How Education Reformers Likely Will Again Miss the Point
By James W. Guthrie
Public reaction to news such as the recent studies showing America‘s elementary and secondary schools‘ students do not know math, science and other subjects as well as their counterparts in other nations is predictable.
Just as predictably few critics and advocates of the studies will get it right. What they are missing are two conditions that immobilize improving education – the abandonment of the notion that individual schools are accountable for academic performance and an unwillingness to link teacher pay to performance.
For America‘s schools to match overseas counterparts in areas such as mathematics and science, we need only two fundamental changes. We must empower teachers and principals and hold them accountable for results. We must also pay them accordingly.
Let‘s take a deeper look at the problems blocking reform. Individual schools are no longer held accountable. The most accountable individuals in public education, the ones who most easily and quickly can be replaced if the system‘s performance is judged wanting, are school superintendents and school board members – however, they are the ones least positioned to influence school instruction.
School superintendents turn over with appalling regularity. The standard length of service for school district superintendents is estimated by the American Association of School Administrators to be fewer than three years. School board members can also be removed from office easily, either by recall or at the next regular election. Neither of these positions is afforded tenure or any other form of employment security.
However, principals and teachers are the individuals most protected by statute, judicial rulings and collective bargaining contracts. They are simultaneously the most important, the most protected, the least accountable and least empowered.
For nearly 100 years, our policy systems have eviscerated the decision discretion of education professionals working at schools. Instead, state laws, federal regulations and court decisions increasingly have padded the decision power of school districts, superintendents, school board members and state and federal bureaucrats. These are the positions that hold the power. Of course, these are not the people who instruct our students.
When critics rail against lackluster education performance and the fear of foreign hegemony, the point on which they should concentrate is this gap between power and position. Principals and teachers justifiably can, and regularly do, shield themselves from criticism by pointing out that they don‘t make education rules, they only follow them.
Also, education officials have been unwilling to judge a classroom teacher‘s effectiveness by their students‘ achievement because, among other reasons, a student‘s learning is not under the immediate control of an instructor. Social science findings consistently document out-of-school influences on students‘ in-school performance. Innate aptitude, parental commitment, early childhood environments, household resources, community amenities, peer group expectations and personal aspirations are among the legion of conditions over which schools have only the most modest influence.
Still, little effort is being made to devise an accountability system that might possibly unravel such complexity. The research to push this concept forward has not been funded or forcefully pursued – and it is needed.
America‘s teachers are the only large labor force segment whose pay is unrelated to performance. Ninety-six percent of America‘s public school teachers are paid for their workplace seniority and education levels. This is the ubiquitous ” single salary schedule” against which policy makers and critics rant but which steadfastly dominates teacher pay.
Modern testing and statistical controls offer the prospect that the value an individual teacher adds to a student‘s understanding of subject matter can be measured in a fair and accurate manner. A teacher reward structure could be constructed around such value added results.
There is nothing complicated, in a policy sense, about making U.S. education more effective. The problem is that we simply have not yet tried. No other education reforms, no matter how well intended, well funded or well publicized will prove as well founded.
James W. Guthrie is a professor of education and public policy and director of the Peabody Center for Education Policy at Vanderbilt University in Nashville, Tenn.
Media contact: Princine Lewis, (615) 322-NEWS
princine.lewis@vanderbilt.edu