politics@theEAGLE is back! Although the Honors capstone that inspired this site finished in December, the blog is here to stay! This semester, we’re going to focus on the Obama administration’s efforts to reform higher education, chronicling the new president’s proposals, successes and shortfalls during his first 100 days and beyond. So, as usual… check back often!
In the meantime, here’s part two of a three part series I published earlier this week at UPI’s Voice of Young Voters, a student-run, presidential transition blog. Please bookmark that Web site as well!
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BY: TONY ROMM
As I mentioned last week, the education community presents President-elect Barack Obama with no shortage of political and economic challenges, especially insofar as college affordability and public school financing are concerned. That said, here’s part two of my three-part series on the four most dire education problems Obama faces in 2009:
2. Bettering the nation’s struggling public schools. Arriving this Tuesday was Education Week’s Quality Counts 2009 study, an annual collection of report cards that track state developments in public education. The survey, as imagined, was incredibly dense and detailed, the full results of which are available on Ed Week’s Web site, but one grade perhaps best summarized the current condition of the nation’s school districts: a national mark of “C” in the “Chance for Success” index, which Ed Week defined as a “perspective on the role that education plays as a person moves from childhood, through the formal K-12 school system, and into the workforce.”
The challenge: Facilitating academic progress (while holding the right group of people accountable for school performance). It is usually at this point in the discussion that the more hardened reformists among us champion merit-based pay, or some variation thereof, as the solution to public schools’ math, reading and science deficiencies. Proponents, including prospective Education Secretary Arne Duncan, argue that pay schemes tied to progress reward educators for their students’ successes – a system, furthermore, that also encourages teachers to pursue advanced degrees or otherwise improve their skill sets to better the classroom.
A host of states since 2005 have introduced merit-based pay systems, each with important (though often disappointing) results. Of note is one such attempt in Florida: In 2006, Gov. Jeb Bush allowed school districts to configure their own merit pay schemes, provided at least 60 percent of their “progress” formulas included standardized test results.
Unfortunately, it seemed wholly unsurprising months later when the St. Petersburg Times uncovered that public school teachers, some of whom had long endured substantial classroom adversities, were beginning to desert Florida’s neediest public schools. According to the newspaper, the inherent disparities in the state’s ad hoc “progress” formulas were partly to blame; in the Hillsborough district, for example, a disproportionate number of merit pay bonuses were awarded to teachers at its more affluent (and better-scoring) institutions, which possessed the greatest capabilities to meet the district’s self-determined benchmarks. Lawmakers were thus forced to reconsider their coveted merit-based pay regulation, which is still the subject of much dispute.
If anything, Florida’s mistakes alone demonstrate why President-elect Obama must balance his efforts to hold schools more accountable with the structural inequalities that have historically complicated education reforms. Insufficient attention to the economic detriments of merit pay – the chilling effect it has on employment and low-income districts – could further harm struggling primary and secondary schools, perhaps in a way not too unlike the early consequences wrought by the No Child Left Behind Act.
Nor can Obama forget who, exactly, his reforms are supposed to benefit. Although assisting underpaid teachers is an obvious political priority, it’s quite haphazard to implement a program that’s structurally tailored to improve students’ performance without first determining whether merit-based pay actually helps students. Chicago, serendipitously, is an excellent example of this tautology: Although Duncan – then the Chicago schools’ chief – mailed out nearly $340,000 in bonuses to nine schools that demonstrated notable improvement (a five point test score increase), the state has yet to accumulate any data proving that merit-based pay (based on test scores) affected any of the factors that, for example, Ed Week analyzes ad nauseum.
Hence the real challenge in improving public schools: Reform efforts that substitute accountability for measurable achievement threaten to exacerbate public school districts’ present plethora of ills. Put more broadly, Obama must determine how to fix what’s currently broken before he charges someone with the responsibility to fix it — even if it is clear, to his supporters at least, who that “someone” should be.
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The final installment of this series, to come later this week @ the UPI Web site, examines America’s international competitiveness.
