How to fix our schools: A manifesto by Joel Klein, Michelle Rhee and other education leaders
Let's stop ignoring basic economic principles of supply and demand and focus on how we can establish a performance-driven culture in every American school -- a culture that rewards excellence, elevates the status of teachers and is positioned to help as many students as possible beat the odds. We need the best teacher for every child, and the best principal for every school. Of course, we must also do a better job of providing meaningful training for teachers who seek to improve, but let's stop pretending that everyone who goes into the classroom has the ability and temperament to lift our children to excellence.
Just as we must give teachers and schools the capability and flexibility to meet the needs of students, we must give parents a better portfolio of school choices. That starts with having the courage to replace or substantially restructure persistently low-performing schools that continuously fail our students. Closing a neighborhood school -- whether it's in Southeast D.C., Harlem, Denver or Chicago -- is a difficult decision that can be very emotional for a community. But no one ever said leadership is easy.
For the wealthiest among us, the crisis in public education may still seem like someone else's problem, because those families can afford to choose something better for their kids. But it's a problem for all of us -- until we fix our schools, we will never fix the nation's broader economic problems. Until we fix our schools, the gap between the haves and the have-nots will only grow wider and the United States will fall further behind the rest of the industrialized world in education, rendering the American dream a distant, elusive memory.
AV Club: Interview with Davis Guggenheim, director of Waiting for Superman
AVC: Was that intimidating? It’s such a vast problem.
DG: This thing almost destroyed me, it really did. There were days where I thought “I’ll never get this,” and the minute you think you’re onto something, something else contradicts it. The minute you think someone makes sense, someone else contradicts them. It’s a world where people devour each other, and destroy each others’ ideas, and almost stand on the sidelines and argue, which in its own way is part of the Blob: perpetuating the status quo, the educational elite that are constantly having a perpetual debate about things. So it’s like cutting through thickets of really smart people’s ideas with really nothing to grasp. And the things I felt myself drawn to were these pragmatists. I think you really can call it a revolution, these reformers.
These are people who say, “This is broken, this is ridiculous, I’m going to change the world in front of me.” So over here, Geoffrey Canada, over here, Michelle Rhee, over here, the KIPP guys. Hundreds of them, and they’re pragmatists, they’re not politically driven, they’re not ideologically driven, they’re pragmatists, and that’s what I think makes them win. This is hard work, but it’s not as complicated as you very smart people tell us it is. It’s about longer days and great teachers and hard work and changing the culture of a school, and that’s what so exciting now that wasn’t there 10 years ago. The sense that it’s possible.
Why Aren't our Teachers the Best and Brightest?
Dave's comment: the issue of teacher recruitment is incredibly complex, with lots of interdependencies on teacher evaluation, union contracts, the quality of teacher schools (vs. the quality of applicants). It is not an easy problem to solve.
These countries also foster a professional working environment. Finland, for example, grants teachers the kind of autonomy typically enjoyed by doctors in this country: They have wide latitude over how they teach, they share responsibility for their schools' operating budgets, and they belong to a culture that emphasizes the need to continually update one's skills.
In the United States, by contrast, teaching is often seen as an "unprofessional" career track, even by teachers. For example, we found that only 3 percent of the U.S. teachers we surveyed who were in the top third of their college class think that people who do well in teaching can advance professionally.
Crucially, these other countries provide competitive compensation. Of the three, South Korea puts the greatest emphasis on salary, with starting pay equivalent to about $55,000 and top salaries reaching $155,000. According to Linda Darling-Hammond of Stanford University, these earnings place South Korea's teachers somewhere between its engineers and its doctors. Singapore, in addition to competitive pay, offers retention bonuses of $10,000 to $36,000 every three to five years.
