By Stuart Buck and Robert Maranto
Special to the Arkansas Democrat-Gazette
Monday, December 22, 2008
Last week President-elect Barack Obama showed that he is a real reformer.
Behind the scenes of the “no-drama Obama” presidential transition, education reformers and teachers unions waged an all too dramatic battle over the choice for secretary of education. In picking Arne Duncan, Obama has sided with the reformers, putting children’s needs over grownups’ jobs.
Public education serves a variety of stakeholders, two of the most important being children and teachers. And sometimes the goals of these two groups conflict. For instance, if policymakers adopt reforms that might lead to better outcomes for students but also might change the income of some teachers, tough decisions must be made.
Candidate Obama took conflicting positions, sometimes backing useful education reforms, but at other times suggesting a typical allegiance to the status quo. Indeed, his positions were so inconsistent that both the Democrats for Education Reform and the anti-reform National Education Association claimed him as their own.
With Duncan at the helm of education, the Obama administration seems poised to embrace the reforms promised in the campaign. For example, on the campaign trail he promised to seek ways to pay teachers more for serving in disadvantaged schools. The goal would be to enable inner-city and rural schools to offer salaries above those of suburban counterparts, thus encouraging talented teachers to go where they are needed most.
He also argued that more effective teachers should be paid more.
Both of these reforms are huge breaks with the status quo in which teachers are paid based on their years of experience and professional development (typically, courses taken) regardless of whether they are effective and whether they are teaching in high-need areas.
Reforming teacher pay to reflect student needs will be controversial, but it is also necessary. Too often, the debate over teacher pay revolves around the simplistic question: the same vs. more. But if teacher salaries are raised across the board, bad teachers are equally rewarded along with good teachers, and high-poverty schools are unable to entice good teachers to move there. Real reform would increase salaries in a way that gives teachers an incentive to improve or to serve the neediest children.
The selection of Duncan signals that the Obama team will mend rather than end No Child Left Behind, the bipartisan reform that requires schools to keep track of how all students are doing and try to improve the achievement of poorer minority children. This accountability scheme has pushed adults to focus on children’s needs. As a superintendent from an affluent, well-regarded Pennsylvania school district said, “The biggest requirement of NCLB was to report data by group. Eighty percent of our kids achieve well, but when we disaggregate data by poverty and race, the data doesn’t look too good. . . . We’re going to put more effort into teaching minority kids.”
The Obama platform ridiculed NCLB as “forcing students to fill in bubbles on standardized tests.” One campaign spokesperson suggested that schools use individual assessments such as portfolios instead of tests.
Unfortunately, without objective tests there is no way to tell which schools or teachers are more effective. Performance-based pay cannot work unless we have actual measures of performance. Otherwise, we are reduced to the sort of “accountability” that Enron made famous. Portfolios of student achievement end up being almost entirely subjective, easily rigged by those who want to game the system.
To be sure, it seems unfair to determine a school’s worth based on how many students score at a predetermined level on a standardized test, since many children arrive at school with massive disadvantages from their lives at home. A better reform would change NCLB to measure how much a teacher or school has improved a child’s skills. If the kids aren’t improving, after all, then there isn’t any reason for them to be in school rather than at an arcade or mall.
Colorado has paved the way with the Colorado Growth Model (www.cde.state. co.us/cdeassess/growthmodel.html). We hope an Obama administration will encourage other states to follow Colorado’s lead.
On all these complex issues, we believe that the Obama/Duncan team will put children first. That would be the change we need.
