Talking to the State Boards of Education

This week ED in 08 has been all over Capitol Hill. We had Bill Gates yesterday, and this morning, executive director Marc Lampkin sat on a panel with education policy experts for a panel discussion at the National Association of State Boards of Education's (NASBE) annual legislative conference to discuss the future of school reform. Yesterday, the NASBE conference featured members of Congress from the House Education Committee, the superintendent at Miami-Dade Public Schools, and of course, NASBE executive director Brenda Welburn.

On the panel called "Where do we go from here?," Marc discussed the future of education reform as we face a new presidential administration alongside David Hoff of Education Week and Diane Rentner from the Center for Education Policy. They talked about what will and should be the top K-12 priorities for the new President and Congress. I know they'll focus a lot on No Child Left Behind, but I trust that Marc will steer the conversation to our key issues of higher standards, improving teacher quality and providing more time and support for learning.

As I've said before, the next President doesn't have to be the superintendent in chief. But he or she can lead by setting priorities, and getting Congress, as well as state level leaders and boards of education to act now to secure America's economic future.

According to Rachel Bird, a member of our policy team, the NASBE crowd really took to Marc's arguments about high dropout rates and college remediation. He talked about how more than 1.2 million students drop out of school every year and identified the California State University system as an example of the education crisis. More than half of the system's 2006 incoming freshmen had to take remedial courses in English or math.

On a related mathematics note, the Washington Post reflected on the National Mathematics Panel findings that I blogged about on Monday. From the article:

The 24-member panel of mathematicians, education experts and psychologists said yesterday that students need a deeper understanding of basic skills, including fluency with whole numbers and fractions. It urged more training and support for teachers and called on researchers to find ways to combat "mathematics anxiety." ...

Roy Romer, former governor of Colorado and chairman of Strong American Schools, said the report illustrates a need for states to voluntarily agree on standards that are "uniform for all of America and benchmarked against the rest of the world."

In order to get the states to agree to this, however, we'll need national leadership from our next President, and we'll also need the support of groups such as NASBE to follow through on this ambitious goal.