The vast majority of Americans believe that the United States needs a strategy plan for pursuing, and eventually achieving, world-class education for all American children.
This must start with a national curriculum for every course being offered or perceived to be needed in America's schools. The curriculum for each course would be determined by our best public school and college teachers in both content and pedagogy. .Each curriculum would contain content that range and challenge from basic thru world-class content. Students and parents would have access to these curricula, including via the internet, and quality-control would be built into the process of building such quality.
The teachers' responsibilities would be to enable student to master the content, commensurate with their abilities, their interests and the amount of time they either can or choose to spend trying to master content.
Administrators' responsibilities would be to enable teachers to become the best teachers they can be, commensurate with their abilities, interest and the amount of time and money they can or choose to spend preparing themselves to be successful teachers.
School board responsibilities would be setting world-class goals for student performance that, while providing adequate education at basic levels, also sufficiently challenge students thru world-class levels.
That curriculum would be available for adoption by each state. States would be permitted to make substitutions for 10% of the content. But substitutions would have to be of comparable contents and challenge at comparable levels.
If we took the curriculum at either Stanford University, Chicago University, Harvard University or Rice University and taught them at all four schools, the quality of education would likely not vary very much. The same would be true of Cal Berkeley, University of Texas, University of Minnesota and University of Pennsylvania.
Common curricula enable training institutions to know what to teach future teachers in the content areas, and how to teach it in the departments of education. Universities would even teach teacher-trainers how to best teach what they teach. All of these people would be talking to each other about common problems, solving them together, and making everybody else better because of it.
What's wrong with that? I'm guessing, but I'll bet wherever firefighters and policemen policewomen are trained, they are trained the same way, to do the same kinds of things, given a set of circumstances. I'd bet surgeons learn to do the same things for particular kinds of surgeries. And when someone announces a new, more effective way of doing something, it's passed on to others. The military does not have different ways to train recruits at its different locations. There are correct ways to handle guns, deploy troops or fly airplanes. Oil refineries refine oil in the same ways, even different refining companies because, if cars don't perform properly because of poor gasoline, refineries can't get away with blaming cars.
Why, then, the difference in education? It's the absence of quality controls.
Contrary to what the pay for educators suggest, providing opportunities for each student to receive the best education possible is the hardest job. The only things that limit what children learn--and are prepared to learn in the future--is the quality of education offered in their public schools and the times they are inspired, encouraged and want to invest taking advantage of the opportunities. The quality of that education is limited only by the ability of educators to provide it after investing the time needed to learn how to do it That means students will learn more as educators themselves learn more, and as students are motivated and enabled to do so. So the crucial question is: How can we improve the performances of educators?
Every educator from the superintendent to the classroom teacher would have a job description that specifies the expectations of each position in terms that board members can understand. Consistent with those descriptions, each would have a plan of action in writing describing in detail how they will fulfill those expectations: Administrators would have weekly or monthly plans and teachers, daily plans.
Copies of these plans would be on file at the home schools of teachers and in the administration building for review by appropriate administrators and board members at their discretion.
Logs of administrators' daily activities would document what they've done, when it is done, why it was done, and reference evidence of effectiveness. Plans, logs and their assessments would serve as bases for staff and board discussions at special monthly meetings on instruction and suggest ideas for future improvement.
The board would hire an ombudsman, who could never become district superintendent, to oversee compliance with board policy regarding instruction and preparations for instruction at all levels. The ombudsman (or woman) would make monthly reports to the board and the community, and would be held responsible if student performances during each grading period fail to measure up to monthly reports and expectations of improved performance..
One board meeting would be conducted each month, devoted exclusively to instruction; instructional planning; evaluation of student, teacher, and administrator performances; parental and community involvement, and such other things that can impact student performance in the future.
That's the kind of quality-control in education that produces higher salaries for educators, a better educated workforce, and a brighter economic future for America. Without quality-control, quality education is left to chance--a slim chance.
Ronald
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