Fenwick graduation 2012
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Dayton Daily News education reporter Scott Elliott writes about schools, kids, teaching and learning.
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November 2008
This is a beautiful story
Alexander Russo at This Week in Education points us to a wonderfully written example of narrative journalism called Zach and the reading thrones by Cindy Lange-Kubick at the Lincoln (Neb.) Journal-Star. I just had to pass it on.
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Alarms ringing: Will Obama back-burner education?
New York Times columnist Nicholas Kristof today picked up on some nervous buzz out there that education is going on the back burner for the upcoming Obama administration. This is in light of education coming in fifth on a list of Obama priorities.
Panic may be a little premature, but I am on board with the general sentiment of Kristof’s column — that the U.S. must take steps to improve its low performing mostly urban schools if it wants to improve the nation’s economic future fortunes.
I don’t agree that Kristof’s favored policy approaches — killing teacher certification and eliminating tenure — would do much to help. But I agree with him that education must be a key component to whatever comprehensive national reform Obama may be planning.
Finally, I have a personal pet peeve to nit-pick in the column.
Kristof does a good job running through the history of education in the U.S. and demonstrating that widespread free, quality schooling for a large chunk of the population helped give this nation a competitive advantage in the world economically over the last 150 years or so.
But I stumbled on this sentence:
“Then in the 1970s, the United States education system began to stagnate, with high-school graduation rates stuck at about three-quarters of all students. Probably as a result, income inequality increased again.”
First of all, what happened in education here in the 1970s? An earthquake hit called “integration.” Suddenly thousands of students who had been intentionally underserved were integrated into the wider national school system and counted in statistics like graduate rate.
It bugs me when I hear people suggest that scores dropped starting in the 1960s or 1970s because educators somehow just got lazy or education just “stagnated.” The 60s and 70s were, in fact, a time of vibrant experimentation in education. But educators absolutely struggled with the huge challenges of school integration and the concurrent social effects of the associated turmoil.
Second, I don’t think there is any way you can pin the income inequality we’ve seen since the 70s on education alone. There are many, many factors driving income inequality and a good bit of the problem, in my view, is rooted in national economic and tax policies.
Other than that, I’m on board with Kristof. Education should not be brushed aside by the new administration.
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Who should (and shouldn’t) be education secretary
There’s a lot of rumors and very little concrete information out there about who is being considered for U.S. Secretary of Education in the Obama Administration.
The sexiest name batted about is former Secretary of State and ex-general Colin Powell. The other names getting the most buzz are Arne Duncan, who heads Chicago Public Schools, and Jim Hunt, the education-minded former North Carolina governor.
Personally, I don’t think Powell is the right choice. But Hunt might me.
Since leaving the Bush Administration in 2005, Powell has at times highlighted the need for education reform in the U.S. in speeches and he founded an organization called America’s Promise focused on improving the well being of children with better education as a major pillar.
I think his interest in education is genuine, but he is nowhere near a policy expert. He’d have a lot to learn. The things I have heard Powell say about education strike me as unsophisticated. He supports more pay for teachers and expansion of school choice options. OK, but being for those ideas and having a plan to affect change through them are vastly different.
He backed President Bush on bringing his Texas-style, testing-heavy reforms to Washington through No Child Left Behind. That hasn’t worked out as many hoped. Powell also has talked often of more school-business connections like student work experience, career counseling, etc., for K-12 schools. Again, not a bad idea but hardly a comprehensive way to improve education.
Many of these ideas are popular and certainly useful but not necessarily on the mark when it comes to the sorts of changes an education secretary could pursue that might make large-scale improvements in the national education system.
Add to all this the mixed track record of other ex-generals in education and I wonder if Powell is the right guy for this job.
The plus of Powell is he brings stature to the post and can get people’s attention when he talks about education. I’m not sure that outweighs his drawbacks.
Duncan is an intriguing option. He is well-regarded for his efforts to reform Chicago schools. A lot of people are paying attention to what he is doing in Chicago, even if so far he’s not achieved big improvements in achievement. He has made important small strides, though.
I’m not sure Duncan’s experience in Chicago translates well to running a federal political office, but it might. Education blogger Alexander Russo, who writes a Chicago schools blog, doesn’t think Duncan is a serious candidate. That’s also my gut reaction — that he could emerge as a compromise choice if others don’t work out.
Hunt, in my view, seems to have many of the qualities the next education secretary needs. He’s had a big-scale political job as governor of North Carolina and he is a proven education reformer. Most impressively, he was an early advocate for early childhood education, pushing all-day kindergarten through in NC and expanding pre-school there. Early childhood education is where all the current research is pointing. It’s the place where the biggest impact can be made to improve student achievement.
North Carolina also developed, under his leadership, an impressive standards and testing operation that is less punitive than the Bush approach but still collects a ton of useful data to direct policymaking and identify areas of need.
One other interesting possibility is Linda Darling-Hammond, an education researcher who studies teacher quality issues at Stanford University and an Obama education adviser. Darling-Hammond is a former teacher and highly-regarded for her research. Teacher quality is really THE issue when it comes to improving learning through better instruction. Making teachers better is far more effective than, say, changing curriculum or school design when it comes to impacting achievement.
Having a true expert in that area leading the federal education effort strikes me as a good idea. School choice advocates, however, view her as an enemy.
I’d like to see Hunt or Darling-Hammond. An education secretary who really knows policy and is focused on issues that matter would be a good move for Obama.
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New Education Secretary … Colin Powell?
According to this Bloomberg News story, President-elect Obama may consider former Secretary of State Colin Powell for education secretary. The story sources this to Mark Halperin at Time Magazine, but I cannot find the original story.
This choice would be, to say the least, surprising. Bloomberg says Powell has a long-running interest in education, but if he has been involved in education policy at all it has been under my radar.
Powell is philosophically conservative. Would he, for instance, be a booster of vouchers and charter schools? Powell did lend his name to a Dayton charter school. Of course, it’s now potentially embarrassing that the Colin Powell Leadership Academy was forced to close for chronic academic underperformance and glaring mismanagement.
It’s also a potential concern that Obama would give this job to someone who has an “interest” but perhaps no real expertise in education. The issues in education are complex and nuanced. The education secretary shouldn’t have a steep learning curve.
Of course, this is all speculation right now. It will be interesting to see Powell is a serious contender or not.
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Check in on election night blogging
Don’t forget that I will be blogging on the school levy, among other local election news, all evening at the DDN editorial board’s A Matter of Opinion blog. Check it out.
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Predictions anyone?
So what do you think? Will Dayton’s school levy pass? Give us your prediction in the comments — yes or no and what percent of the vote for each.
Normally you would expect an economy this bad to work against a school levy in Dayton. But it seems likely that there will be a huge turnout of Democrats voting in the presidential election, a phenomenon that usually helps school levies pass. Which trend will win out?
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We’ll be following school levies on election night
I’ll be live blogging on election night over at the DDN editorial page’s A Matter of Opinion blog and I’ll be writing about school levies, among other issues.
I’ll be paying particular attention to two big school levies in Dayton and Jefferson Township. So check in Tuesday for local election news and reaction.
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