Boushall Middle School, Part 2

This column appeared on the editorial page of the Denver Post, 5/16/06

Think Fresh About Public Schools

By: Jane Urschel

The Pentagon recently pulled the plug on a contract to build a new spy plane, saying the plane was too expensive and too heavy to fly. Admitting the rejection was "an embarrassment," the contractor also pointed out that the company has supplied some very famous and successful spy planes in the past.

In a similar way, American public education has admirably provided decades of opportunity and progress for children. It is our greatest public good. Yet I believe we have an education system today that is too heavy to fly.

What makes a system too heavy to fly? Bureaucratic mandates and fragmented programs coming from local, state and federal agencies load the system down. As one former superintendent put it, "School districts can literally be grounded by the three L's: legislation, litigation and labor agreements."

Before the public-education "contract" is cancelled, let's make a new offer that parents and the public will accept. This contract requires a new performance role that will hold all levels of the system accountable.

We need to ask the right questions in order to incorporate new learning into the design of a new system. Asking those questions will, undoubtedly, offend many adults in the system. But here goes ...

While there is some progress in closing the student achievement gap, too many students fall below the proficiency level. We know these gaps begin before children reach the schoolhouse door. Yet we continue to organize the education system to exacerbate the problem. We take students who come with less and give them less in curriculum, revenue, expectations and teachers.

Why can't we use data to learn whether teachers have the skills to diagnose, prescribe and motivate? Why aren't we giving incentives through special pay to send the right teachers to the schools with the most need?

What stops us from rewarding teachers who teach hard-to-staff subject areas like math and science?

Data and technology are changing the face of education. As noted by the World Future Society, "education is leaving the schoolhouse." Why aren't we embracing online education as a new option?

Why is the value of high school diplomas so different district to district? Must we have state graduation requirements to establish a level of uniformity? Could school boards agree among themselves to guarantee a diploma that meets or exceeds set standards?

Why can't the adults who run bureaucracies and make policies affecting the academic lives of students talk to each other? We need to organize schools around student needs, not adult needs. What if higher education sent their professors "below" to work with and learn from teachers in K-12, and K-12 teachers went to college classrooms?

Why can't we act on the research that tells us that investing more dollars in pre-school education means spending fewer dollars in remediation and, for that matter, in welfare services and prisons for adults?

A truly nimble system would engage the assets of the full community to offer all children the best education possible. Why shouldn't school boards contract with diverse providers, including in the private sector, if they can produce better services for students?

If we are to build a new system, data will become its connective tissue. Like the wiring of a plane, data can fuse connections at all levels of the system. And, data can tell us about the needs of students as they move from one grade to the next.

We need state and local leadership to negotiate a new contract and to build our schools to the specifications of the 21st century. All parties have to work together, and everybody has to shed some dead weight.

Work to rebuild a next-generation system of education has begun through the interest of private foundations and state leaders. Gov. Bill Owens' Colorado Education Alignment Council is studying and recommending better "outputs for all of our inputs" in education.

Sen. Ron Tupa proposed legislation to create a special council to begin a discussion about the impact each part of the educational system has on others. The bill's awaiting the governor's decision.

Let's support these efforts, giving Colorado the opportunity to go back to the drawing board and redesign our system of schools into one that nurtures students from pre-school through college; a "P-16" system.

Jane Urschel is associate executive director of the Colorado Association of School Boards.

Editor's Note: "associate executive director" = lobbyist. This article dated 10/2003 gives her basic instructions on how to lobby.

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