The Promise and Pitfalls of Public Education: What We All Need to Know

Twenty-seven years since the publication of "A Nation at Risk," the alarming report that warned of "a rising tide of mediocrity" in U.S. schooling that threatened the country's "preeminence in commerce, industry, science, and technological innovation," the needle has not moved much for public education. I was reminded of this when I read Carlo Rotella's profile of Secretary of Education Arne Duncan in this week's New Yorker (the magazine's subscribers can read the full digital version; others can purchase access).

Duncan is on the side of what Rotella calls the "free-market reformers" – those "who believe that competition, choice, and incentives" are the keys to improving all that ails public education. In plain language, that means more public charter schools, merit pay for teachers, and data systems that track student performance from pre-K through college.

What's unusual – even unprecedented – about Duncan is that he's not just delivering his thoughts from a bully pulpit. He was given $98 billion in stimulus money, $4 billion of which comprises the Race to the Top grant program that the secretary gets to dole out to the states that best follow his lead. Last week President Obama, Duncan's longtime basketball buddy, announced an additional $1.3 billion, part of a $3 billion increase in kindergarten-twelfth-grade funding in his new budget -- in a largely frozen fiscal environment.

Critics say the problem, as The New Yorker piece points out, is that not all of Duncan's ideas have been proven to work and that for all of the expectations he built up at the beginning of his tenure, his ideas are more or less a rehash of his Republican predecessor.

The even bigger problem, of course, is that over the past two-plus decades, few ideas have proven to work. International assessments continue to place American students behind those of other industrialized countries. While the National Assessment of Educational Progress, also known as "the nation's report card," shows gains for fourth- and eighth-graders in reading and math, over the past 35 years it hasn't translated into sustained improvement. Twelfth-graders' reading and math scores remain essentially unchanged.

But perhaps the biggest problem is that testing kids, offering performance pay and promoting charter schools doesn't get at the real issue: Maybe we're all placing too much of a burden on schools to fix society's other ills, even though, as Duncan habitually says, "education is the civil rights issue of our time." President Obama reiterated the thought in last night's State of the Union Address when he said, "In the 21st century, one of the best anti-poverty programs is a world-class education. In this country, the success of our children cannot depend more on where they live than their potential."

Speaking strictly as a public-school parent, it doesn't make sense to me that a teacher, no matter how fabulous, can be expected to compensate for a child's coming to school hungry; for a child who hasn't been read to at home or been prompted to finish homework; a child who didn't get a good night's sleep. The list goes on.

Those lessons take place at home, not in the classroom. Still, I applaud the president for throwing his budgetary weight behind improving education. It's been an ideal for too long. In this economic climate, it's now an imperative.