There is a great article from this week’s TIME magazine that contains some visionary ideas for education — some good, some not so good. It came on the same day that a column appeared in the Boston Globe about issues facing Needham High. In the case of NHS, the principal was forced to defend his decision to stop publishing the high school student honor roll in a local newspaper.
These stories appeared in the same week that a blue-ribbon panel called the New Commission on Skills of the American Workforce issued a blistering report on the state of education in the United States. The executive summary of the report is available by clicking here. The full report is available on Amazon.
According to the report, if Americans want to maintain their customary high standard of living in today’s global economy, we’ve got to rethink almost every aspect of our education system, including when kids finish high school and who runs our schools. The commission of heavyweights included four former cabinet secretaries, the president of the American Manufacturers Association, the chancellor of the California State University system, executives from Viacom Inc. and Lucent Technologies, and other government and education leaders.
Entitled Tough Choices or Tough Times, the report also cites studies showing that the U.S. share of the world’s college-educated workers has shrunk from 30% to 15% in recent decades and that, even after all the outsourcing of the past decade, some 20% of U.S. jobs remain vulnerable to automation or offshoring to educated workers overseas.
As School Committee members, we pay particular attention to Step 5 of the executive summary pp. 17-19) which talks about the roll of school boards and the structure of schools. The recommendation would give individual schools the autonomy to run their own building operations as small corporations. The National School Board Association has reacted by saying:
This report covers a wide swath of territory and asks readers to assume a great leap of faith in adopting its recommendations. But should the American public build a new K-12 system on a leap of faith, given that many of the report’s recommendations are not supported by current data? While the report is provocative and groundbreaking, the National School Boards Association questions how much ground we can afford to break on what is currently working in an effort to fix what is not.
In particular, the NSBA noted that a community working with its local school board and superintendent is the way to enact changes to improve the education for all children in that community. The idea of giving individual schools the autonomy to run their own building operations may sound attractive, but is irresponsible without an adequate analysis of the time, skill, and resources that would need to be expended by building administrators. How many more administrators will each school have to hire to manage bus contracts, run the breakfast and lunch programs, or renovate and maintain their facilities?
Further, placing the authority and control at the school level, as the report recommends, removes the school system leadership that results in efficient operations, a shared vision, and a clear accountability system on which parents and community members depend to deliver outcomes.
Not to be outdone in the wake of earth-shattering education news, the Massachusetts Commissioner of Education called for an end to MCAS. As reported in the Boston Globe, Massachusetts should scrap the 10th-grade MCAS tests and instead require sophomores to pass a tougher battery of tests that would give them entry to a public college or university in the state. Driscoll is promoting the change and a slew of others as part of his work on a national commission proposing an overhaul of the nation’s education system, state by state, by 2021.
Stay tuned!
