From a reader:
1, Dispose of Teach for America and alternative certification (except for vocational courses) or revise it completely as follows. Hire TFAs as paraprofessionals to work under experienced teachers for their first year.
2. Require a commitment of 5 years, not 2, so the schools get full benefit from them
3. Do not place them in schools with high percentages of disadvantaged and disabled students. Instead, put them in middle class schools and create incentives for the best teachers to go to the disadvantaged schools instead.
4. Expect that by the end of their second year they are taking education courses online or in person to earn certification if they intend to stay another year.
5. Charter schools: Hold them to the same standards as public schools and require them to hire ONLY certified teachers and to pay them at state rates and use approved curricula. Require them to provide full special education services including moderate and severe/profound/multihandicapped and autistic with NO quotas and taught ONLY by certified special educators (No first or second year TFA’s) and to follow IDEA and Section 504.
6. Require that all principals be teachers with at least 5 years in the classroom, a Masters or higher in Education and special ed. experience
7. Require that all superintendents have at least 10 years of classroom experience and special educaton certification, (original or add-on) and a Masters or higher. This includes and especially includes the state superintendent.
8. No taxpayer money for parochial or private schools. None for charters that do not meet standards.
9. Schools with high percentages of disadvantaged, disabled, ELL, or 504 students get 10% in extra funding beyond what other schools in the district receive.
10. School Board will consist of parents, grandparents or siblings of students in public schools in the district and teachers or retired teachers only.
11. State governing board consists of 1/2 parents, grandparents, siblings or students in the public schools and 1/2 teachers or administrators from the public schools who have been or are certified teachers.
12. The Mayor, Governor or other public official has no role in choosing the State Superintendent or other leader over the schools. The leader is picked by the school boards. The exception is when the Mayor or Governor IS a teacher (such as Zell Miller was in Georgia.)
13. Eliminate most standardized testing. Any standardized testing is normed on students of the area where the students who are tested live. Questions include equal numbers that are regionally based. In other words, don’t ask Louisiana children about mountains unless there are also questions about bayous. Include regional vocabulary among correct answers, i.e. “pocketbook” as well as “purse” and “soda” or “coke” as well as “pop” for a cold drink.
14. Include the teachers’ unions in policy development and require local and state boards to show evidence of their inclusion.
15. Universally available pre-k held in the public schools and taught by certified early childhood teachers.
16. Deemphasis on “on time” graduation. Emphasis on graduating whether the student is 16 and took some courses on-line or 22.
17. Special education diplomas, state diplomas, for all students with IEPS even if they cannot pass standard courses as long as they complete the work required by their IEPS. NO Certificates of Achievement for students who have been in school all their lives—Real Special Education Diplomas and a Vocational Seal on those diplomas if they completed a vocational program, even with accommodations—-as long as they know the material.
18. Require EVERY administrator and policy maker who is or was a certified teacher above the level of principal to go back to the classroom for 1 year out of every 7 and to spend one week of each school year as a substitute teacher. Require every principal to spend 10 days per school year as a substitute in their own or a nearby school.
Well, that is more than a few. If the schools do not comply the risk losing federal funding or being taken over by a compliant school.
Diane Ravitch's blog 
This is a good start. Here are a few more we need. Schools with high poverty should be required to provide: parent liaison, social worker, nurse, and librarian in EVERY school. Add to that a class size of 15 – 1 and we might get somewhere.
If the schools are going to be required to provide those sorts of things (and I’m 100% in favor of all of the above), then the government has to be required to fund them.
They would certainly be able to when the testing stops and the millions go back to the schools!
I like where this is going. Keep up the great ideas!
“Like”! Terrific suggestions! I just hope that Mr. Secretary is listening…
Charters also comply with rigorous teacher evaluation rubric so that teachers demonstrate competency, but NO teacher ANYWHERE to be evaluated using test scores outside their own control. Local control of assessments which should be relevant and useful for improving teaching and learning.
Charters either need to be abolished altogether, or they simply have the taxpayer money cut off and they would be forced to operate as the private schools they are.
That about covers it.
