Roanoke Times
Copyright (c) 1995, Landmark Communications, Inc.
DATE: SUNDAY, September 25, 1994 TAG: 9411050021
SECTION: EDITORIAL PAGE: E2 EDITION: METRO
SOURCE:
DATELINE: LENGTH: Medium
Learning.
The Committee for Economic Development, a nonpartisan public policy organization whose 250 trustees are top corporate executives and university presidents, poses this as the challenge for American public schools.
Schools aren't meeting this challenge, the committee says, in part because they are burdened with pressures and mandates to deal with every social, economic and health problem in their communities.
The economic-development group does not suggest that these issues can be ignored, only that the responsibility for addressing them be shifted off schools and onto the community. Schools may be logical sites for services that children need, logical locations for community centers. But community institutions should deliver such services, freeing schools to focus on their core mission.
This makes sense. Educators doubtless would embrace a compact by which communities assure that children are ready to learn, while schools assure that they do learn.
Teachers will always be role models, of course. They need to care about kids' lives, and know how to link a troubled child with the proper resources.
A school's job, however, is to help children sustain a lifelong love of learning and develop critical-thinking and problem-solving skills. In the process, they need to acquire a solid foundation in language and math tools, and a broad base of knowledge in core subjects such as literature, science, foreign languages and history.
The CED proposes a businesslike approach for achieving such results. It recommends that governing bodies - the state and, on the local level, the school board - adopt national standards to set high goals for academic achievement, see that schools have the necessary resources to reach them, then get out of the way and give school faculties, in consultation with parents, the authority to decide how to succeed.
With that authority would come accountability. The committee proposes that every school enter into a contract with its school district that clearly states the school's mission, its goals for student achievement and its plan for meeting the goals. Students' progress would be measured against national standards, and teachers and principals found to be ineffective could not be ignored. The executives urge peer review, peer coaching and mentoring to help weak teachers improve - or be ushered out of the profession.
If this sounds like site-based management, a central tenet of current education reform, that's because it is. But success in site-based management depends on a political commitment allowing schools to concentrate on academic improvement, undiluted by other pressures and agendas.
The CED proposal also recognizes a major factor often overlooked in education reform - students' own responsibility for learning. To our way of thinking, abandoning the factory model of education, emphasizing creative and team-based learning instead, would go a long way toward discarding the myths of students as passive receptacles and institutional products. But there is also merit in the CED's recommended reality-checks and incentives: that colleges and universities require higher achievement for acceptance, and that employers routinely look at high school academic records when making hiring decisions.
What the Committee for Economic Development is saying is that school performance should have meaningful consequences - for policy-makers, administrators, teachers and, most important, for students. It's a good idea. It, too, could have meaningful consequences, if it is heeded.
by CNB