Today, Seattle Times' Lynne Varner posts another excellent piece about education reform: "A state of educational inertia." She puts it gently when she says the state of Washington should be renamed the Complacency Belt, the land where inertia rules when it comes to education reform.
To Lynne's Complacency Belt let me add the image of the Berlin Wall. Education reformers are inert here for good reason. A Berlin Wall, a thicket of laws passed by the Legislature, blocks reform. Many, many good people have tried to improve the schools. Time and again they run up against this Wall, injure themselves, fall back, and retreat. They make another try to get over the Wall, and are forced back by various factions of the education establishment. No wonder genuine reformers are inert---they are up against a formidable and powerful Berlin Wall.
But the times, they are changing. And there is reason to hope again. Reformers are regaining their focus and energy. A feeling of fierce urgency about the education of our students is in the air. And the Legislature is listening to observers like Lynne Varner.
Here are some of the concrete blocks which make up our Berlin Wall:
- The laws grant schools of education and regulatory boards monopoly power over the training and production of teachers, when alternate recruitment and training models like Teach for America exist and produce better-qualified and more effective teachers;
- The laws generously fund school district bureaucracies, not students, bureaucracies which then use up 41 cents of every education dollar;
- The laws create a thicket of obstacles, paperwork requirements and appeals to removing ineffective teachers from the classroom, so, as reported here by the Tacoma News Tribune, even teachers like the junior high teacher in Morton who spent time in jail for sexually assaulting a child is protected from losing his teaching certification. It does not take much analysis to conclude that, given this environment, it is nearly impossible to remove a teacher who only fails at educating a child;
- The laws ban the creation of charter schools and alternative models for delivering education. Lynne points out that the all-or-nothing debate on charters fails our children. If some charters succeed, she says, allow the good charters to work their magic here. There are many good charters that achieve great results for kids: KIPP Academies, Green Dot Schools, Aspire Schools, Geoffrey Canada's Harlem Promise Academy, and Ben Chavis' school in Oakland.
To the Legislature: take down our Berlin Wall. Permit our schools, principals, teachers, parents and children the freedom they need to flourish.
Reform the laws by giving parents many choices among public schools, allow good charter schools, allow good innovation schools, put the principal in charge, fund the child (not the bureaucracy), create genuine alternate routes to the classroom that don't involve schools of education, eliminate teacher and principal tenure, and then hold everyone accountable for results. See our education reform plan for more details: "Eight Practical Ways to Reverse the Decline of Public Schools."
Below is President's Reagan's "Tear Down This Wall" speech. Notice any parallels?
