How not to improve a school system
In 2010, mark Zuckerberg, CEO and founder of Facebook, donated $100 million to the Newark Public Schools district. The goal was to not just completely transform Newark schools within five years, but to develop a model of education reform for all American cities. Five years have now passed, all of the money (which with a matching grant ended up totalling $200 million) has been spent and Newark schools are not much better off than when they started. While the story of this failure, outlined in the new book, The Prize: Who’s in charge of America’s Schools, is primarily about Newark, it also serves as a cautionary tale for us in canada about America’s failed approach to education reform.
Zuckerberg, along with Facebook Coo Sheryl Sandberg, New Jersey Governor chris christie and then-Newark mayor cory booker, devised a turnaround plan for Newark schools that included evaluating teachers based on student test scores and expanding charter schools. What is remarkable about these reforms is not that they failed in Newark, but that, despite their continued failure in school systems across the united States, policy-makers continue to push ahead with no seeming end in sight.
Take standardized testing. While it is true that many other countries engage in some forms of testing, the united States has taken it to unprecedented levels. data from the council of chief State School Officers has shown that American students in large school districts are now taking an average of 113 standardized tests prior to graduating high school, despite their being little evidence that all of this testing does anything to help students learn more.
Or take charter schools, which have grown tremendously over the last decade and now number over 6,700. The theory behind charter schools is that, freed from traditional rules and regulations, they can be more innovative and therefore provide a better education to their students. but while there certainly are some successful charter schools, most have had less-than-stellar outcomes. Indeed, the largest nationwide examination of their effects, by Stanford’s center for research and education Outcomes, has shown that the vast majority of charter schools do not outperform their public school counterparts.
It was also thought that successful charter schools would provide competition to public schools and therefore cause them to improve because they now had to compete for students. however, what usually ended up happening was that charter schools simply drained the children of the most ambitious parents with the most social capital from the public system, to devastating effect.
What is most bizarre about the American educationreform movement, is that it has doggedly pursued these ineffective strategies while ignoring much more basic problems that need to be addressed. One is the fact that American schools cannot recruit and keep high-quality teachers, because their pay and working conditions are so poor. Indeed, America is currently in the grips of a national teacher shortage, which has resulted in many school districts hiring unqualified teachers with little or no training. but this should not be surprising, given that starting salaries in many states are only around $30,000, and even the average national salary is about a third less than what it is in Ontario.
It should be said though that even though Zuckerberg clearly had no idea what he was getting into, his heart is in the right place. he wants to make teaching, which in his mind is one of the most important jobs in society, as prestigious and attractive to the most talented graduates as working at Facebook. And even though we do a better job of recruiting talented teachers here in canada, we still have a long way to go before teaching becomes as respected as other professions like law or medicine.
So what would it take to do this? It would involve modernizing the teaching profession so that teachers are better paid and more accountable for their work, while also ensuring that they have a real voice in policy decisions.
This serves as a cautionary tale for us in Canada about America’s failed approach to education reform