- Decentralize Funding – Bloated bureaucracy and red tape at the district level creates unnecessary logjams at the school and classroom levels. As teachers and students move increasingly towards individualized and highly personalized teaching and learning, the system must decentralize decision-making about curriculum, funding, hiring, technology, professional development, and evaluation to the school and classroom level so that education professionals can make decisions that are appropriate for their school and students. In Baltimore, CEO of Public Schools Andres Alonso decentralized school funding and gave principals full autonomy over their school budgets. This allows principals to collaborate with teachers and the community to assess the needs of the school and prioritize funding dollars to provide the appropriate resources. Furthermore, by valuing every teacher salary in the budget at the mean cost to the district, this budgeting structure has completed eliminated Last-In-First-Out hiring practices.
- Let Teachers Teach – No Child Left Behind mandated that all teachers be highly qualified to teach their subject area, but bureaucracy is stripping the profession of anything that requires qualification. Scripted curriculum, test proctoring, and micro-managed professional development plans do not require (nor do they attract and retain) highly qualified professionals. Let’s ensure that every child has a highly qualified teacher in his or her classroom. Then, let’s permit that highly qualified individual to exercise her qualifications and expertise by making her own decisions about curriculum, assessment, and professional development. Micro-management and bureaucracy are the fastest way to drive away creative thinkers and innovators. Let’s grant our educators autonomy and empowerment, instead.
- Research and Development – What works in education? How do you teach a child to read? How do you teach him to add and subtract? For the amount of federal money poured into education in this country, we should have better answers to these questions. Educational research is notoriously useless, which is why the same ideas with different names keep being recycled in education practice every few years. Is it student-to-student talk or independent study? Is it phonics or whole word reading? Is it small classes or what? Veteran teachers are jaded by the buzzwords and new teachers just don’t have a clue what they are doing and will try just about anything. If the Department of Education was serious about improving education, they could start by funding seriously scientific, comprehensive, longitudinal studies about best practices in teaching, learning, evaluation, and assessment. And then, if they were really committed to improvement, they could think about sharing some of this information in teacher education programs instead of – oh, I don’t know, having teachers-to-be make collages, or something. Talent development of teachers and school leaders is crucial. Many teacher education programs are not adequately preparing teachers for the challenges in the classroom. Continued lack of support and mentoring at the school level contributes to the high rate of attrition among new teachers. National leaders must institute policies to recruit, train, support, and reward the best teachers and school leaders.
- Stop the College Propaganda – Not everyone should go to college. There, I said it. It’s not a popular opinion, but it’s true: college is not for everyone… and that’s okay! Our economy needs all kinds of people for all kinds of careers. Some of those careers require a college or professional degree, but many of them do not. Making a college degree the aim and end of education not only devalues and delegitimizes the many valuable skills and services that can be obtained without one, but also sets unreasonable expectations for students and teachers. I’m not advocating that teachers lower expectations for students; I’m advocating for a broader definition of educational achievement. The “college or bust” mentality is unrealistic and unfair. Our economy needs electricians, technologists, plumbers, stylists, painters, and mechanics just as much as we need doctors, scholars, lawyers, and accountants. Consider the hurricane last week: how many philosophy scholars does it take to repair a roof? Instead of encouraging young people to incur hundreds of thousands of dollars of debt, our country needs a resurgence of vocational schools, which could prepare young people for jobs or apprenticeships right out of high school and put them on a path for economic success and stability. Any student who has the cognitive capacity, academic achievement, and passion for attending college should be able to do so, regardless of his or her zip code or parents’ bank statements. However, it is a disservice to young people and our economy to suggest that alternate career paths are somehow “less than” or a sign of educational failure. Educators should be encouraged to work with students to discover and pursue their unique talents and interests, whether that means Russian literature or carpentry.
