Everyone talks about the failures of public education. Former West Virginia Gov. Gaston Caperton wants to talk about the successes.
And that’s what Caperton, president of the College Board, does in detail in his new book, “The Achievable Dream: College Board Lessons on Creating Great Schools,” co-authored with Richard Whitmire, who wrote “Why Boys Fail.”
During his two terms as governor and 13 years leading the College Board, a testing service that administers the SAT, Caperton has focused on expanding opportunity. Caperton, who will retire in the fall, is credited with pushing to open the College Board’s Advanced Placement courses to more than a handpicked few.
His book highlights urban high schools with high concentrations of poor kids who have ramped up the number of AP courses with impressive results, including a school in Massachusetts, which — with a third of its students low-income — went from 59 students enrolled in AP math, science and English courses to 543. And their students’ passing rates on the AP exams, which bring college credit, are rising.
Caperton’s book celebrates successful schools, leaders and programs, from the principal called out of retirement at age 66 to turn around a gang-infested high school in Houston, to an innovative graduate education program in New York that forgoes campuses and textbooks and trains teachers in their classrooms based on reality rather than theory.
“What I was trying to say is that you can spend all your time on what isn’t working when there are schools across the country that are working,” Caperton said in a telephone interview.
And what those schools share in common, according to Caperton, are leadership, innovation, equity, teacher quality and engaged parents.
He understands that those elements are not easy to assemble, but he contends there are examples of where it’s being done that ought to be studied.
While acknowledging the challenges that follow poor children into the classroom, Caperton says, “No reasonable person can argue that waiting for poverty to be solved is a reason to maintain the status quo in urban school districts that are failing their students. We urgently need to send the best teachers to the highest-needs classrooms, and school districts don’t know how to make that happen.”
He doesn’t believe that a school’s salvation rests on finding that one-in-a-hundred, natural-born, charismatic leader with all the answers. He believes there are proven scripts and formulas that can be adapted and replicated under the right school leadership team.
“I don’t think we focus enough on creating leaders in education,” he said. “Are our education schools trying not only to create good teachers but good leaders? Are school boards looking for tomorrow’s leaders as well as tomorrow’s teachers?”
From his own evolution as a struggling student with a reading disability — diagnosed in the 1940s as “reversals” and later as dyslexia — to the leader of a national testing service, Caperton recognizes the power of education to enhance lives.
Among his views of current education issues:
Performance pay: “If you take a survey of students and parents, they can tell you who the good teachers are and who the bad teachers are. They know that in the third grade they want Jimmy to be in Miss Smith’s class or Miss Jones’ class.
“I was in business for many years and I always believed in performance pay. It isn’t easy to do in any aspect of private or public work. But I believe you can have incentive pay that is fair.”
Teacher training: “If you are college presidents and you don’t have a great education school, shame on you. Leadership in these universities and colleges have to put more emphasis on the importance of their schools of education.”
Education funding: “I think the underfunding of education is a huge problem. You can’t demand higher accountability from schools without adequate funding — you can’t have one without the other. It takes political courage to increase funding, but I did it when I was governor. And I had to raise taxes. Once people began to see what was going on, that the schools were improving, they understood why we had to do it. I was re-elected.
“Education needs to have people willing to stand up and call for change. It is worth the political tussle. It is worth the hard work so our children can have the best possible education in the world.”
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