Getting Tough in Colorado (Ben DeGrow)
For those intrigued by the new report Tough Choices or Tough Times, Colorado is ground zero for reform. This is the place to be for anyone eager to jump into the nuts-and-bolts debate on whether and how the K-12 education system can be transformed.
“No state has expressed more excitement,” former Secretary of Labor William Brock told the Denver Post about the report’s reception here.
Brock and National Center on Education and the Economy President Marc Tucker, both members of the New Commission on the Skills of the American Workforce that generated the report, recently shared their thoughts with a teeming crowd of 600 at the Colorado Convention Center in Denver. The January 17 event was co-sponsored by the Donnell-Kay Foundation and the Piton Foundation.
In attendance was Speaker of the House Andrew Romanoff, who immediately upon the report’s release in December expressed interest in moving the plan forward in Colorado. New Lieutenant Governor Barbara O’Brien offered one of the enthusiastic introductions from the platform.
Notably, both Romanoff and O’Brien are Democrats. To their credit, they are willing to think—and act—outside the education establishment box.
The amazing level of interest witnessed here in Colorado suggests that free market reformers risk ignoring the report at our peril. With this consideration in mind, I had perused through the report before attending the forum.
Regardless of your opinion of its merits, Tough Choices or Tough Times cannot be labeled a tepid call to trim a little fat from the K-12 education system. Tucker and Brock said we can no longer afford to tinker around the edges. Instead, they expressed a remarkable sense of urgency surrounding the need to bring wholesale reform to the way the nation runs its public schools.
Brock, who served in President Reagan’s Cabinet, painted a bleak portrait of our nation’s prospects of preserving its high standard of living. Growing numbers of engineers from India and China provide much cheaper labor than Americans with comparable skills. The United States needs to raise the output of its students’ math and science skills to compete, breaking the industrial mold by producing more workers who will find success through creativity and innovative thinking.
While Brock highlighted the problem, Tucker outlined the Commission’s comprehensive list of solutions: refocus teacher recruitment, overhaul teacher compensation, raise standards significantly, streamline assessments, reconfigure school governance, focus funding on students’ needs, to name a few.
Both the report and the speakers emphasized that the reforms will only work as a package deal, not as piecemeal fixes. In part, they say this is because certain reforms bring large-scale savings and others require significant investment. All told, “we need less money than one might think,” about $8 billion, or less than 2 percent of national current education spending.
Such an admission may irritate some apologists for the status quo. In 2005 the Colorado School Finance Project, a non-profit group funded by school employee interest groups, said that Colorado alone needed $800 million to $1.5 billion more in new funding to provide an “adequate” education.
Of course, their findings presume current funds are being used efficiently. Yet the executive summary of Tough Choices or Tough Times frankly proclaims: “We tolerate an enormous amount of waste in the system.”
Supporting its claim, a new Education Sector report by Dr. Marguerite Roza conservatively estimates that 19 percent of current education spending is diverted into areas consistently shown not to improve student achievement. As Rosa points out, a large portion of the misplaced spending priorities is reflected in how we pay teachers.
The Commission says we should trim public educator pensions to compare with generous private sector packages and raise starting teacher salaries to match the national average to recruit qualified candidates from the top third of the market. Tucker said extensive polling confirms that the reshaped compensation packages would bring more of the brightest and best into the nation’s classrooms.
The report further calls for the abolition of tenure, which keeps many poorly-performing teachers in classrooms, and the distribution of performance-based incentives for instructors who demonstrate excellence. These ideas reflect essential common sense yet fly in the face of the vested interests of unions and other establishment groups.
Then again, so does advocating for universal public school choice through a system of contract schools operated by independent contractors rather than micromanaged by government bureaucracies. Money would be attached to the child based on need (read: Weighted Student Funding), and “[p]arents and students could choose among all the available contract schools.”
As one who accepts the notion that the current system needs to be shaken up and put back together, I could gladly shout an “Amen” from the pew in support of these seemingly radical ideas.
The teachers union lobbyists sitting nearby were probably a little less comfortable. The call for universal preschool may have suited their tastes more.
