Барак Обама - The Audacity of Hope

Both assumptions are wrong. Money does matter in education — otherwise why would parents pay so much to live in well-funded suburban school districts? — and many urban and rural schools still suffer from overcrowded classrooms, outdated books, inadequate equipment, and teachers who are forced to pay out of pocket for basic supplies. But there’s no denying that the way many public schools are managed poses at least as big a problem as how well they’re funded.

Our task, then, is to identify those reforms that have the highest impact on student achievement, fund them adequately, and eliminate those programs that don’t produce results. And in fact we already have hard evidence of reforms that work: a more challenging and rigorous curriculum with emphasis on math, science, and literacy skills; longer hours and more days to give children the time and sustained attention they need to learn; early childhood education for every child, so they’re not already behind on their first day of school; meaningful, performance-based assessments that can provide a fuller picture of how a student is doing; and the recruitment and training of transformative principals and more effective teachers.

This last point — the need for good teachers — deserves emphasis. Recent studies show that the single most important factor in determining a student’s achievement isn’t the color of his skin or where he comes from, but who the child’s teacher is. Unfortunately, too many of our schools depend on inexperienced teachers with little training in the subjects they’re teaching, and too often those teachers are concentrated in already struggling schools. Moreover, the situation is getting worse, not better: Each year, school districts are hemorrhaging experienced teachers as the Baby Boomers reach retirement, and two million teachers must be recruited in the next decade just to meet the needs of rising enrollment.

The problem isn’t that there’s no interest in teaching; I constantly meet young people who’ve graduated from top colleges and have signed up, through programs like Teach for America, for two-year stints in some of the country’s toughest public schools. They find the work extraordinarily rewarding; the kids they teach benefit from their creativity and enthusiasm. But by the end of two years, most have either changed careers or moved to suburban schools — a consequence of low pay, a lack of support from the educational bureaucracy, and a pervasive feeling of isolation.

If we’re serious about building a twenty-first-century school system, we’re going to have to take the teaching profession seriously. This means changing the certification process to allow a chemistry major who wants to teach to avoid expensive additional course work; pairing up new recruits with master teachers to break their isolation; and giving proven teachers more control over what goes on in their classrooms.

It also means paying teachers what they’re worth. There’s no reason why an experienced, highly qualified, and effective teacher shouldn’t earn $100,000 annually at the peak of his or her career. Highly skilled teachers in such critical fields as math and science — as well as those willing to teach in the toughest urban schools — should be paid even more.

There’s just one catch. In exchange for more money, teachers need to become more accountable for their performance — and school districts need to have greater ability to get rid of ineffective teachers.

So far, teacher’s unions have resisted the idea of pay for performance, in part because it could be disbursed at the whim of a principal. The unions also argue — rightly, I think — that most school districts rely solely on test scores to measure teacher performance, and that test scores may be highly dependent on factors beyond any teacher’s control, like the number of low-income or special-needs students in their classroom.

But these aren’t insoluble problems. Working with teacher’s unions, states and school districts can develop better measures of performance, ones that combine test data with a system of peer review (most teachers can tell you with amazing consistency which teachers in their schools are really good, and which are really bad). And we can make sure that nonperforming teachers no longer handicap children who want to learn.

Indeed, if we’re to make the investments required to revamp our schools, then we will need to rediscover our faith that every child can learn. Recently, I had the chance to visit Dodge Elementary School, on the West Side of Chicago, a school that had once been near the bottom on every measure but that is in the midst of a turnaround. While I was talking to some of the teachers about the challenges they faced, one young teacher mentioned what she called the “These Kids Syndrome”—the willingness of society to find a million excuses for why “these kids” can’t learn; how “these kids come from tough backgrounds” or “these kids are too far behind.”

“When I hear that term, it drives me nuts,” the teacher told me. “They’re not ‘these kids.’ They’re our kids.”

How America’s economy performs in the years to come may depend largely on how well we take such wisdom to heart.

OUR INVESTMENT IN education can’t end with an improved elementary and secondary school system. In a knowledge-based economy where eight of the nine fastest-growing occupations this decade require scientific or technological skills, most workers are going to need some form of higher education to fill the jobs of the future. And just as our government instituted free and mandatory public high schools at the dawn of the twentieth century to provide workers the skills needed for the industrial age, our government has to help today’s workforce adjust to twenty-first-century realities.

In many ways, our task should be easier than it was for policy makers a hundred years ago. For one thing, our network of universities and community colleges already exists and is well equipped to take on more students. And Americans certainly don’t need to be convinced of the value of a higher education — the percentage of young adults getting bachelor’s degrees has risen steadily each decade, from around 16 percent in 1980 to almost 33 percent today.

Where Americans do need help, immediately, is in managing the rising cost of college — something with which Michelle and I are all too familiar (for the first ten years of our marriage, our combined monthly payments on our undergraduate and law school debt exceeded our mortgage by a healthy margin). Over the last five years, the average tuition and fees at four-year public colleges, adjusted for inflation, have risen 40 percent. To absorb these costs, students have been taking on ever-increasing debt levels, which discourages many undergraduates from pursuing careers in less lucrative fields like teaching. And an estimated two hundred thousand college-qualified students each year choose to forgo college altogether because they can’t figure out how to pay the bills.

There are a number of steps we can take to control costs and improve access to higher education. States can limit annual tuition increases at public universities. For many nontraditional students, technical schools and online courses may provide a cost-effective option for retooling in a constantly changing economy. And students can insist that their institutions focus their fund-raising efforts more on improving the quality of instruction than on building new football stadiums.

But no matter how well we do in controlling the spiraling cost of education, we will still need to provide many students and parents with more direct help in meeting college expenses, whether through grants, low-interest loans, tax-free educational savings accounts, or full tax deductibility of tuition and fees. So far, Congress has been moving in the opposite direction, by raising interest rates on federally guaranteed student loans and failing to increase the size of grants for low-income students to keep pace with inflation. There’s no justification for such policies — not if we want to maintain opportunity and upward mobility as the hallmark of the U.S. economy.