Two important things happened in education last week—one national, one local.
On the national front, the New Commission on the Skills of the American Workforce issued its report “Tough Choices or Tough Times.” This bipartisan commission includes many of the most influential thinkers on education policy today, including Chancellor Klein, former Senator and Secretary of Labor William Brock, former Secretary of Labor Ray Marshall, former Michigan governor John Engler, Professor Sharon Kagan of Teachers College, Past President of the Toledo Federation of Teachers Dal Lawrence, former Secretaries of Education Paige and Riley, and former Boston Superintendent Tom Payzant, among others. The report was described in a Wall Street Journal editorial by Mayor Bloomberg as “a sobering assessment of our nation's education system.“
The report points out that “American students and young adults place anywhere from the middle to the bottom of the pack in all three continuing comparative studies of achievement in mathematics, science, and general literacy in the advanced industrial nations. . . . It is easier and easier for employers everywhere to get workers who are better skilled at lower cost than American workers.” To stay competitive, says the Commission, we will need a workforce with “a very high level of preparation in reading, writing, speaking, mathematics, science, literature, history, and the arts,” that can compete in a world “in which comfort with ideas and abstractions is the passport to a good job, in which creativity and innovation are the key to a good life, in which high levels of education – a very different kind of education than most of us have had – are going to be the only security there is.”
The Commission makes a series of recommendations that would change the face of education as we know it. These are, briefly:
1) “Assume that we will do the job right the first time” – in the European model, create Board Examinations in core subjects, of comparable rigor to other industrialized countries, typically to be taken at the end of 10th grade. These examinations will certify students as ready for higher level academic work—either at the community college level or in the equivalent of an International Baccalaureate program.
2) “Make much more use of available resources” – Redeploy resources saved by the first item in order to recruit and deploy a teaching force from the top third of the high school students going to college, build high quality early childhood education, and direct resources to disadvantaged students.
3) “Recruit from the top third of the high school graduates going on to college for the next generation of teachers” – change teacher compensation by making retirement benefits comparable to the better firms in the private sector, and use the money saved to increase teachers’ salaries, building a more differentiated career ladder for teachers.
4) “Develop standards, assessments and curriculum that reflect today’s needs and tomorrow’s requirements” – stress creativity and innovation, facility with ideas and abstractions, and the self-discipline and organization needed to manage work.
5) “Create high performance schools and districts everywhere” – Rethink the role of school boards as managers of schools, and allow public schools to be created by teachers and other independent contractors who are held accountable by school boards to high performance standards
6) “Provide high quality universal early childhood education”
7) “Give strong support to the students who need it most”
8) “Enable every member of the adult workforce to get the new literacy skills”
9) “Create personal competitiveness accounts – a GI bill for our times”
10) “Create regional competitiveness authorities to make America competitive”
I predict that this will be an influential report, and that these ideas will begin cropping up in a number of places. Here’s a link to the Executive Summary. The entire report will be released in bookstores and through Amazon on December 22.
K:\Pool\Leigh's Weekly Reader\ToughChoices_EXECSUM.pdf
On the local front, the DOE announced the closing of five high schools. Three are large high schools in Brooklyn: Lafayette (1850 students, graduation rate of 39%), Tilden (2000 students, graduation rate of 44%) and South Shore (1990 students, graduation rate of 44%). Two are small schools in Manhattan: Urban Peace Academy (340 students) and School for the Physical City (382 students). These schools will not accept incoming freshmen next year and will gradually phase out over three years, to be replaced with new small schools.
I think these schools deserve a moment of silence. Even when performance is unacceptable and closing is the best thing for students, it’s a wrenching process to close a school, especially a big high school with a rich history. Lafayette, for example, was founded in 1939, and dedicated by Fiorello LaGuardia. Sandy Koufax and Larry King graduated from Layfayette. Al Sharpton, Willie Randolph, and former White House counsel Len Garment graduated from Tilden. There was a time when New York’s high schools were among the best urban schools in the country, routinely turning out leaders in all walks of life—not to mention baseball legends. It’s a sad end for these once-great schools. We owe it to New York to close them elegantly, and to replace them with schools that produce a new generation of leaders.