January 13, 2009
Opinion: Philanthropy Needs to Promote Real Change in Education
By Marc S. Tucker
We pay more per pupil for our elementary- and secondary-education system than any other industrialized country except Switzerland, yet the United States ranks near the bottom in performance. For the price they pay, Americans should expect the learning equivalent of a Lexus. Instead, we’re bumping along in a Chevy Nova while our economic competitors zoom past us, fueled by well-educated work forces.
If education were a product and the United States were a corporation, we would try and figure out how other nations manage to succeed where we have clearly failed, and then beat them at their own game. Instead, many of America’s leading donors are lavishing their money on social entrepreneurs whose small, innovative programs don’t have a prayer of dealing with the problem at the scale that is needed.
Among the best known of these entrepreneurs are people like Wendy Kopp, founder of Teach for America, which recruits graduates of elite universities to spend two years teaching at some of the country’s worst schools. The line of limousines gathered for a recent fund-raising benefit the group held in New York reportedly went around an entire city block at the Waldorf-Astoria hotel. Five million dollars was raised in one night. Other well-known entrepreneurs include Green Dot and KIPP (Knowledge Is Power Program), which operate charter schools.
Those are all worthwhile organizations, no question about it. Their leaders are smart, visionary, and very dedicated. But as exemplary as they are, small programs like these are not equal to the task. Teach for America accounts for just two-tenths of 1 percent of the new teachers entering our schools every year. The entire enrollment of the Green Dot schools is no larger than the enrollment of one typical high school in the Los Angeles Unified School District. KIPP schools, the object of enormous attention in the national news media, has an enrollment equal to three-hundredths of 1 percent of the 92,000 public schools in the United States.
The foundations, corporations, and wealthy individuals who support these organizations are well-intentioned, but their efforts amount to boutique grant making personally gratifying to those engaged in it, but irrelevant in practical terms compared with the education challenges the United States faces.
Other countries have not built highly effective and very efficient school systems by financing a handful of small, disruptive interventions. Not at all. They have developed policies that get results. It is the structure of those systems that account for their effectiveness.
To those of us who have studied these nations in detail for years, there is no mystery about what has to be done. America, too, needs to recruit teachers from the top one-third to one-fifth of college graduates. To get them, we need to pay them as much as the other professions they could just as easily choose to go into: medicine, law, architecture, accounting, engineering, and so on. We need to make sure the best of them can do very well for themselves without leaving teaching. We need to give them the same kind of control over the way their services are delivered to their clients as the other professions have over theirs, and that will mean turning virtually all of the decisions as to how the schools are run over to them.
By handsomely rewarding school faculties that produce smashing gains for their students and closing schools that fail to make strong progress, we can ensure that handing over the decision making is a wise move. But, if we do that, we will be making a big mistake if we continue to measure student progress with the cheap, minimum-competency tests the states now use. We need instead to adopt high-quality board examinations like those the most successful countries use, which can measure a student’s grasp of the concepts underlying the subject, the student’s creativity and capacity for innovation, as well as the student’s knowledge and ability to apply what he or she has learned to real-world problems. As many other countries have done long ago, we need to shift our financing system away from a reliance on the local property tax and toward a system that makes sure each and every student has the resources needed to get to internationally benchmarked standards.
That is not a list of modest changes; taken together, they constitute a major redesign of the American education system, a system that got its last redesign some 100 years ago.
Social entrepreneurs are no match for such a comprehensive approach. Imagine if the United States relied on elite, committed, but mostly short-tenured twenty-something volunteers to help solve comparable national crises such as the search for sustainable energy, or if the nation had done the same thing in response to the challenge posed by Sputnik. The idea is laughable. Yet that is precisely how we have dealt with the problem of our inadequate education system.
Entrepreneurs are not the solution. The solution is to completely change our education system in the United States as we know it today. A growing number of other countries are beating the pants off America not by financing a few attractive entrepreneurs, but by adopting state-of-the-art systems of education designed to make a difference to every student in their country.
President-elect Barack Obama and many of the other new leaders taking office this month talked on the campaign trail about the need for change and to put this nation on a new course. Policy makers have the power to change American education, and for less money than it might seem. Two years ago, the New Commission on the Skills of the American Workforce issued a report titled “Tough Choices or Tough Times,” which called for a top to bottom shake-up of the education system.
When the entire system is put in place, the net increased cost will be almost zero. To get there, an initial investment of about $60-billion a year is required—roughly a tenth of the cost of the war in Iraq since 2003. Among other things, this level of investment would enable us to pay our teachers about $100,000 annually, start school for most children at age 3, and greatly increase the amount of money available to educate our most disadvantaged students. The report shows how, as these investments are made, the country could reduce other expenditures now being made on our schools in an almost equal amount, saving enough to virtually offset the additional expenses.
There you have it: good value for a fair price, something education donors want as much as any other American. To get it, they must shift their attention from supporting cameo programs to influencing public policy. That’s where the payoff is.
Marc S. Tucker is president of the National Center on Education and the Economy, in Washington.
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Sounds good, to me. I agree that we should invest in education as soundly and wisely as other important aspects of living. How foolish of America to continue otherwise.
— Deia More Jan 14, 09:53 AM #
I’m not clear on the logic here. If we’re already paying more than other countries and getting less for it, why is the answer massive additional Federal spending? I understand the stated purposes of the funding, but with the same structures in place (state regulation, local union work rules, etc.) what is the real likelihood of substantive, positive change?
Some of the “disruptive” experiments Mr. Tucker refers to have demonstrated that money is not an indicator, much less a predictor, of student success.
If we don’t address what’s NOT working in K-12 education and, more importantly, form a consensus on what K-12 education should be and cannot be, we’re doomed to the “opportunity” to “invest” yet more money in a system most agree is mediocre at best.
— Michael L. Wyland Jan 15, 08:04 AM #
I am not sure the action step the author wants me as a reader to take. Assuming I am both a donor to meaningless entrepreneural investments in education and a taxpayer supporting in part our failed public education program is the admonishion to stop giving and stand ready to applaud the wisdom of new policy makers who will spend my tax money more wisely soon and save the day, or should I offer to give my donation money to the government for that initial start-up cost to change our education system, or should I continue to give to those boutique solutions in order to set examples of how well we can do if indeed the public program administrators, teachers, unions and the like get their collective heads together and actually make the changes needed to create excellence again in our education program within the budget we currently provide? I am stymied. My knee jerk reaction is to keep giving to private efforts because at least some students will benefit and do that until the proof appears in the proverbial pudding that the proposed changes in public education are indeed taking place effectively at the larger scale. At the same time I can join others in strongly applauding the proposed initiative to radically improve public education and do all I can to help foster that change by continuing to earn a living and paying my taxes and/or voting for ballot measures and elected officials that enable change when those opportunities arise. The author has the opportunity to go beyond simple and potentially divisive critique of alternatives and offer a plan of collective action that will in fact lead to dramatic, widespread improvement in our education system. That would be useful.
— Charley Ansbach Jan 15, 02:18 PM #