5/3/05 -- The nation is stuck in an education policy rut, and school board members need to pressure state and federal leaders to make obvious and needed changes, two former governors told conference-goers at the Fifth Annual Danzberger Memorial Lecture.
Roy Barnes, a Democrat from Georgia, and Jim Geringer, a Republican from Wyoming, agree that merit pay for teachers ought to replace the current system of step increases and pay for university credentials that too often have little relevance to classroom needs.
“You school board members have more influence than you give yourselves credit for,” Barnes says. “You are influential leaders.”
While Geringer urged school board members to write their own agenda for change, Barnes provided his wish list:
• Use better diagnostics to track results, such as “value-added” statistical analysis to measure the progress of individual students to ensure each student makes at least a year’s worth of progress for every year spent in school. Above-average performance could be rewarded monetarily at the school level.
• Use uniform national assessments, which would allow states and localities with different approaches to compare results. The current system of unique assessments in every state benefits test-development companies and state officials who want to mask weaknesses.
• Concentrate resources on early education, prekindergarten to grade 3. Teacher-student ratios need to be low enough to ensure teachers can give every student individual attention when needed.
• End or greatly reduce the use of teachers teaching classes in subjects for which they don’t have degrees.
• Require all teachers to have degrees with a major in reading and a minor in special education, because those are the skills that are most important in today’s classrooms.
Geringer says education today is like the medical profession in the late 1800s, when well-meaning professionals relied on “folk wisdom” rather than scientifically proven approaches. While medicine has improved greatly through the use of diagnostic tests and targeted treatments, American education is not truly modern.
We know what works, and we just don’t do it in a systematic way, agrees Barnes. “It’s not rocket science. The question is, do we have the will, the political will, to enforce what works?”
Research points to the importance of “a good beginning for all children, high quality of teachers, and accountability for results that doesn’t make excuses and set high standards for all teachers,” Barnes notes.
Barnes’ personal experiences made it clear that the will to make changes has not reached the tipping point. He says he succeeded in ridding Georgia of tenure for teachers in a horrendous political fight, only to lose the election and see his Republican successor re-institute tenure. He says his position on tenure hurt him at the polls, but not as much as removing the Confederate flag from the statehouse.
Geringer says school board members have more power than they think. For instance, he advises boards to make use of the discipline procedures at their disposal to rid themselves of incompetent teachers.