A Stagnant Nation

Today the campaign unveiled an original analysis and report card showing the lack of progress in the school reform movement since the release of the landmark report, A Nation at Risk, written by the National Commission on Excellence in Education 25 years ago.

Our schools have been underperforming for 25 years. America is slipping farther and farther behind the rest of the world academically because we have been unable to enact meaningful reforms or substantially improve student learning in the last quarter century.

We know that the American public supports education reform – the missing piece is leadership – on national and local levels. Without vigorous national leadership, states and schools cannot significantly improve their antiquated education systems. Students in our nation’s schools deserve a robust and world-class education that offers them a pathway towards the American dream.

Our report, A Stagnant Nation: Why American Students Are Still at Risk, explains that few of the National Commission on Excellence in Education's recommendations related to time, teaching and standards have yet to be enacted.  The report also says that America's economic future remains gravely at risk. Here are some of our findings:

• Time: A Nation at Risk urged schools and state legislatures to break the six-hour-a-day, 180-day-per-year calendar and consider seven-hour school days and 200- to 220-day school years. Yet, today only one state has a pilot program to significantly expand learning time and nationwide, the amount of time elementary school students spend learning core academic subjects has increased by only approximately 36 minutes per week, amounting to fewer than ten minutes per day.
• Teaching: The Commission urged policymakers to help recruit the best and brightest to teaching by making the profession more attractive. To that end, the Commission recommended making teacher compensation "professionally competitive, market-sensitive, and performance-based."  Yet today only five states have large-scale programs in place for performance pay or career-ladder incentives. And, only about eight percent of public school districts offer pay incentives to reward excellence in teaching -- a figure that has remained virtually unchanged since 1984.  In 2004, only six percent of U.S. school districts could offer recruitment incentives in mathematics, despite the fact that nearly 30 percent of districts reported great difficulty hiring qualified math teachers to fill vacancies.
• Standards & Expectations: The Commission recommended that states and districts raise standards and expectations so classroom grades reflect actual learning.  Yet 12th grade reading and science scores dropped as average high school GPAs were increasing. Students are earning better grades in "tougher" courses, yet actual learning is stagnant or declining.  In addition, states have failed to set rigorous academic standards in the lower grades. One study found that out of 32 states, not one state had set standards for 4th grade reading that were high enough to meet the proficient level on the National Assessment of Educational Progress (NAEP) test and 24 had set standards so low they did not reach even the most basic level.

We need to do better; we can't let another 25 years go by without action. Let's stand up and call on our candidates to support real education reform. It's the only way we’re going to fix our schools and better prepare our students for the future.

Comments

[Jef Kurfess]

On November 20th, 2007, the Los Angeles Times ran an important Op Ed piece by John Rogers and Jeannie Oakes – “Schools that fail all our children”. It correctly identified what I believe is the most important failing of California’s public schools – they don’t do a very good job with advantaged students either, when compared to other states. The article hints at what I believe is the clear cause of this failing: California’s education system is incestuous, inwardly focused around the Master Plan for Higher Education.

From at least the 1960 adoption of the Master Plan, California has been an educational island, smugly self-satisfied, long after there was any reason for it. Our high schools focus their curricula on having students complete the “A through G” requirements to get into a California university or college. Other states keep data on what proportion of their high school graduates go on to college – no matter where. California high schools can only tell you what proportion goes to a school in the State system. We don’t track students who go out of State. We don’t even gather statistics on students who go on to a private school in state!

Several parts of the Master Plan should be reviewed and changed. Does it make sense to mandate that the CSU and UC systems take Community College transfers? “Let’s see. I could work really hard in high school, get great entrance exam scores and gain admission to the most prestigious university in the world, or I could slack off in high school, go to the local Community College, that has no entrance requirements whatsoever, and transfer – without test scores at all -- into the same school – and save a lot of money too.” Is this really the thought process the Master Plan wanted to foster in California’s students – and the always energetic outreach staff from the local Community Colleges?

Someone needs to look hard at capacity, utilization, and performance in the Community College system. Several recent studies have raised serious questions about how well they perform their role. These studies focused exclusively on students who planned to graduate with a two year degree or transfer to a UC or CSU school, that is, they excluded the dabblers. Both studies concluded that only around 25% graduated or transferred after 6 years!

Is this any surprise? As the Community College system itself bemoans, they are getting high school graduates who are woefully unprepared for college work. Many of our kids, even in affluent communities with supposedly good schools, go through high school, do not even complete the “A through G” courses, and do not learn subject matter or study skills because they plan to attend the local Community College. Every high school student in California can tell you that all they need to get into a Community College is their name and a nine digit number configured as though it might be a Social Security number. If you want one reason why our kids, especially our advantaged kids, don’t do as well as those in other states, I submit this is it.

We do a tremendous disservice to our kids by deluding them into thinking there is an easy way out. (Is there a way to gather statistics on what is undoubtedly a huge, uniquely California, tragedy – kids sucked into going the Community College route who instead become dropouts – lacking either a college degree or a meaningful high school one?)

The key to improving California’s schools is to focus on K-12, getting more serious about vocational education in the process. We can not expect to remediate poor high school education in our Community Colleges. We should not be allowing, let alone encouraging, today’s destructive mantra of “go to Community College, then transfer”. This undermines high school achievement. Unsurprisingly, the Community College statistics bear out that it isn’t happening as advertised anyway.

California is entering the next budget cycle and will be looking for ways to reduce cost. With so much of the State budget going into education, we should get serious about examining new more effective means of spending the money. It is time to re-visit the structure of our entire education system and the role each part plays.

In the business world, I learned that a 10% across the board budget cut is lazy and harmful. You should always cut strategically, by intent, accompanied by restructuring and changing processes. I would start by re-visiting the Master Plan with an eye to refocusing the mission and scope of the Community College system. Do we really need 109 Community College campuses? Does each campus need its current capacity? In my limited experience with one school, class attrition during a semester can easily be 50%. Why not operate accordingly? Start classes with standing room only and allow attrition to take effect. I have also observed that it is hard to put together a class schedule that includes Friday classes. My guess is that throughout California’s higher education system, teachers, administrators and students have quietly evolved a mutually agreeable four day school week. All of the direct stakeholders may want this, but is there any reason parents and taxpayers should allow it?

As long as most of us can agree that our K-12 system is broken, we should focus our intellectual and financial resources on fixing it. The last time a child can get a good high school education is in high school. Let’s revise the State’s Master Plan and especially the role of the Community Colleges. They are, as the lawyers say, an “attractive nuisance” that undermines the motivation of our kids to get a good high school education.