Wow this is a really great list. I really like the one about admin having contact with kids. I think that builds empathy and perspective for everyone. Our principal already does this on his own! Can’t find a sub ? He does it. Need to run to a meeting, he’s got it covered. etc. It just builds three way respect between students, admin, teacher. We’re all in this together.
We need more principals like this. And we need more teachers who are open to this.
Amen! Since I am recently retired from teaching, I now have the time to read in more depth about issues in education. I greatly appreciate the information and opinions you share. As a classroom teacher, I observed administrators lose touch with what actually happens in the classroom. Data collection and reading literature/studies about education become the administrators’ points of reference. They lose touch with what it is like to deal with real human beings – the children who come into the classroom with a multitude of issues which affects any learning.
That is a great list. My favorite is #12. I would love to have something on the list disclosing research and companies behind standardized testing, remediation for testing, and who funds educational research that makes public statements supporting testing and the like
Diane,
Please see this video filmed in December in Albany..posed on the PAA site and featuring our Wendy Lecker and many great students:
Diane,
Also, see this video…Karran Harper Royal and Journey to Justice in DC:
http://m.youtube.com/#/watch?v=c00PWQl8wLk&feature=player_detailpage&desktop_uri=%2Fwatch%3Ffeature%3Dplayer_detailpage%26v%3Dc00PWQl8wLk
Beautifully written. Add strict guidelines for corproate funding of any program.
I think #10, regarding school board qualifications, should be explored more deeply: one of the things that really bothers me about how public education has changed over the years is this: in 1980, there was one school board member for every 500 students average in the country; I until recently worked for OCPS, a particularly large school district with 7 school board members and about 200,000 students. That’s a little bigger than the average, of course, but on AVERAGE, there’s something like a 1:10,000 ratio. It’s no wonder those folks aren’t “responsive to the community.” How can they be?
That suggestion is one of the WORST on the list. I mentioned below the filthy politics that goes on in school districts around the country. Can you imagine a board made up solely of cronies who have spent their whole lives in the district, with their relatives and friends there? This stuff already happens now. MORE stuff would be swept under the rug. Better to have outsiders with no district connections than more nepotism, etc.
Offer/require a “Life Skills” course for Sophomores or Juniors, possibly Seniors. The course would include general budgeting techniques, understanding payroll/taxes, consumer financing, mortgages/amortization schedules, how to change a tire and check a car’s oil level, and so forth. Students might be able to solve for “x” but they have no clue how to open/balance a checking account.
Would this course be best seen as part of a common core?
Great list, bravo!
Feed your faith and your doubts will stave to death.
Some of the recommendations are good, but others, such as TFA and charters, are off base. Both need to be abolished, period. There is no reason for them to exist.
Number ten is an especially awful suggestion given the filthy politics that goes on in school districts. This nepotism breeds nothing but corruption. I would PREFER outsiders to retired teachers and administrators on school boards because they CAN be objective and don’t have relatives working in the districts.
By the way, the person who wrote the letter or recommendations hasn’t a clue what charter schools ARE. They are NOT public schools, and therefore they have no right to exist. They are there merely to get the taxpayer money.
There is an interesting aspect, though, for Race to the Top states (at least in NC)– charter schools could refuse RttT money (I think about 18% in NC turned that money down), so they provide a way to avoid RttT parameters without having to attend a private school (I suppose–I am basing this on a list I saw from the State–I have no real knowledge of what happens in those charter schools). But I don’t see any other way to avoid RttT other than move to a state that doesn’t have it (or attend a charter school that did not accept the funding).
I disagree that only teachers and relatives of students should be allowed a voice on school boards. Voters should take that into account, but there are plenty of people without children and who are not career educators who can contribute to the discussion. Public schools are for the good of all of society, whether you have children or a job in them or not. If it’s fair to leave out so many citizens’ voices, then it’s equally fair for those citizens to feel that they should not have to pay taxes for a system that doesn’t benefit them because they don’t have kids, their kids are grown up or don’t attend public schools. That’s not what we want. I do not believe that the problem is too much interest in schools—the problem is that the interest with money have too much say.
Well, it’s a good list of policies to talk about and implement, at many levels, but most of these aren’t things a secretary of education could or should do.
