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Sunday, February 4, 2007
True education reform takes bold actions
The Atlanta Journal-Constitution
Three events of enormous importance to the future of education came together on two days last week.
• On Tuesday, U.S. Secretary of Education Margaret Spellings came to the region of the country that she identifies as the national leader in education reform to promote renewal of the federal No Child Left Behind Act. The trick, for conservatives, is to retain accountability and choice in a Congress now controlled by the party of teacher unions. That sudden turn of events in one election cycle is a screaming message to education reformers in Georgia: Act boldly and decisively — or return to the throw-money-at-it status quo.
• On the day Spellings announced to the Georgia Public Policy Foundation that in Georgia “you all are already doing the things that are so important to improving our schools, like inventing and chartering new schools,” a committee of the Georgia State Senate passed Lt. Gov. Casey Cagle’s proposals to allow up to five of Georgia’s 180 school districts a year to become charters and to create five career academies — a type of charter for students to pursue job skills. Both the districts and the academies would be largely exempted from some state and federal regulations. Both passed the full Senate on Friday, one 52-3 and the other 53-2.
• On Wednesday, the full Senate passed a bill by State Sen. Eric Johnson (R-Savannah) that would offer scholarships — or vouchers, whichever terminology you would apply to grants for HOPE and pre-k — to parents of special needs children in public schools.
The NCLB law, charter schools and districts, and special needs scholarships are revolutionary in that they begin the essential process of shifting decision-making authority for a child’s education to parents. A terribly important feature of NCLB, as spelled out by President Bush in his State of the Union message, is an offer of Promise Scholarships that would give parents the federal money allocated to educate their children, money that they could then use to buy better education services from other public school districts or from private schools.
“There has to be a day of reckoning,” Spellings said in an interview after she spoke Tuesday to the conservative think tank. “When kids get to five or six years of being trapped in chronically underperforming schools, something more drastic has to happen.”
The president, she said, “has answered the question in three ways. … The three things on the president’s agenda are real private school choice, the opportunity for real chartering where it has been impeded now — like in New York and Illinois and Michigan, among others. And the opportunity to put our best educators in our most challenging places.”
Georgia is on the right track in developing and testing a standard curriculum. Public schools are being upgraded. The best thing the rest of us can do is to give state School Superintendent Kathy Cox and other education experts time and resources to do their jobs.
The point is that we have no reason to be gloomy about public education or to look at competition as retreat. The reality is that the traditional reforms — lower class size, better pay, bigger or smaller schools — are all approaches based on a world that existed 50 years ago when a pent-up demand existed, when education had a virtual monopoly on the talents of women, when two-parent families provided schools with children reasonably prepared to learn and supported teachers in that effort.
That’s not the world today. There’s no pent-up demand for education. Educators are chasing parents trying to get them to recognize its value. Some parents are better educated than their parents were, but are more adversarial with the children’s teachers. Other parents are producing children who pose greater academic challenges, including an inability to speak English. Children, too, have short attention spans and a frightening number are from broken or never-formed unions.
About 70 percent of black children, almost half of Hispanic and 25 percent of white children are born to unmarried women. Imagine the baggage they bring to school. It’s impossible to create a single model, whatever the pay or classroom size, to address the voids or the damaged lives.
Time is of the essence. Every child has one shot at the sixth grade — and every majority is eventually lost, as the nation just saw in Congress. Don’t be timid with reform.
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