http://www.edweek.org/ew/articles/2014/08/27/02finn.h34.html
Published Online: August 26, 2014
Published in Print: August 27, 2014, as American Education in 2014: Where We've Come, What's Ahead
COMMENTARY
Finn: Eight of the Toughest Challenges Schools Still Face
Two years before A Nation at Risk, we—and a handful of fellow travelers—had concluded that American education needed a kick in the pants, a kick toward greater quality, primarily in the form of stronger student learning....
What has been accomplished in three decades-plus? A lot, actually, beginning with two epochal changes: First, we now judge schools by their achievement results, not their inputs or intentions.... And, second, choice among schools has become almost ubiquitous. Though too many choices are unsatisfactory, and too many kids don't yet have access to enough good ones, we're miles from the education system of 1981, which took for granted that children would attend the standard-issue, district-operated public school in their neighborhoods unless, perhaps, they were Catholic (or very wealthy).
Let me note eight of the toughest and most consequential challenges ahead.
Governance. The basic structural and governance arrangements of American public education are obsolete. We have too many layers, too many veto points, too much institutional inertia. Local control needs to be reinvented—to me, it should look more like a charter school governed by parents and community leaders than a vast Houston- or Chicago-style citywide agency....
Finance. I dare you to track, count, and compare the dollars flowing into a given school or a given child's education. I defy you to compare school budgets across districts or states. I challenge you to equalize and rationalize the financing of a district or state education system—and the accounting system that tracks it—in ways that target resources on places and people that need them and that enable those resources—all those resources—to follow kids to the schools they actually attend. What an unfiltered mess!
Leaders. We're beginning to draw principals, superintendents, chancellors, and state chiefs from nontraditional backgrounds, but we haven't turned the corner on education leadership. We still view principals, for example, as chief teachers—and middle managers—rather than the CEOs they need to become if school-level authority is ever to keep up with school-level responsibility. We already hold them accountable as executives, but nothing else about their role has yet caught up.
Curriculum and instruction. "Structural" reformers—I plead guilty to having been one—don't pay nearly enough attention to what's happening in the classroom, in particular to what's being taught (curriculum) and how it's being taught (pedagogy). The fact is that content matters enormously [emphasis added]—E.D. Hirsch Jr. of the Core Knowledge Foundation is exactly right about this—and that some instructional methods work better in particular circumstances than others [emphasis added]. Both standards-based and choice-based reform have remained largely indifferent to these matters, but that ought not continue.
High-ability students. Smart kids deserve education tailored to their needs and capabilities every bit as much as youngsters with disabilities. And the nation's long-term competitiveness—not to mention the vitality of its culture, the strength of its civic life, and much more—hinges in no small part on educating to the max those girls and boys with exceptional ability. Yet gifted education in America is patchy at best; at worst, it's downright antagonistic to the needs of these kids [emphasis added].
Preparation of educators. How many times [emphasis added] do people like former Teachers College President Arthur Levine and organizations like the National Council on Teacher Quality have to document the failings of hundreds upon hundreds of teacher- and principal-preparation programs before this gets tackled as a top-priority reform? [emphasis added]....
Complacency. Two forms of complacency alarm me. The familiar one is the millions of parents who deplore the condition of American schools in general but are convinced that their own child's school is just fine ("... and that nice Ms. Randolph is so helpful to young Mortimer"). The new one, equally worrying, is reformers who think they've done their job when they get a law passed, an evaluation system created, or a new program launched, and then sit back on their haunches, give short shrift to implementation, and defy anyone who suggests that their proud accomplishment isn't actually working.
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