As to the characteristics of elected school boards, or politicians, there’s no way around electing them ourselves, setting policies ourselves, and doing the ongoing due diligence to make it work. Democracy falls down without exactly the kind of work we’re doing on this blog, and it doesn’t work to wish for any administrator to do it for us.
My list is more of things a secretary of education should NOT do, like employing a whole staff of venture entrepreneurs with multiple conflicts of interest at the DOE.
Take a look at the unfriendly book that the TESTING HEIRARCHY think as number one!!
Bull-Pucky!!(Thx Rachel)
http://www.math.umn.edu/~gray/errors.html
User-Unfirendly
Scattered
Midleading
Cra*ppy
OOPS
HIERARCHY
Why no mention of legislated parental responsibility in the education of one’s child? I’ve taught for 20 years in a suburban/rural school. The only students who have ever failed were the ones where the parents weren’t involved in the child’s education. I’ve never had a struggling student fail. I’ve only had lazy kids fail. But where are the parents? Someone needs to say, “If your child fails because the grade book is full of zeroes, YOU, the parent, need to pay for that child to re-take the class. I’m in a high school where I’ve seen some kids take a class 5 times before passing (we’re on a semester, block schedule). And for every recidivist, you get extra sections of a class, that student is essentially deadwood (“Why try this time? I didn’t try last time and there were no negative repercussions for me…”). We’re getting students who are nothing but a burden on the taxpayer. Education will never succeed until we change the parenting culture in America. People breed and then forget that they had kids, and what their responsibility to their progeny might be.
Have you ever tried asking any of the kids who fail why they don’t exert any effort? Maybe they have personal issues at home that are overwhelming them (the fact that their parents don’t seem to care about their failure may be indicative of that)? Maybe they have zero self-confidence that they could pass even if they try, so they head failure off at the pass? Maybe they don’t find the material the least bit relevant to their real life? I don’t know, maybe there are other reasons too, and I’m not saying you have to bow down to them or allow them to make excuses. But if you listen to what they have to say, you might just make enough of a connection to get them engaged, and maybe you’ll learn something too. I’m also not saying, by the way, that every kid will respond and get back on board, or that you can “save” them all. I’m just saying it can’t hurt to reach out with an open mind.
If reform were the actual and real goal, these would be great ideas. Instead their agenda seems use the name of “reform” to dismantle or privatize public education.
Yes to all, especially 18. Too often admnistrators forget what it was like to be in the classroom, or only spent a few years teaching.
I generally agree with your prescriptions re: teacher education and induction. I do have some things to add to your list.
For teacher course work, don’t forget summer sessions. They can be quite helpful. Also, a blanket rejection of alternative certification can impact areas of shortage, such as science and math, rural education, etc. As chair of the Loyola University/New Orleans Education Dept. in the 1980’s I pushed, post baccalaureate alternative certification with emphasis on but not only for folks with science/math degrees and relevant work experience. The program was small but generally successful.
School board elections can be made more meaningful if coupled with biennial general elections. Doing so saves money and reduces the impact of silly factions, aka Tea Party.
No on #18. This is an artificial barrier to school effectiveness. Principals who are perceived to be inept should be thanked for their service and shown the door. Good principals know what is happening in their classrooms and their presence should be maintained.
While in New Orleans I was invited by the Jefferson Parish School Board to conduct a Principals’ Leadership Project (96 schools). For three years, I believe we had some impact on how principals conducted their work. I key element was the organization of principals into five person teams and mandated observations of each school by every team every year. Principals participated in decision-making regarding the character of the project itself.
FYI: am now Professor Emeritus, College of Education, University of New Mexico. My last position at UNM was Chair, Division of Language, Learning and Sociocultural Studies.
I much appreciate your efforts in clarifying issues in education. Issues are extremely complex, varied and have all sorts of consequence, real and imaged. Thanks.
Sincerely,
Bill Kline
Bernalillo, NM
Diane,
I love your list. I think you should turn it into a petition to the White House! All of us would sign on!
Judy Palac
Beautifully written. Thank you. Can we send a million copies of this to the White House?