Guiding principles for a more enlightened U.S. education policy
Michael V. McGill is the long-time superintendent of the Scarsdale school district in New York, one of o the most successful in the country. Now a professor of school leadership at Bank Street College of Education, McGill challenges the dominant vision of school reform in a new report that defines what effective policy and school leadership should like in quality schools. The paper synthesizes McGill’s views from his forthcoming book, “Race to the Bottom: Corporate Reform and the Future of Public Education” (Teachers College Press, April 2015).
By Michael V. McGill
Congress and the White House are doing the porcupine dance as they try to reauthorize the education law called No Child Left Behind (NCLB). Some of the disagreements are old: Should the federal government have more or less control over schooling? Some are newer: Must every child in grades 3-8 take federally mandated standardized tests every year?
Either way, however, the policy response from Washington and in statehouses continues to focus largely on silver-bullet strategies that lack a foundation in research and have fallen markedly short of their goals.
Current policy tries to force improvement by holding educators accountable for students’ test scores and by creating competition among teachers and schools. But these strategies are not improving learning appreciably, let alone creating schools for the 21st century. According to the National Assessment of Educational Progress (NAEP), younger children’s learning improved most in the 1970’s, before the accountability era. Since the late 1980’s, their gains have been modest, while 17 year-olds’ scores have been essentially flat. Additionally, we’ve made little recent progress in closing achievement gaps. There was a large improvement in reading between 1971 and 1980 and a smaller one after 1980, for example. However, it’s narrowed by just four points in the NCLB years.
According to most studies, charter schools do about as well on average as regular district schools. Meanwhile, Ted Kolderie, one of the movement’s early advocates, has recently written that charters have fallen short on their promise of sparking teacher-led innovation because, in recent years, they have largely promoted a single academic model. They also continue to siphon resources away from district schools.
Furthermore, the accountability and competition strategy has too often undermined the quality of education. Test prep has displaced efforts to make learning interesting and inspiring. Curriculums have gotten narrower. Educators have become increasingly demoralized. And growing numbers of parents are angry about a testing system on overkill.
In short, the accountability movement that began in the 1990’s, then became codified in NCLB, is not what America needs. Considering the human and financial resources that have been poured into the approach, its results are at best unimpressive and often worse. Instead of trying to improve education by the numbers so that performance converges on a low average, we need to establish ‘schools of tomorrow’ that will redefine what and how students learn in order to lift all of them up.
Guiding Principles for More Effective Education Policy
It’s time to consider what a more enlightened policy might look like.
After 16 years, I recently left the position of superintendent of one of the most successful school districts in the country, Scarsdale, New York. Graduation rates and college acceptances were exceptional. SAT scores were consistently in the top one percent of the top one percent.
Scarsdale and its schools have admitted advantages. Nonetheless, we can Guiding principles for a more enlightened U.S. education policy - The Washington Post: