By Pedro Noguera
Dear Deborah (Meier),
Well, we can let out a sigh of relief. Barack
Obama won, and it wasn't even as close as many in the media predicted it would
be. Nov. 6 was a great day, not only because the president was re-elected, but
a number of progressive Democrats, including Elizabeth Warren, Sherrod Brown,
and Tammy Baldwin will be in the Senate. The election was a major loss for the
Tea Party, the religious right (especially given that gay marriage has now been
approved by voters in Maine and Maryland), and conservatives who favored Mitt
Romney's vision of protecting the 1 percent. President Obama has already made
it clear that he intends to honor his pledge to raise taxes on the wealthiest
Americans, and this means the budget won't be balanced on the backs of the poor
and middle class. A great deal is being made about the lack of minority support
for Romney, but it should be noted that Obama won in predominantly white states
like Minnesota, Iowa, New Hampshire, and Oregon, too. We may not be in a
post-racial America, but it's clear that a majority of Americans had no problem
electing a black man to the presidency again. This is a good thing for America.
As we both know with respect to education, the
future is less clear. Obama didn't speak much about his plans for education
during the campaign. He didn't say much about Race to the Top or take a lot of
credit for getting 46 states to adopt the common-core standards. I
guess he understood that those measures aren't as popular with teachers, and he
relied heavily on support from teachers' unions to win in several key states.
His silence on these issues doesn't mean that his policies will change, but it
may mean that we have an opportunity to influence the direction the
administration will take over the next four years as they consider adopting new
policies.
The Students First campaign headed by Michelle
Rhee experienced some major losses in Idaho where they tried to end teacher
tenure and in Bridgeport, Conn., where they wanted to replace the elected
school board with mayoral control. This is a good sign
that the public has not embraced their narrow agenda, but if we want the Obama
administration to rethink its policies and adopt a broader reform strategy we
will have to move quickly to mobilize parents, teachers' unions, and community
organizations around a broad vision for change. Such a vision must go well
beyond a critique of No Child Left Behind and Race for the Top, and it
certainly has to do more than assert that poverty is the real problem.
We both know that poverty is harming millions of
children and the schools they attend, but we can't take the position that
nothing can be done until we eliminate poverty. We have too many children
languishing in dysfunctional schools in urban areas throughout the nation right
now, and their parents don't want to hear that we have to wait till we muster
the will to reduce poverty. Moreover, there are schools that
are showing us right now that if we address the academic and social needs of
poor children, they can not only achieve, they can thrive. We must use these
schools as examples for reform, and we must offer clear and concrete
recommendations on what the administration can do right now to produce real,
sustainable improvements in our nation's schools.
While many stakeholders need to be involved in
developing this vision and agenda, I think it would be helpful if we used our
exchange to discuss some of the things it must include. Here are three ideas
that I think make sense:
1) The federal government should call for the
creation of a comprehensive support systems around schools in low-income communities
to address issues such as safety, health, nutrition, and counseling. This
should include the expansion of preschool and after-school programs and
extended learning opportunities during the summer. Many of these ideas were
included in the Obama administration's Promise Neighborhood program, but the
$60 million allocated in 2012 to fund the initiative was insufficient to meet
the overwhelming number of applications that were received. Instead of relying
exclusively on federal funds, local communities should be encouraged to develop
public-private partnerships so that the support systems can be developed and
sustained without ongoing federal support. We know it will be hard to maintain
federal funding for these systems in this fiscal climate, particularly as the
president and Congress try to find a way to balance the budget, so we must try
to develop models that will not be vulnerable to spending cuts.
2) The federal government must support a new
approach to assessment that focuses on concrete evidence of academic
performance—writing, reading, mathematical problem-solving—and moves away from
using standardized tests to measure and rank students, teachers, and schools. A
number of schools in New York state utilize performance-based assessments,
and longitudinal studies have found that these students are more likely to
enroll in college and less likely to take remedial courses in college than
their peers who are subjected to traditional standardized tests.
3) The federal governments needs to call upon the
states and school districts to undertake careful evaluations of struggling
schools to determine why they are failing to meet the needs of the students
they serve before prescribing what should be changed. Instead
of simply closing troubled schools such a strategy would require a greater
focus on enrollment patterns (i.e. have we concentrated too many
"high-needs" students in a school?) and ensuring that schools have
the capacity to meet the needs of the students they serve rather than merely
judging them under the current accountability systems.
I'll stop here to await your reactions. I don't
think we need to produce a manifesto for change, but we do need to begin to
outline some key steps that could be taken to move public education in a
different direction.
Deb, there is ample evidence that the direction
we've been taking isn't working. The international comparisons, the
high dropout rates, the large number of failing schools, and the deep
alienation we see among so many students who are being bored to death by the
emphasis on test preparation are all indications that a new strategy is
necessary. I think the time is right to begin formulating ideas and
policies that will take us in a new and better direction, and I think the
administration may be more open to change than it was over the last four years.
I look forward to hearing from you.
Pedro
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