My Education Policy

A while ago I wrote what was a lengthy piece on my foreign policy – or at least the military side of it. I never did get around to the non-military side, but I do plan to get back to that sometime soon. In this post I will cover education policy. I don't pretend that any of this is original.

Now is an exciting time to debate education policy. There are a lot of exciting options that are being explored and given a chance to prove their worth. Consider that across the country, different governments are exploring charter schools (including single sex charter schools), standardized testing, and the broad issue of administrator / teacher / political accountability. New York City is probably the best test case for all of these issues. Mayor Bloomberg has taken control of the school district (as has the Mayor of Los Angeles). Now, if things don’t improve, the mayor can no longer blame the school district, who would in turn blame the Superintendent, who would then probably blame the mayor. New York City is also filled with charter schools in some of the best and worst neighborhoods. And or course New York is participating in No Child Left Behind and is therefore using standardized testing.

Before I dive into all of those issues though, there are some less controversial ones that get very little attention but are as important if not more so. Let’s start with early education. There has been a lot of talk for a while now about the merits of universal pre-K / Head Start. The problem with Head Start as a universal solution is that it does nothing to deal with the kids who even with preschool fall behind. What is necessary instead is a universal early intervention program. A program of this kind would use diagnostic standardized testing to measure if children in grades K-3 (at least) are at grade level in math and reading at the end of the grade. If not, these children will participate in extended school year (over the summer) and extended school day programs (during the school year) to get them caught up. From the statistics I saw in Montgomery County Maryland, this type of program worked wonders, especially in the lower income areas of the county.

One of the reasons this worked of course was that Montgomery County had the resources to devote to all the children who needed them – although federal funding also played a major part. As a rich suburb of Washington, DC, Montgomery County could spread its resources to cover all areas of the county. It also shows the benefits from a county-wide school district, where resources can be redistributed when necessary. For counties that don’t have any money to spread, state funding should be made to compensate (rural poverty is not often given the attention it deserves, and they should be considered as much as urban areas).

Another not so controversial education policy that doesn’t get enough attention is rigor in high schools. It has become quietly accepted that programs like Advanced Placement (all courses finish with standardized tests, but no one complains about “teaching to the test”) and International Baccalaureate significantly improve high school education and achievement. In what can be called the “Stand and Deliver” philosophy (a great movie staring Edward James Olmos), you get the best results when you challenge students and set high expectations. These courses also prepare students for college while setting the expectation that it is within their reach. Having as many of these courses available as meets the demand of the students should be the focus for every high school, and the federal and state governments should help out where necessary.

I will admit that I have skipped over middle school. As I left Montgomery County, they were in the process of doing for middle school what they did for elementary and high school. I don’t know of a great model yet, but my bet is that it involves a combination of the two approaches; continued availability of extended day and school year programs, as well as rigorous courses.

So that gets us through some uncontroversial but necessary policies. Now I need to dive into the hard stuff. First of all, I feel that the charter school movement has proven that vouchers were a flawed idea. While adding some market pressures is a good idea, vouchers operated under the assumption that good schools cannot exist if funded publicly. Charter schools try to use the same methods as private schools to attract students, while retaining their public funding and open availability. The benefits of charter schools are their flexibility. They can specialize in arts, technology, the humanities, or anything else, and are also free to offer longer school hours and school years when necessary. They can change the curriculum without the bureaucratic hassle typical of school districts. The bottom line is that they can experiment.

This shouldn’t be thought of as a free pass though. In some of the research I have seen, charter schools, while often serving more minorities than the average public school, are not always better than their public school counterparts. The fact is that charter schools still need to be monitored to ensure that they are providing a quality education. In my mind, the best methods for this are accountability and standardized testing.

Let me start with accountability before moving onto the elephant in the room. I believe accountability is a great thing. I am glad that the voters in New York have someone to blame if the schools don’t improve or someone to praise if they do. The fact is that it wasn’t working when everyone could blame everyone else for bad results. It also didn’t help that you had sometimes three groups working on fixing the schools that each might have their own idea of what is best.

On top of that, principals and teachers need to be held accountable. In New York City, Bloomberg and Chancellor Klein started a pilot program where principals signed up for greater control over their budgets and operations while agreeing that if they didn’t perform they could be terminated. This type of policy needs to spread. Granted, new administration will not solve any problem alone (which is a weakness of NCLB, where failing schools are closed down and the students are sent elsewhere – this does nothing to address some of the environmental problems those students might be facing). But it is a step in the right direction and will be positive as part of a broad approach to education.

I also strongly believe that teachers need to be held accountable. I attended public schools all my life and can think of too many bad teachers that no parents wanted their child to get. Unfortunately, every year 25 or more students were unlucky enough to get that teacher. There is no reason that this should be the case. If a teacher is not performing, they should not have a job and children should not be subjected to them. The problem with this is that I don’t know when teacher tenure will ever be eliminated. The teachers’ unions’ lone goal is not to improve education, but to protect teachers, and this truth becomes clearer to me everyday. If you look at the policies they advocate for, they all benefit teachers first and they will never advocate anything that is bad for teachers (my view on teacher’s unions is the same as my views on unions in general – they often work very hard to protect their worst employees). In my mind, it would take a huge amount of public pressure to convince unions to give up tenure, and I hope one day people realize how bad it is to subject their kids to ineffectual teachers.

