Presidential Candidates: Education Plans

I recently took the time to review the education plans being proposed by each of the presidential candidates. It was discouraging to see a set of proposals that once again fail to address the core functions of schools. While I pride myself on knowing what it takes to turn around a district, their advisors appear to lack the hands-on experience in school reform and teaching all students to mastery. In fact, after reading each plan, I found myself reflecting on the Wendy’s commercial that used the tag line, Where’s the beef?

The problem with these types of plans is that each lacks the details needed to truly transform American schools. If you look at the research conducted over the past 30 years, it clearly states that increasing achievement is directly tied to the level of instructional effectiveness, which boils down to four things:

1) Defining what objectives will be taught to mastery and when mastery is expected (not just proficiency). This also starts to address an issue raised in an earlier blog about rigor or the expectations we have for all students. This also means that we as a profession must focus on teaching with strategic intent versus the coverage of materials or simply delivering lessons that come with our textbooks.

2) Assessing student mastery everyday to identify objectives to reteach and with whom. This does require a wholesale change in what we mean by good assessment practice – using multiple measures to determine mastery, not just a test. And let’s not get confused by test vendors that cloak their benchmark assessments as good formative measures, when in fact they are summative.

3) Adjusting the instructional strategies that teachers use to teach skills and concepts to mastery. Isn’t it about time that we shift our focus from simply measuring outputs (test scores) to understanding how to change the inputs or the teaching strategies used in the classroom. As Tony Alvarado once said, the power learning comes from the power of teaching, so we need to use a diverse repertoire of strategies to teach different concepts and to different students. The notion of one size fits all will not work.

4) Sustaining achievement gains by reallocating staffing, training, and financial resources to effective programs and eliminating practices that do not result in increased achievement. This does require that we have the right data, which is typically not the data that is stored in a data warehouse.

The work required to move a low performing school to a high achieving school is central to each of these points. If these are the core functions of every district and school, why are the candidates continuing to develop new policies that fail to trickle down to the classroom? Taking a macro level view of educational reform is safe becuase it speaks to general topics that minimize public debate. Well, the time has come when we need to stand up as citizens and demand more before our country is left behind.