WSJ Article Calls for National Standards, Complete Overhaul of Public Education

If you haven't had a chance to read Louis Gerstner's compelling piece from the Dec 1 Wall Street Journal, entitled Lessons from 40 Years of Education 'Reform,' here is the link. Mr. Gerstner is the former CEO of IBM and Chairman of the Teaching Commission from 2003-2006.

I'll leave it to the readers of this blog to decide if some of Mr. Gerstner's major suggestions echo the positions taken by this blog for the past two years.

Mr. Gerstner's article is not just another set of opinions -- it is a call for drastic change and immediate action. It will surely be controversial. I do not necessarily agree with all of his statements and/or recommendations but I agree with the 'core.'

Perhaps, the time for change has come to American Education...

Here are some excerpts -- I strongly urge you to read the entire piece:

I believe the problem lies with the structure and corporate governance of our public schools. We have over 15,000 school districts in America; each of them, in its own way, is involved in standards, curriculum, teacher selection, classroom rules and so on. This unbelievably unwieldy structure is incapable of executing a program of fundamental change. While we have islands of excellence as a result of great reform programs, we continually fail to scale up systemic change.

This is a complex problem, but countless experiments and analyses have clearly indicated we need to do four straightforward things to bring fundamental changes to K-12 education:

1) Set high academic standards for all of our kids, supported by a rigorous curriculum.

2) Greatly improve the quality of teaching in our classrooms, supported by substantially higher compensation for our best teachers.

3) Measure student and teacher performance on a systematic basis, supported by tests and assessments.

4) Increase "time on task" for all students; this means more time in school each day, and a longer school year.

Therefore, I recommend that President-elect Barack Obama convene a meeting of our nation's governors and seek agreement to the following:

- Abolish all local school districts, save 70 (50 states; 20 largest cities). Some states may choose to leave some of the rest as community service organizations, but they would have no direct involvement in the critical task of establishing standards, selecting teachers, and developing curricula.

- Establish a set of national standards for a core curriculum. I would suggest we start with four subjects: reading, math, science and social studies.

- Establish a National Skills Day on which every third, sixth, ninth and 12th-grader would be tested against the national standards. Results would be published nationwide for every school in America.

- Establish national standards for teacher certification and require regular re-evaluations of teacher skills. Increase teacher compensation to permit the best teachers (as measured by advances in student learning) to earn well in excess of $100,000 per year, and allow school leaders to remove underperforming teachers.

- Extend the school day and the school year to effectively add 20 more days of schooling for all K-12 students.

A Message to Edspresso (John Dewey)

The following is a comment made on edspresso's blog and expanded on here:

Happy Holidays Mr. Dewey!
I invite you and your faithful to read my expanded comments in my 'newish' blog MathNotations.
At any rate, I've just become aware of your excellent writings and I commend you for your thoughtful insights. Ok, enough of the brownnosing... Here's the skinny. I believe you're on the right track with your thoughts about constructivism. My comments regarding this appeared in Joanne Jacob's blog so I won't go into detail here. As children move up the ladder, they should need less of the hands-on manipulatives and tactile experiences like the one described in my post. This is why I suggested that cutting off the corners from the vertices of a polygon is a worthwhile activity for FOURTH graders, but I would not spend that kind of time for middle schoolers. Once they've experienced the hands-on approach, they can quickly revisit this for a triangle, then move onto a more abstract pattern-based approach in the middle grades, e.g., dividing a polygon of n sides into n-2 triangles (they can formulate this for themselves within 5 minutes), thereby developing the standard formula. By the time they reach a traditional geometry course in hs, they've had the spatial experience from 4th grade, the pattern-based approach in middle school and therefore they can quickly review this and focus on APPLYING the formula to regular polygons and more sophisticated algebraic exercises. But this discussion has important implications:
0. None of my remarks makes any sense unless 4th, 8th and 10th graders in downtown Chicago are exposed to the same learnings as those in the affluent suburbs of Chicago off Lake Michigan, if you get my point. THERE MUST BE ONE NATIONAL MATH CURRICULUM and it cannot represent one side or the other in the Math Wars. Your approach is a good one, Mr. Dewey, because it is a blend, but you might need a bit more field experience before deducing general principles. I'm not being patronizing or condescending here, so pls don't take it that way. Radical solutions from either camp can be dismissed but how we combine the best of traditional and reformed approaches is not so obvious.
1. More hands-on in lower grades (assign any label you want!) with teachers who are committed to this and properly trained
2. Gradual development of abstract formulations of patterns with algebraic representations starting much earlier in Middle School than is the norm in the USA and ONE of the reasons why we lag behind other nations.
3. More challenging applied problems for the hs students instead of merely rehashing formulas and doing the standard problems
FINALLY, SOME APHORISMS (mock me if you will!):
4. Despite 'cutting the corners' for polygons, THERE ARE NO SHORTCUTS FOR DEVELOPING A PROFOUND UNDERSTANDING OF FUNDAMENTAL MATHEMATICS! Here's what I tell my students and they don't think the reference to their grades is amusing:
The only shortcut in math is from 'A' to 'F'! [ok, you can groan loudly now!]
HAPPY HOLIDAYS AGAIN AND BEST WISHES. WHEN YOU'RE LOOKING FOR A POSITION, LET ME KNOW!!
Dave M