SAVE OUR SCHOOLS: Rescuing the Future (Part 5 of 5)
RESCUING THE FUTURE: A myriad of changes must be made to reverse the decline of the nation's schools
BY NOREEN O'DONNELL AND JOSH BERNSTEIN
What’s the price of a bad teacher? About $1 million, said Eric Hanushek, a senior fellow at Stanford University’s Hoover Institution.
In a paper to be published in June, he finds that a teacher in the 90th percentile of effectiveness generates about $1.1 million more income for a class of 20 students over the course of their lifetime compared with a teacher in the bottom 10th percentile.
America is in the midst of a sometimes bruising debate over what to do about failing schools. Reformers like Geoffrey Canada, leader of Harlem Children’s Zone, and Michelle Rhee, former Washington, D.C., schools chief, have become minor celebrities thanks to appearances on Oprah and starring roles in the documentary “Waiting for Superman.” The advantages of charter schools and merit pay are being thrashed out from school auditoriums in New York City to courtrooms in Los Angeles.
For Hanushek, the quality of teaching tops all else.
“All of the other changes that we have considered are really small potatoes,” he said.
For Canada, the afternoon school bell might as well be a factory whistle: The bell rings, teachers and students leave, and no one stays late to help children who are failing, he said.
“Education’s the only place where you can get all the data that says that you’ve done a terrible job and take two months off and no one thinks about it at all,” Canada said during a discussion about education sponsored by The Daily.
To transform public education, treat teachers and principals as professionals, use the data to determine who's performing well and pay them well, he said.
Other changes that are critical, reformers say:
- eliminate tenure
- fire poor teachers
- remake teachers colleges
- offer parents a choice of schools
- close schools that are failing
President Obama tied the $4.35 billion Race to the Top school funding to lifting caps on the number of charter schools, adopting common standards and measuring teachers’ performance. Now he wants to model the reauthorization of No Child Left Behind on the competitive grants, scrapping yearly benchmarks in favor of measuring whether students are ready for work or college.
Lindsey Burke, an analyst at the Heritage Foundation, called the plan a federal overreach. Conservative leaders have suggested they favor moving dollars and decisions back to the states, she wrote.
“Education’s one of the toughest things to work on, because everybody went to school and so they’re all experts,” Sen. Mike Enzi, R-Wyo., said during a news conference call with U.S. Education Secretary Arne Duncan and other senators last month on what's formally called the Elementary and Secondary Education Act. But the senators predict they will find consensus.
Teach for America founder Wendy Kopp said the country has lurched from one big idea to another, when in reality schools need many things, from more funding to new technology. None will work without strong leaders, she said.
Canada provides the children in his zone — a 100-block area in Harlem — with medical and dental care and other social services. It’s not a new idea, he said, and it is one Randi Weingarten, the head of the largest teachers union, would like to emulate.
"Let's have wraparound services around schools so that we address these issues," said Weingarten, president of the American Federation of Teachers.
Weingarten has backed tying teacher evaluations in part to student performance and stripping some tenure protections from ineffective teachers, but she also has battled with key reformers.
As schools chancellor in Washington, D.C., Rhee negotiated a contract that weakened seniority rights and added performance pay in exchange for a 21 percent raise — boosting the average salary from $67,000 to $81,000 (the average salary for public school teachers in the 2008-09 school year was $53,910, according to the National Center for Education Statistics). She also fired 241 teachers.
As for reforming teachers colleges, at Teacher U — a master's program started by two charter school founders at New York City's Hunter College — the emphasis is on success in the classroom. It's based on the idea that great teaching can be taught.
Hanushek is not convinced these reforms will be actual repairs. But he argues student achievement would improve dramatically if the bottom 5 to 10 percent of teachers were replaced with just an average teacher. The United States could move from below average in international comparisons to near the top.
Credit: The Daily (www.thedaily.com)
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