” designed to produce them at that scale.
That is hardly surprising, he added, when you think of what we have asked teachers to do. “When I was twenty-one years old, I was a first-year high school teacher, and I taught six sections of Julius Caesar to ninth graders each day,” said Johnston. “In the room across the hall was a teacher who was sixty-two years old and she taught six sections of Julius Caesar each day. That was the career path that I was being offered. This is why we lose 50 percent of teachers in the first three to five years.”
Teachers come in loving the idea of sharing literature with young minds, said Johnston, and then they discover that there is no real potential for job growth unless they leave the classroom, very little ongoing professional development, inconsistent evaluation or feedback, and limited opportunities to interact with colleagues who are serious about reflecting on and improving their practice.
The same is true with principals. Other than the classroom teacher, the principal is the most important person in that school building. “What we see around the country,” said Johnston, “is that great principals attract and retain great teachers. Terrible principals drive out great teache
rs. What is amazing is that the system retains as many good teachers as it does,” given the uneven quality of principals.
“We are not focusing on teachers because teachers are the problem,” said Johnston. “It’s because they are the solution.” When you look at the data on the difference that great teachers can make “you realize that they are such high-leverage instruments that a small move of the lever produces exponential results in student achievement.” That means building systems that attract and retain more of the top teachers and improve or weed out more of the weaker teachers, which could thereby lead to a system-wide change in the quality of teaching. The Great Teachers and Leaders Bill, signed into law by Colorado governor Bill Ritter on May 20, 2010, aims to accomplish just that goal and is built on five principles.
First, explains Johnston, “we make 50 percent of every teacher’s and principal’s performance evaluation based on demonstrated student growth—and ‘growth’ is the key word. It doesn’t matter what level the kids start at on September 1, we want to see that they know substantially more when they walk out the door on May 30. We are now developing, in consultation with teachers and principals, the metrics for these assessments. This is not meant as ‘gotcha!’”
That Used to Be Us: How America Fell Behind in the World It Invented and How We Can Page 14