Despite a favorable interest in some of the proposals, market reformers cannot in good conscience make the wholesale leap onto the Commission report’s bandwagon. Even the best aspects of the overall plan are tied to an overarching scheme that would centralize greater responsibility for education at the level of state government.
The strongest lovers of educational freedom may want to reject the report, but they at least should seek to inject a bit of wisdom first. We can start on the common ground that the current system needs some serious repair.
Tough Choices or Tough Times has opened the door wide for a significant education policy discussion, and nowhere wider than in Colorado. Those who believe in the transforming power of choice and competition should find a platform and join the conversation.
Ben DeGrow is an education policy analyst for the Independence Institute, a free market think tank in Golden, Colo. He also keeps his own Web log at bendegrow.com.
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“NCEE and Ben DeGrow are attempting to divert our attention from the real issue. Don’t fall for it again.”
Jeff, I recommend you carefully reread what I wrote, such as: “Despite a favorable interest in some of the proposals, market reformers cannot in good conscience make the wholesale leap onto the Commission report’s bandwagon. Even the best aspects of the overall plan are tied to an overarching scheme that would centralize greater responsibility for education at the level of state government.”
That’s hardly different from your basic point. Clearly, I am not an apologist for NCEE. But I share the belief that there are plenty of ways in which we can do education better.
That being said, you offered some thoughtful comments. I’m familiar with the line of argument you present. The assumption that educational scores alone are such a strong determinant for economic success is certainly overstated. On the other hand, there’s a lot more that can be said for the power of educational freedom.
And while your claims about free trade are off base, I think the point of general agreement is that the education system as it stands need some serious structural reform. “A Nation at Risk” was a useful marker in identifying the problem, and “Tough Choices” can serve a similar purpose.
As I said in the article, there is still plenty of room to discuss particular reforms advocated in the “Tough Choices” report – either pro or con. It should be examined with skepticism, handled with care, and used as an opportunity to inject other reform ideas & philosophy into the conversation.
You and I have started down that path.
There are a whole lot of problems with the *Tough Choices or Tough Times* report but I’ll point out just one. That is that the report is based on a fundamental assumption that high test scores on international comparisons translate to global competitiveness. NCEE has been making this same bogus argument for decades, and it has become conventional wisdom, but there’s no evidence to support it!
We have only to look at a previous version of the *Tough Choices* report, *A Nation At Risk*, to see the fallacy of this argument. In 1983, *A Nation At Risk* warned that Japanese kids were kicking American kids’ butts on the tests, and therefore our global economic superiority was threatened. Then in 1990 Japan’s economy collapsed, and in 1992 the U.S. entered the largest, most sustained economic expansion we’ve ever seen. Hmmm…
A recent longitudinal analysis of data from cross-national achievement tests (Ramirez, et al, 2006. “Student Achievement and National Economic Growth.” *American Journal of Education* 113) questions both the idea of a causal link between academic achievement and economic growth and the ability of the tests on which these comparisons are based to measure the kinds of skills NCEE supports. The authors argue:
“[M]uch of the obsession with the achievement “horse race” proceeds as if beating the Asian Tigers in mathematics and science education is necessary for the economic well-being of other developed countries. Our analysis offers little support for this obsession.
“[…] Educational reform to upgrade the quality of mathematics and science education in the United States makes good sense. But achievement indicators do not capture the extent to which schooling promotes initiative, creativity, entrepreneurship, and other strengths not sufficiently curricularized to warrant cross-national data collection and analysis” (p. 23).
There are some ideas worth considering in the *Tough Choices* report. But let’s make sure we check our assumptions before we rush headlong into an embrace of these reforms. Implementation of the NCEE recommendations would not even accomplish what the report’s authors advocate and it would divert us from the real problem of American education: the achievement gap.
If India and China are taking “our” jobs, it’s not because of the quality of our educational system; it’s a result of unrestricted free trade and the ability of multinational corporations to close up shop at any time and move wherever labor is cheapest without regard for those they leave behind. NCEE and Ben DeGrow are attempting to divert our attention from the real issue. Don’t fall for it again.