Guest Viewpoint: School reform: Needed now more than ever

Initially, the challenge was to educate Americans especially in mathematics and science. It was a Cold War response, says Lauren Resnick, director of the University of Pittsburgh’s Institute for Learning.

“There were three things propelling this push for reform,” she recalls. “Could we compete with the Russians? Could we compete with the Japanese, the Germans, and certain rising economies in the rest of Asia? And could we take care of all of our kids and bring everybody into this opportunity structure?”

The danger of second or third-rate academic performance in a global economy is a future American economy weakened by the steady drain of jobs lost to Japan, Europe, India, and China -- and future generations of Americans lacking sufficient skills to hold their own.

Another powerful force driving education reform is the recognition that the economic and social gap between the haves and have-nots in American society is deepened and sharpened by the different quality and level of education that different groups of children receive.

“For the better part of the 20th century, our schools were designed to educate students to reach different standards,” observes Warren Simmons, executive director of the Annenberg Institute at Brown University.

“And now, since 1983, but more recently with the enactment of No Child Left Behind, we are asking that same system to turn on its head and stop educating students to meet different standards and educate the vast majority of students to meet one high-level standard,” he says. “So that’s a sea change with respect to our nation’s goals.”

The challenge to spread high-quality teaching and strong student performance across the board is forcing radical changes in schools and school districts that take it seriously, such as Corbin High School in eastern Kentucky.

“You have a certain percentage of students, and they are going to learn no matter what -- probably about 20 percent of the kids,” observes Joyce Phillips, Corbin High’s principal. “But then we have about 80 percent of the kids who need some kind of a hook, something to get their interest, something that will make them want to come to school and want to learn and want to do their best.”

It’s that 80 percent, whom reformers have focused on. When Eric Smith took over as superintendent of North Carolina’s Charlotte-Mecklenburg school system in 1996, he was troubled by the disparities he found between suburban white schools and inner-city black schools.

“We found that the expectations were different for inner-city kids versus suburban,” says Smith. “We found that the pace of instruction, the speed with which content was being delivered was different -- totally different expectations.”

The heart of Smith’s strategy was to deliver “equity” education to all -- to use the best-performing suburban schools with their experienced, high-quality teachers, good resources, and demanding curricula and textbooks, as the yardstick for inner-city schools. Then he set out to deliver the same quality of education in high-poverty communities.

In New York’s District 2, Tony Alvarado was animated by a similar ambition for reform. “The values that we hold dear are that public education is most important for the weakest students in our society,” Alvarado explains. “And what we did in District 2 was to pay lots of attention to the leaders and the teachers that had to serve these students.”

The architects of school-by-school reform also voice similar objectives. Bob Slavin of Johns Hopkins University was asked by the city of Baltimore to create his highly scripted reading program, Success for All, especially for inner-city students at low-performing schools.

In 1968, James Comer of the Yale University School of Medicine took his ideas for holistic child development and school development into troubled schools in New Haven, Conn.

When Mike Feinberg and David Levin generated KIPP, their Knowledge Is Power Program, they targeted children from high-poverty neighborhoods who were falling behind on academics. And Gene Bottoms designed High Schools That Work for teenagers who were lost in school and falling through the cracks.

The determination to overcome these disadvantages and the optimism of the reformers are widely shared by advocates of education reform.

Two decades of effort, they contend, have now accumulated enough evidence of improved student performance to answer critics who say the public school system itself cannot make the grade.

“Number one, it is very clear that even poor kids and kids of color who come from difficult neighborhoods can, in fact, achieve,” declares Kati Haycock, director of The Education Trust. “Number two, it is very clear that there are some public schools -- even now some districts -- that have figured out how to do that.”

“Our task has to be to help other schools and districts achieve those same ends,” she says. “And the evidence again suggests we can do this if we don’t get distracted, if we learn from the high achievers, and if we act with dispatch.”