LITTLE ROCK — HERE’S a bright ray of hope about education, a field that usually has more than enough fogspeak to obscure any progress. Not to mention common sense. But this isn’t just a bit of good news; it could mark a major advance for public education in this state-more than all the wrestling that reformers have had to do over the past couple of decades with Arkansas’ educational establishment. The big change was noted by the ever vigilant Cynthia Howell in her Education Notebook column last Sunday:
The rigorous Fordham Institute, which advocates higher standards for American education, now has examined the new Common Core State Standards that Arkansas has just adopted, along with 20 other states. The education-watchers at the Fordham Institute found the new standards a marked improvement over Arkansas’ old ones in English, which date back to 2003 and 2006,and the state’s current standards in math, which were established in 2004.
The state’s current standards in English got a grade of D while the Common Core standards got a B-plus from the Institute. Quite a spread.
Arkansas’ math standards merited a grade of C while the Common Core math standards got an A-minus. That’s quite a difference, too.
(Ms. Howell, our woman in education, noted that the whole study can be viewed at www.edexcellence.net/index. cfm/news_the-state-of-state-standardsand-the-common-core-in-2010.)
Conclusion: Here is a much heralded change in education that might actually be worth heralding.
ALL OF this comes with the usual caveat: Education consists of more than having a set of academic standards that may or may not be met, however much those standards can be improved. For what’s the good of having even the highest standards if student achievement never matches them?
If public education is ever to fulfill the promise it once had in this country, the schools and departments of education that turn out teachers must be reformed, or maybe just abolished. Because the quality of education depends on who’s doing the educating, that is, the teachers.
A far better model for producing fine teachers than four years as an education major at the usual university is Teach for America. Its approach begins with well-educated graduates of good schools who have a solid liberal education. That is, a good handle on the content they’re going to teach. Not just a mastery of empty if verbose form.
After a brief period of teacher training, these young people are sent out to some of the worst schools in the country and turn out to be some of the country’s best teachers, that is, the most effective as reflected in their students’ performance on standardized tests. Thebest departments of education, which are all too few, follow much the same order of priorities, insisting that the teachers they turn out first have a liberal education, and only then are they qualified for an apprenticeship in pedagogy, aka practice teaching-under the demanding eye of a master teacher.
Unfortunately, too many colleges and universities are turning out teachers full of educanto after a bloated diet of mickeymouse education courses instead of well-educated teachers. (See the current attempt to water down the core curriculum at the University of Arkansas.)
Note, too, how hard, if not impossible,it is to get rid of bad teachers once ensconced in the tenure system and cushioned by a union contract. New York City, the country’s largest school system, is a perfect example in this regard-an example to beware. It’s had to assign its worst teachers to those notorious “rubberrooms,” where they do nothing all day, because that’s better than letting them have any contact with students. Why let them ruin still more kids?
MICHELLE Rhee, who (1) heads the Washington, D.C. school system, and (2) is our hero, just fired 241 teachers for their poor performance, or just being unqualified to teach. Naturally, the system she established to evaluate teachers has come under fire from the president of the teachers’ union there. But she’s not dismayed at all. She’s got her eye on 741 more teachers in the system who were evaluated as only “minimally effective,” and she’s warned them they won’t be getting their pay increased this year, and, if they don’t shape up, they’ll be gone.
Ms. Rhee understands the paramount importance of having effective teachers in a school system, not just time-servers. Why? “I’ve got two children in the system,” she explains, “and I don’t want a ‘minimally effective’ teacher-and I don’t think anyone else does, either.”
In the end, the quality of education in this country depends on the quality of teachers, just as the quality of medicine depends on the quality of physicians. And the quality of law on the quality of the lawyers who practice it-on their education and ethics.
For that matter, the quality of American journalism depends on the education of journalists, their education and ethics-by which we mean not just journalism courses but, far more important, a broad liberal education. The advantages of such an education cannot be underestimated. Not just in a career but in a life.
The appearance of higher standards for education, or in any field, is to be welcomed. But those standards are of only secondary importance compared to the quality of those who will be trying to meet them or, preferably, surpass them. Teachers do matter. Both the best and, alas, the worst.
Editorial, Pages 18 on 07/28/2010