The last issue, standardized testing goes along with the previous paragraph on teacher accountability. While I don’t think standardized tests should be a major component of teacher reviews (because it encourages teachers to cheat), I also don’t think testing is a bad thing. I firmly believe it is necessary to have a benchmark to compare all kids to, so that we know if they are getting the basic education they deserve. We need to know if they are learning basic math and reading skills, along with language and history / social studies. As importantly, we need to stop the practice of social promotion.

As I see it, there are a couple serious objections to standardized testing. One is the fear of teachers “teaching to the test”. As a student of the Regents exams in New York State, that never concerned me. In the classes where the teacher was very strong, he or she found ways to go above and beyond the state mandated material. The teachers that weren’t strong at least gave us the basics of what the state thought was necessary. Therefore I don’t see this as infringing on some right to creativity for teachers. I am sure it sounds like I am bashing on teachers in this post. The fact is that I have great respect for teachers, and I think the proposals I have outlined will protect the good ones while protecting the children from the bad ones.

The one objection I do find to be compelling has to do with age appropriateness. My brilliant girlfriend has made this point to me a few times and it has definitely stuck with me. While I mentioned at the beginning that there needs to be testing / diagnostics at early ages so that interventions can be made available to students who need them, I do think we need to be conscious of how we do this. At young ages, it might not be good to force children to sit through long tests (I say might only because I don’t know this independently from what my girlfriend has told me). Since this post isn’t about curriculum but is about education policy broadly, the only thing I can say about this is that we need to be conscious of using appropriate tests and measures for children depending on their age.

As I bring this to a close, I realize I have forgotten one final thing – NCLB’s requirement that there be a quality teacher in every classroom. Since I have already posted about this, let me just say that I think the goals of making every teacher go through teacher training are right, the enforcement is sometimes too strict and doesn’t allow for mid-career people to come back to public schools nor does it give credit to private school teachers who have plenty of experience. These requirements should be more flexible.

As I do not have the energy to talk about special education or English Language Learners, I will cover that much more briefly in another post. This one should give people plenty to debate with me about since you now know where I stand.

Election 2006

I will be honest – I didn’t think I cared if the Democrats took back the majority in Congress. I was extremely upset at their inability to articulate (by they, I mean the leadership) any coherent vision. Instead, they spouted off vague but popular remarks about the need to change course without ever going into detail.

I realized today though that I am thrilled at today’s election results. I am still not a huge fan of Pelosi, but I am willing to keep an open mind and see whether she can run the House in a way that is productive for our country. I was also really excited to see how New York State shaped up, although none of that was really a surprise. I didn’t hate Pataki, but it will be nice to have a Democratic governor, and I have a lot of hope for Spitzer. With such a broad mandate, he will likely feel empowered to make some big changes.

More than the overall results, it was the individual elections that really got me excited. Rick Santorum lost his seat in the Senate, which is great despite evidence that he does fight for the poor. And things look positive, although nothing is certain yet, in Virginia. In fact, if the source the Times has is accurate, Allen might not even call for a recount. It is great seeing two obnoxious Senators learn a lesson in humility. We all need it from time to time. Also, I think it will be a nice change for Massachusetts to have a Democrat governor again, and now that I know a little about the governor-elect, I am interested to see how he does.

The Lieberman / Lamont race turned out the way I wanted, although I have to admit that I am less excited about Lieberman now that I know more about his domestic politics. I also have to admit that even though I didn’t think Lamont was a great candidate, it might have been better had Connecticut gotten a new Senator. I realize it sounds like I am playing both sides here. The point I am trying to make is that I think kicking out some old blood is good now and then (but your options for turnover might not be so good), which is another reason this election was so thrilling. The Republicans were getting greedy and were ignoring the policies that got them elected. Because of that, they deserved to go. I also think the Democrats were behaving in a similar way in 1994 and were long overdue to be kicked out. An optimal situation in my mind would be a change in party control of Congress every couple decades (or less if necessary).

All of this was great, but the real treat was the news I got after lunch today – that Donald Rumsfeld had been fired. I never expected this to happen so soon. I thought Bush would hold on to Rummy like grim death. I couldn’t be more happy. Rumsfeld’s decisions have created some of the biggest problems we face today (along with Cheney, of course). We invaded Iraq with too few troops and no plan to provide security after we defeated Saddam’s military. Both of those are on Rumsfeld’s shoulders. When we look back many years from now, I expect everyone will realize how bad we managed Iraq, and who was at fault. Starting very soon, we will be able to set a new course, and hopefully make some progress (although Friedman thinks our only options there are ($)"tolerable" and "awful").