Название: The Smart Society
Автор: Peter D. Salins
Издательство: Ingram
Жанр: Экономика
isbn: 9781594037016
isbn:
The Obama administration has tried to speed up the pace of educational reform by dangling before states and localities the prospect of winning competitively awarded federal grants. Originally part of the American Recovery and Reinvestment Act (ARRA) of 2009, and now funded through annual appropriations, the Race to the Top initiative has distributed, in three competitive cycles, more than $4 billion—with another half billion in the pipeline—to states that agree to implement more aggressive school reform measures. Success in winning a Race to the Top grant (or its size) has depended primarily on the willingness to implement a rigorous, student test–driven teacher evaluation system and substantially increasing the number of charter schools, while gaining the acquiescence of local teacher unions.
In parallel with the steady stream of publications that view American education with alarm and pieces of federal legislation, there have been substantial developments of the reforms themselves. The first truly new idea was the “charter school,” a tuition-free, publicly funded school available to parents dissatisfied with the zoned local district school, and operated free of the constraints imposed by unionized teachers and district administration. The idea of permitting independently operated schools to receive public funding is said to have originated with University of Massachusetts, Amherst, professor Ray Budde in 1988, and was embraced soon after by Albert Shanker, then president of the American Federation of Teachers. In 1991 Minnesota became the first state to authorize charter schools, followed by California in 1992. Today charter schools exist in forty-one states and the District of Columbia. The success to date of charter schools nationally will be considered in chapters 3 and 4.
Another independently developed but highly significant educational reform initiative is Teach for America (TFA), which was founded in 1990 by Wendy Kopp and based on her 1989 Princeton University senior thesis. Its idea is to break the prevailing monopoly on teacher training of state teacher colleges—and their mediocre private collegiate brethren—by recruiting “the best and the brightest” graduates of U.S. Ivy League and other prestigious universities to become teachers, especially in the country’s most troubled neighborhoods. The TFA program involves, first, going to America’s best colleges and universities to attract teaching candidates—none of whom has ever taken any “education” courses—and then giving them a crash course in pedagogy so they can qualify to teach in public school classrooms in most U.S. states. TFA has by now become hugely successful in carrying out its mission; each year it currently attracts more than 46,000 candidates and trains and places about 4,500.15
It is indeed curious that, given the stress our national dialogue about public school reform has placed on the importance of recruiting and retaining highly effective teachers, there has been so little interest in where teachers are being trained. Kopp’s brainstorm was to recognize that the overwhelming majority of U.S. teachers today are being educated in second-rate institutions, and consequently America’s public schools are losing out in the competition for first-rate talent. We don’t know yet how well teachers’ effectiveness is correlated with their intellect, or the quality of their undergraduate education, but there is good reason to believe that brighter, better-educated individuals might also be better teachers. Beyond this yet-to-be-proven hypothesis, there is the important issue of teachers’ prestige. Among the countries that outrank the United States in educational outcomes there is one common factor: their teachers are better educated and, consequently, better respected.
The last significant educational milestone is the effort to institute across the country a more rigorous—and more nationally uniform—public school curriculum. Launched by two nonfederal organizations—the National Governors Association and the Council of Chief State School Officers—and based on studies going back to 1996, the Common Core State Standards Initiative encourages every state to adopt its highly subject- and grade-specific recommended curriculum. As of 2012, all but five states are on board.16 While very promising conceptually, it remains to be seen whether the common standards are academically sound and whether they will actually be implemented as envisioned and prove to be educational game changers.
All of the milestones noted so far have been national. One important addition to the list, however, is state initiated. The Massachusetts Education Reform Act of 1993 imposed a rigorous, statewide K–12 core curriculum and a somewhat longer school day and school year; in 2005, the state began piloting an even longer school day in certain districts. Perhaps because of these measures, Massachusetts now leads the nation in K–12 education gains. A recent Harvard study, examining results from international math and reading tests, found that Massachusetts eighth graders not only scored highest among American states on the tests but also outscored test takers in all but a few countries (see table 2.9).17 Other encouraging statistics: 61 percent of Massachusetts high school freshmen proceed to college, and 53 percent of its young adults have college degrees; both are the highest proportions of any American state.
MINDING THE (ACHIEVEMENT) GAPS—AND CLOSING THEM
For America to regain its status as the world’s smartest society, it must have the world’s best educational system. Yet, as noted earlier, looking at metrics of educational achievement internationally, we see that the United States is rapidly falling behind, being overtaken by an increasing number of other countries with each passing decade. Most of this can be ascribed to the rapid educational progress being made by other places. The advanced rich countries of Europe have largely abandoned their educational elitism and are making good on their own version of “not leaving any children behind.” Other countries with the will to become smart societies needed only the means. The former Soviet satellites of Eastern Europe no longer have their educational potential held back by the yoke of Soviet communism, and the “Asian tigers” no longer suffer from the scarce resources of early-stage economic development. Although we are losing the educational race mainly because others have learned to run faster, that is no excuse; we must learn to run even faster ourselves.
The inferior standing of the United States is evident in all three of the international tests, in all three subjects (reading, math, and science), and at all ages (fourth grade, eighth grade, and age fifteen) as shown in tables 2.2 and 2.3.
A detailed analysis of the data behind these dismal statistics reveals that the deficiencies in American school achievement are present not just in the bottom cohort of schoolchildren (the “left behind”), but also in those at higher levels of ability. As shown in table 2.4, even America’s brighter youngsters, those in the 75th and 95th percentile of test takers, do poorly relative to their peers in other advanced countries. This suggests that the fastest way for American political and educational leaders to restore the country’s historic international educational supremacy is to direct much more attention to increasing the academic performance of mainstream schoolchildren, a subject elaborated on later and addressed in chapter 4.
Table 2.2
PIRLS Test Scores for Reading (fourth grade)
Source: СКАЧАТЬ