Dayton Daily News education reporter Scott Elliott writes about schools, kids, teaching and learning.
Home > Blogs > Get on the Bus > Archives > 2006 > June > 02
Friday, June 2, 2006
Intel’s chairman on improving U.S. education
Great examples of quality learning can be found everywhere, no matter how easy or challenging the circumstances — at schools in cities, the suburbs or rural towns and in public, private and charter schools.
What’s the common denominator?
It’s great teaching, said Craig Barrett, the chairman and former CEO of the computer giant Intel. Barrett spoke today at the Education Writers Association annual convention.
These high performing kids do well because of the expectations of their teachers, the close relationships between the staff and students or other factors that relate right back to consistently having a great teacher at the front of the room.
“That’s because the magic in the classroom is the teacher,” he said.
Here’s Barrett’s top three suggestions for improving education in the U.S.:
Improve teaching.
Barrett said 30 percent of math and science teachers in the U.S. are not certified to to teach their subject.
“For a young child to get through 12 years and stay interested in math they probably have to have a good math teacher just about every year,” he said. “But any one year, the chance of having a quality teacher in that subject is only 75 percent. This is part of the reason why our system is so effective at filtering out young children not interested in math by 12th grade.”
What can we do about this?
We need a high focus on teaching content to teachers and training them to teach, with a heavy focus on content, according to Barrett. He argued against today’s certification process, noting that he has a PhD, has taught at Stanford and run a major U.S, company but is not qualified to teach anywhere in the U.S. because of certification rules.
Barrett also believes in pay for performance, saying, “If you pay good teachers the same as bad teachers what happens is good teachers leave and bad teachers stay.” He added later that teachers need to be paid more comparably to other professionals like doctors and lawyers.
Accurately assess student results
Expectations are too low, Barrett said, noting that most state exit exams require only eighth grade math. And he said the U.S. too often compares only to itself — city vs. city and this year vs. last year — rather than comparing to our competition by looking at how our kids do vs. kids around the world, especially the “3 billion new capitalists” in nations who formerly closed their economies to international markets.
Barrett urged reporters to compare internationally, but he didn’t have good ideas about how to do this in places like Dayton. There are not good measures to see how Dayton kids specifically do vs. kids in Singapore, Buenos Aires or Amsterdam. International test score comparisons are usually only on a macro level.
Competition
As a capitalist, Barrett likes competition. “I don’t know of a monopoly that has lasted through time that has served its customers well,” he said. In questions, though, he acknowledged that for education isn’t a perfect setting for market-driven change. But he still maintained that competition should help improve results.
In a last word, Barrett claimed to have a certain cure for the dropout problem in the U.S. — require all kids to show a high school diploma in order to receive a driver’s license in any state.
Permalink | Comments (7) | Categories: Teaching and Learning
