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U.S. News & World Report
Rethinking
Education in America
America's schools are being left behind, but it doesn’t have to be this
way.
By Gabrielle Levy
July 27, 2018
ARNE DUNCAN HAS SPENT most of his life in and around education, from
helping out at the after-school community center his mother founded in
one the most troubled neighborhoods on Chicago's South Side, to running
Chicago Public Schools as its chief executive officer and then serving
for nearly seven years as President Barack Obama's education secretary.
In his new book, "How Schools Work: An Inside Account of Failure and
Success from One of the Nation's Longest Serving Secretaries of
Education," Duncan turns a critical eye on the nation's education
system – once considered the best in the world but now is at most in
the middle of the pack – describing how students and teachers alike are
often set up to fail in school and in life.
He recently spoke with U.S. News about where he thinks the U.S. went
wrong and how he believes the country's schools can get back on track.
Excerpts:
You explain that our educational system is essentially built to create
assembly line workers and that the system is exceptionally ill-prepared
to meet the needs of today's students. How did we get to that point?
About 100 years ago, America made secondary education in high school
compulsory. That was almost unprecedented, a massive leap forward, and
it drove a lot of our economic boom over the past 100 years. The
problem is we haven't moved past that and we haven't adjusted the
model. Obviously, the world is radically different from that time, but
unfortunately education isn't much different. And you see other nations
out-educating, out-investing, out-innovating us. Not only have the
skills needs changed dramatically, but we now have a globally
competitive economy, a flat world. It's no longer Iowa versus Indiana
versus Montana for jobs, we're competing with India and China and
Singapore and everywhere else. That's the world where our kids – my
kids – are going to grow up into, and we're never going to go back the
opposite direction. It's only going to accelerate.
At no level – early childhood, K-12, higher ed – are we even in the top
10 internationally. And that should scare us. It is scary and it does
not bode well for the future.
What's holding the nation back?
This is not a cure for cancer, this is not rocket science. It's total
lack of political will. And I think the politics of the left and the
right stand in the way of what's best for kids.
There's a small number of political leaders that are willing to
challenge the status quo and challenge the base, but that's few and far
between. And that's what we desperately need. You have [Gov. John]
Kasich in Ohio fighting for high standards, you have [Gov. Bill] Haslam
pushing for free community college for every person in Tennessee. Those
are hard places for a Republican to be. I've told stories of [Obama]
talking about merit pay and paying teachers more when his political
future was looking pretty bleak, and those are profiles in courage.
That's very very hard to do and that's why, I think, kids too often
lose.
The previous two administrations both took big swings at shaping
American schools – President George W. Bush with No Child Left Behind;
you and President Obama with Race to the Top and the state-led Common
Core – with mixed results. What steps do you think future
administrations should take, based on your experiences?
As you know, I probably got as much heat from the left as I did from
the right. These are a couple of goals to me that are not Republican,
they're not Democrat, they're not liberal, they're not conservative:
One is that we should try to lead the world in access to high quality
pre-kindergarten. We're like 28th. We're not close. Second, we were
able to get high school graduation rates to an all-time high of 84
percent, which we were very proud of but obviously that's nowhere near
high enough. The current administration's goal should be up to get that
84 up to 90 percent. Third, we should make sure that 100 percent of
those high school graduates are college ready, with higher standards.
And then fourth, we should try and lead the world again in college
completion. That's four-year universities, that's two-year community
colleges, it's trade, technical and vocational training.
Those are goals that keep high-wage, high-skill jobs in our country.
Those are jobs that grow the middle class, those are jobs that keep our
civic democracy healthy. We should unite behind goals and have lots of
vigorous debate around the strategies to achieve those goals. What
works well in Montana may work differently in California. Something in
Detroit may be radically different. So we should have lots of
flexibility and local innovation around the best means and we should
see what works best in rural communities and in urban communities and
on Native American reservations, but we should unite around those
goals. No one has a monopoly of good ideas.
Federal education policy is limited by design. What role should the
federal government play?
We had what was called the i3 Fund, the Investing in Innovation Fund,
which was a couple hundred million. And all we did is just scale what
works. It wasn't my ideas, it wasn't the president's ideas, it was just
looking at the evidence from across the country where we saw student
achievement rising, we just put money to scale. That was an
unprecedented investment, but I think we were only able to fund about 4
percent of what we got in, the demand was so great.
We got a lot of pushback. What they're used to in D.C. is what's called
block grants, which is one chunk of money and everyone carves it off
and everyone takes home their slice of the pie. What was both hopeful
and frustrating is we don't scale what works enough. If that pot had
been a billion dollars – we did more than anyone else has, which I'm
proud of, but we did a tiny percent of what was needed, and that's a
massive missed opportunity. That's the thing. When you ask about what's
the appropriate federal role, I always talk about innovation. It's a
uniquely powerful federal role that we played at an all-time high at a
new level but is zero now. It has disappeared. It's disappeared. You
hear no talk – zero talk – about any of those goals from the current
administration. And it's all small-ball. It's all ideology. It's all
trying to score political points.
We tolerate failing teachers in ways that we don't tolerate bad doctors
or lawyers. What are the ways, short term and long term, these issues
can be addressed?
I just don't think we value teaching enough. We don't train teachers as
professionals, we don't respect them as professionals, we don't
compensate them as professionals. Great teachers should make a heck of
a lot more money. Teachers that work in the hardest communities – the
toughest environments, whether that's inner city-urban or rural-remote
– should receive extra support and compensation for taking on those
toughest of assignments. And we don't do any of that.
