Two pieces of interest today on the topic of education.
First piece: The Education Trust, a Washington-based nonprofit group focused on school reform, has questioned the rigor of Virginia’s Standards of Quality exams, according to the Virginian-Pilot.
Among eighth-graders who took the state Standards of Learning math test in 2005, 81 percent were either “proficient” or “advanced.” By comparison, 33 percent of Virginia eighth-graders who took the National Assessment of Educational Progress that year scored “proficient” or “advanced.”
Similar findings applied to fifth graders. Bottom line, we think our schools are doing an adequate job — but maybe they’re not.
Second piece: New York Mayor Michael Bloomberg published a column (subscribers only) in the Wall Street Journal comparing America’s education system to the automobile industry of the 1970s: “stuck in a flabby, inefficient, outdated production model driven by the needs of employees rather than consumers.”
The problem, he says, is not that America doesn’t spend enough money. “We spend enormous amounts, far more than any other nation. But we’re not getting a sufficient return on our investment.”
Bloomberg blames bureacracies that lack clear lines of accountability, tolerating mediocrity and failure and failing to reward excellence. He blames lifetime tenure for school teachers, rewarding them for longevity, not performance. He blames the failure to help struggling students in early years, when costs are lower, and then paying for ineffective remediation programs in later years, when costs are higher. He blames funding inequalities between school districts that short-change minorities.
What schools need, Bloomberg says, is “a top-to-bottom rethinking…. one that insists on a perfomance-based culture of accountability that is oriented around children, not bureaucracies.” He calls for higher teacher salaries to attract the best and brightest, upholding high standards and ending social promotion, and investing in early childhood development.
Bloomberg’s emphasis on early childhood education is reminiscent of Gov. Timothy M. Kaine’s proposal to push universal pre-K in Virginia. While I question the benefits of such a plan, I remain open to persuasion and, indeed, hope to address the Kaine administration’s arguments for universal pre-K in some depth in the not-too-distant future. But I am unalterably opposed to blindly dumping mo’ money into a system that is already awash in funds and exacting no institutional change whatsoever. Virginia has many dedicated teachers and administrators but the system is highly bureaucratic and inefficient.
Any injection of more money into the system must be accompanied by greater accountability and institutional reform. Otherwise, we’re squandering billions of dollars. It doesn’t take a Ph.D. to figure that out.
