July 9, 2008

Bold Education Ideas for Senators McCain and Obama

Posted by Aaron Tang at 5:20PM

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News yesterday from the presidential campaign trail was that Senator McCain was preparing to give an address before the NAACP next week discussing his plans for how the federal government can help improve public education outcomes in America. While his talk, even by his own campaign's admission, is unlikely to be as deep and detailed as Senator Obama's parallel speech on education more than a month ago, word is that he will discuss No Child Left Behind and a handful of more intricate issues such as teacher pay-for-performance.

The fact that none of the presidential candidates have been so measured in their approaches on education -- even Senator Obama's 19-minute address six weeks ago did not contain any headliners -- indicates that they have both bought into the current orthodoxy of education reform in Washington, DC: the standards-based accountability movement. This is the movement that has resulted in states setting standards for what students should know in each subject area by each grade level, and implementing testing systems to measure whether those standards are being met.

In principle, the standards based accountability movement is a sound strategy that owes much of its genesis to successful business practices designed to monitor and enhance productivity. But unlike the business world, where workers rarely object to the idea that they will be held to a set of performance indicators to determine their efficacy, we have seen a fair deal of back-lash from educators and other stakeholder groups against the standards based model in education, particularly on the testing front.

I have often been quick to play devil's advocate against this brand of backlash, asserting the general logic that anytime an institution is suddenly and openly confronted with its own failures (and in the institution of public education, the magnitude of those failures is immense indeed), that the institutional stakeholders will reject and rail against the accountability system that reveals its weaknesses. But it must also be admitted that there is some degree of resonance to what those who object to NCLB and standards-based school reform are saying. The appeal of their arguments can be described this way: is the end goal and sum-total of what we are trying to achieve in public education reform really just an increase in the number of students who correctly fill-in some arbitrary percentage of bubbles on an annual test?

To be sure, those bubbles, the arbitrary percentage, and the tests themselves represent real skills that are indicators of what our children need to know to compete in the world economy. But that's also the problem: they are only indicators. If Susie Q. passes her state-written 4th grade reading proficiency test she still has a ways to go before she has earned her way into a prosperous participation in the global economy.

None of this would be a problem if we didn't have better indicators. That is to say, most people agree that institutions, whether public or private, ought to be held accountable to meeting their stated purposes, and we should use the bets-tailored indicators possible to decide if they are in fact succeeding. But in the case of public education, I believe we do have better indicators to determine whether our schools are meeting the goal of preparing all youth for productive future lives as democratic citizens and members of an ever-changing global work force: college completion rates and, by extension, high school drop-out rates!

In other words, in addition to holding schools accountable for annual yearly progress on standardized tests, shouldn't we be asking our schools to meet the more publicly-accessible end goal of increasing the proportion of students who complete college (which is an indicator for success in today's world that adds a more humanizing element than a passing score on a 4th grade math test, I submit)?

So here's my big idea for Senators McCain and Obama: come up with a plan to inject new Federal and State dollars** into public schools and school districts as an incentive to reward those districts who both increase their numbers of graduates who go on to complete college and who decrease high school drop out rates by at least the same amount. A program that essentially challenges schools to provide more students with a full high school education and do so in a way that prepares them for success in college can only do great things for our national economy and certainly our society. Schools who participate in the program would be rewarded for doing what their ultimate purpose is in the first place, and a race to the top could ensue as opposed to a race to the bottom with the standards on current state tests.

Best of all for the candidates is, in my opinion, the political aspect of such a proposal. Why? Because when I say "new" federal and state dollars, I really mean it. Put it this way: if America's high school drop out numbers were reduced by half, and a similar number of youth went on to complete college instead of stopping after getting a high school diploma, America would increase government tax revenues by at least $40 billion simply through direct and indirect benefits of reducing our incarceration rate!

Since high school dropouts are eight times more likely to go to jail than high school graduates, and since a year of prison costs the government an average of $27,000 plus lost tax revenues as prison inmates do not work, much of the incentive program to push schools to bring up college completion and bring down high school dropouts would pay for itself (over a period of time).

Now, if only we could find a leader willing to stand up and stomache the political costs of putting the money up for such a program up front with the firm belief that America's people do indeed desire to educate themselves, and do want to achieve success in the workplace and beyond...