There's a study that shows that two-thirds of young teachers are
ill-prepared to enter the classroom, and these are the most committed,
most altruistic people you can find. I always say that if two-thirds of
doctors said they were unprepared to practice medicine, we'd have a
revolution in our country. I close the book on the story about visiting
an Academy for Urban School Leadership, which uses a residency model
based on a medical model. That's how they train there: Teachers take a
year and they train with a master teacher before being given their own
classroom. There are a couple other models that are like that, but it's
probably less than 1 percent of teachers get trained that way.
You think about the factory model versus now. You think about
memorization rather than teaching kids to think critically. You think
about how much more diverse our classrooms are, how much more poverty
there is and trauma. Teaching was always a really difficult profession,
but I think the demands on educators have unquestionably gotten more
challenging. And the goal now is not to teach to the average of 25 or
30 or even 35 kids in a classroom, the goal is to meet the individual
needs of every single child in that class. And that's an
extraordinarily important and difficult job. I see amazing teachers do
it all the time, but that's a professional – that's not a factory line
worker.
Why are the massive teacher walkouts we saw this year in Oklahoma and
West Virginia and Arizona, among other places, happening now?
I'll never forget meeting with one teacher who was from North Carolina.
North Carolina used to be an education leader with Gov. Jim Hunt, who
is just one of my heroes. But the teacher was selling her blood. She
was selling plasma to make ends meet. Unfortunately, many teachers have
to work second jobs. Many teachers work over the summer. But when
you're selling blood to stay in the classroom? That's unconscionable.
Every single one of those walkouts was in Republican-led states where
they have starved public education. And when funding was already low,
they've cut it even more. And people reached a breaking point, and they
broke through, which was very, very encouraging. But my question is why
are we starving public education? Who does that serve well? Does that
serve the kids well? States want vibrant economies. Jobs will go where
the knowledge workers are. Every state should be competing to have the
best-educated workforce in the nation, and collectively our nation
should be competing to have the best-educated workforce in the world.
The idea that we're somehow going to dumb things down or reduce
standards or pay teachers less or do less early childhood education,
all of those things are so counterproductive, cutting off our nose to
spite our face.
Why doesn't it seem as if education is a priority in this country?
The challenge is that no one votes based upon education. It's like we
take it for granted. And when we take it for granted, it withers. It
stagnates.
What used to kill me is you watch the presidential debates, education
doesn't come up. And why doesn't it come up? Because no one votes on
it. I've never met a politician that's anti-education. I've never met a
politician that doesn't like to kiss babies and visit classrooms and
pat little kids on the head. But very few are willing to invest, very
few are willing to challenge the status quo and ask for results. It's
not just about more money, it's about outcomes. It's about
accountability, and it's so rare.
South Korea kicks our butt in everything educationally. I remember
President Obama talked to the president of South Korea and said,
'What's your biggest challenge in education?' And immediately the
Korean president said, 'My parents are too demanding. Even my poorest
parents demand a world-class education.' You can't be president of
South Korea and not commit to a great education and fight for that the
best way you know how.
But here in America, you can do lip service, you can do photo ops, but
you don't have anything beyond that. And that's our fault. I don't
blame politicians. I blame us as voters. We don't vote on this issue. I
wish our parents were much more demanding. If there's one message to
come out of this, it's that if every election – local, state, national
– people across the spectrum voted based on what their candidates would
do for education, that's the game changer.
Schools, it seems, have become ground zero for the gun debate, and
that's been a major focus of yours since leaving government. Why is
this such an important part of the education conversation?
I'll tell you a story. When I visited one school in Chicago, this kid –
a young boy, 12, 13 maybe – gave me a drawing of himself climbing up a
ladder as a fireman. The caption he wrote on it was, 'If I grow up, I
want to be a fireman.' I kept that picture behind my desk the whole
time I was in Chicago because that's our kids' reality. They literally
say, 'If I grow up.' And many actually think they will not grow up,
particularly our young boys. Everything I try to preach to kids –
delayed gratification, think long term, think about college – if you're
just trying to literally survive day to day like so many of the young
men I work with now, I might as well be speaking Greek. This isn't just
kids in Chicago, this is in rural Texas, wherever they are, thinking,
'It's a matter of time, it's going to come my way.' The psychological
damage that we're doing to kids, the level of fear that they're living
with, the trauma, it makes no sense.
This is a tough thing to say, but I thought as long as it was Chicago –
my kids were 85 percent poor, 90 percent minority – I honestly thought
that the country didn't care about black and brown kids. I always
thought it would take white kids being killed for the country to do
anything. And then Sandy Hook happened, and none of us imagined 20
babies and five teachers and a principal being killed. And after that,
nothing changed. And that, for me, that's when I realized we value our
guns more than we value our kids. It's irrefutable. We allow this level
of carnage and heartbreak and trauma every day, and other nations
simply don't. So that was a brutal, brutal lesson.
Where I've gotten some hope, what the Parkland kids are doing, what
they're doing with our Chicago kids and others, we definitely aren't
winning yet, but we're making some progress. The Parkland students
kicked off their nationwide rally with us in Chicago and there is
momentum. There's a sense of hope that I honestly have not had since
Sandy Hook. We have so much work ahead of us, but I am more hopeful and
more inspired than I have been in years.
The young people are going to lead us where we as adults have failed to
take them, and that's to a safer country.
Read this and other articles in U.S. News & World Report
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