La última vez que hubo una reforma importante con la amplitud que ahora
se requiere, Dwight D. Eisenhower era presidente. Se hizo responsable
de la ley de Educación y Defensa Nacional de 1958, cuando la Unión
Soviética lanzó Sputnik y nos preocupaba tener que fortalecer nuestras
capacidades en las matemáticas y las ciencias.
HOUSTON — I have an acquaintance who is so sarcastic — should I say cynical — that when I told him I was writing about education reform, he asked how would it affect high-school football.
After decades of studies about how the nation’s children should be educated for the challenges of the 21st century, pom-poms should not rate very high.
Distractions and irrelevancies creep in, as we have witnessed during the health-care debate. As with education, it has a long patchwork history, with no agreement on how to make it accessible to everyone. Inaction affects the well-being of every citizen. Reforming it has been discussed for decades, and the wacko portion of the public gets activated at the slightest instigation to divert the discussion to nonsense or paranoia — concerns about immigrants and abortions. Three decades ago similar forces tried to stop Medicare by calling it “socialism.” The last education reform, in the ’50s, was blistered as “federal control.”
The last time major reform occurred with a scope like that needed now, Dwight D. Eisenhower was president. He was responsible for the National Education and Defense Act in 1958, when the Soviet Union launched Sputnik and we were concerned that our math and science capacity needed to be beefed up. Not enough of our young people were going to college, it was believed, to catch up in the “space race.”
Today we are justifiably spooked by our position relative to emerging nations that are building their economies through knowledge and getting market share in industries we had believed were our private domain —engineering, medicine, information technology, biotech, etc. In other words, to remain competitive we must grow and collaborate across borders and cultures.
In 1940, about one-half-million of us, or 15 percent of that age group, attended college. By 1960, college enrollments had expanded to 3.6 million, launching a higher-education growth decade. By 1970, 7.5 million students, or 40 percent of college-age youths, were enrolled, comprising roughly 30 percent of the world’s college students.
In 2008, the graduation rate from high school was 77%, below most developed countries, and we were educating about 14 percent of the world’s college students. Today, barely a quarter of the U.S. population over 25 years have a post-secondary diploma.
The challenge is to improve the quality of instruction, graduate on time and become productive to self and society. This month President Obama spotlighted his approach to education as the “Race to the Top,” a $4 billion grant program intending to reward school districts that set high standards and advance. The administration said states would compete for the money by demonstrating significant buy-in from local school districts and developing plans to evaluate teachers and principals based on improved student performance. According to U.S. Secretary of Education Arne Duncan, those are the most important factors.
But the administration’s approach seems to overlook clear and direct reform blueprints like those of the New Commission on the Skills of the American Workforce, which advocates for advancing U.S. education into the 21st century through a complete restructuring of public schooling rather than through incremental change.
It is about more than spreading dollars for more studies. It calls for a national vision and leadership in addressing the topmost issues dealing directly with our college-graduation rate, which has sunk below the average of all advanced economies.
Reasons for change are abundant: lack of college preparation for the productive years ahead and lack of adequate finances to make attending college a probability, not just a possibility, for all students..
The administration may have missed the chance of a lifetime by failing to spotlight two or three reform approaches for state systems to choose from to revamp the nation’s 16,210 school systems.
The Obama administration’s reform approach waves pom-poms but leaves formulating the game plan on the field to others. Somehow, it seems more concerned with making reform not look like change.
[José de la Isla is a former assistant professor of education at the University of Oregon. His latest digital book, sponsored by The Ford Foundation, is available free at www.DayNightLifeDeathHope.com. He writes a weekly commentary for Hispanic Link News Service and is author of The Rise of Hispanic Political Power (2003). E-mail him at joseisla3@yahoo.com.]
