We face a number of problems right now from a minuscule budget to a constitution tied up in knots to a state bureaucracy that is in places flat-out incompetent. All that and more are very serious problems.
But our long term prospects are determined almost solely by the education we provide our children. If our populace does not have the education required to compete in the 21st century then we become a 2nd world state, mostly used as a place to extract resources from and ski in.
We are presently straight on the road to ruin with 30% of our K-12 students not even making proficient and the number able to attend and graduate college even lower. We face the very real prospect of the percentage of adults having a college education dropping - at the very time we need it accelerating.
It's time for this state to get serious about improving K-12. Not provide lots of sturm und drang, but actually effect significant improvement.
How do we do that? Pretty simple actually. From the N.Y. Times
When researchers ran the numbers in dozens of different studies, every factor under a school's control produced just a tiny impact, except for one: which teacher the student had been assigned to. Some teachers could regularly lift their students' test scores above the average for children of the same race, class and ability level. Others' students left with below-average results year after year. William Sanders, a statistician studying Tennessee teachers with a colleague, found that a student with a weak teacher for three straight years would score, on average, 50 percentile points behind a similar student with a strong teacher for those years. Teachers working in the same building, teaching the same grade, produced very different outcomes. And the gaps were huge. Eric Hanushek, a Stanford economist, found that while the top 5 percent of teachers were able to impart a year and a half's worth of learning to students in one school year, as judged by standardized tests, the weakest 5 percent advanced their students only half a year of material each year.
So why some claim this is a complicated issue requiring addressing numerous issues - it isn't. The key issue is a single very simple issue, the quality of the teacher. But that does lead to a giant question.
But what makes a good teacher? There have been many quests for the one essential trait, and they have all come up empty-handed. Among the factors that do not predict whether a teacher will succeed: a graduate-school degree, a high score on the SAT, an extroverted personality, politeness, confidence, warmth, enthusiasm and having passed the teacher-certification exam on the first try.
Read the above article for a number of projects that are being tried to improve the effectiveness of teachers to move them up to that effective range. (The most efficient way to address this problem is to teach our existing teachers to do better. The alternative is to fire those doing lousy, bring in new people, measure them for a couple of years, and fire the poor performers in that group - much less efficient & effective.)
How important is this? President Obama is a superb politician. He knows what taking on the teacher's union means to his base of support. Yet when it came to the district in Rhode Island firing all teachers & administrators at a failing school, again from the N.Y. Times
But neither the president nor Education Secretary Arne Duncan backed off his support for tough action, including dismissing teachers en masse, to improve learning conditions in chronically failing schools. At the high school in Central Falls, a poor community with a large immigrant population, only 7 percent of 11th graders passed state math tests last fall. And if the administration's posture was undermining its support among teachers, it was earning unusual praise from conservatives, as well as from supporters of an overhaul of the nation's schools.
And the reaction of the teachers unions? No surprise:
Officials at the two unions, the National Education Association and the American Federation of Teachers, were so angry in the hours after Mr. Obama first endorsed the firings that an irreconcilable break with the administration seemed possible, perhaps bruising Democrats' electoral chances in November.
So why did Obama come out so strongly & publicly? Because he knows that what is at stake here is the future of our country. And he is putting our country's and out children's future ahead of the political advantage of putting the union first.
"If a school continues to fail its students year after year after year, if it doesn't show signs of improvement, then there's got to be a sense of accountability," Mr. Obama said. "And that's what happened in Rhode Island last week."
This will require a brutal battle with the teachers unions and the teachers themselves. Why? Because they have spent their entire adult life in an environment where a teacher is never held accountable, where a teacher can never be fired, where showing up delivers the paycheck. Changing this is a wrenching change and one that introduces insecurity to their job. A superb example of the mindset of teachers today is:
Anthony J. Mullen, an instructor at the Arch School in Greenwich, Conn., who is the national teacher of the year, said he supported the notion of establishing more accountability in schools. "But what kind of accountability are we talking about?
Well Anthony, it's accountability as anyone outside of the K-12 system understands it - if you can't perform the job and you can't improve, then you're fired.
We need for our legislature to step up and get this done. It needs to be done thoughtfully & fairly. But it will require a brutal battle with the teachers unions because they are not going to give up ironclad job security gently.
What I think the legislature should put in place this year (alongside the new measurement systems that will be a big help) is a system to identify what makes for an effective teacher and to train our existing teachers to use that approach.
Second, the law needs to be changed that all future teacher contracts must be written to allow for firing teachers who fall below set criteria (awful level) or who fall below a higher level (bad level) and improve at too slow a rate. This needs to go in now so that in 2 - 3 years, as we have the results of the better measurement and can track improvement (or lack thereof) in teachers doing a substandard job, action can then be taken.
For Republicans, this needs to be approached not as a chance to hammer the teacher's unions, but as a way to improve as many of the teachers as possible.
For Democrats, this requires saying no to one of our most powerful constituencies. But we are doing so to advance the interests of an even larger constituency - all parents & children in the state. (I will also remind the Democrats that while they talk about the Republican base voting against their own interests, what do they think of the Democratic base who desperately needs quality schools voting for legislators who keep things as is for the sake of the unions?)
And to the legislature, the future of the state is in your hands.