Obama’s end of the year grades on education

November 7, 11:24 PMEducation Reform ExaminerSasha Sidorkin

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To mark his first year in the office, Obama gave a speech on education. The choice of the topic is remarkable – it is the area were he can show some real progress (which cannot be just yet said about the health care reform), but it is not as complicated and not as depressing as the economy (where he can claim a lot of credit). He mentions both, of course, but certain topics like the two wars, are best to avoid altogether.
How did he do on education? - Better than anyone could have expected. He used the stimulus money to wrangle unprecedented concessions from the states. Those include the agreement to develop national standards, and the commitment to develop better systems for tracking of teacher impact on student learning. These two are remarkable achievements without precedent.
Both of these can go wrong. For example, the national curriculum can be screwed up just as easily as state curricula have been butchered in the past. All you need to do is to make curriculum development overly political, or farm it out to large publishing companies which stand to benefit from expanding their textbook markets. To avoid that, the national standards have to be developed by small groups of experts, and have some idea of curriculum behind them. This is what Linda Darling-Hammond suggested recently, and I hope the administration listens to her once again. As for the teacher identifiers – I already commented on what they can and cannot achieve. One has to be a bit cautious with throwing those tools around.
Two other key ideas… let’s just say, I am less impressed about them. One is to support expansion of school choice, and the other is to support the alternative routes to teacher licensure.
The school choice sounds really good, but as I explained before, choice and free market do not always work. One relevant examples: when health insurance companies compete, they actually tend to raise premiums. This happens because competition weakens their relative power to bargain with large hospital systems. It is different, but also as complicated with schools: competition amongst them can only work when all children and all parents have an incentive to obtain best education. This is not the case, and free expansion of charters and vouchers may easily lead to further class differentiation.
The second idea – to expand alternative routes to teaching - also sounds great. However, think about this: in K-12 world, we demand accountability in terms of learning outcomes. We do not mandate specific methods of ways of learning. Why not do the same with teacher education? Whatever you call them, teacher education programs should produce the same outcomes. If the residency approaches Obama touts really work better, let’s just show some evidence of that. And then – let’s use the same measures to all teacher education programs – traditional and alternatives. But please stop prescribing a specific approach without really having any idea if it works. We tried this before.