Looking Back

Yesterday, I shared some of Stacey Childress’s “Rethinking School,” an article first published in the Harvard Business Review in March of 2012.

Today, I thought it would be nice to share more of what Childress was thinking about our traditional K-12 system, especially the diagnosis of what the current reality looked like over 10 years ago.

Childress writes,

“In 2008 the Stanford economist Eric Hanushek developed a new way to examine the link between a country’s GDP and the academic test scores of its children. He found that if one country’s scores were only half a standard deviation higher than another’s in 1960, its GDP grew a full percentage point faster in every subsequent year through 2000.”

“Using Hanushek’s methods, McKinsey & Company has estimated that if the U.S. had closed the education achievement gap with better-performing nations, GDP in 2010 could have been 8% to 14% – $1.2 trillion to $2.1 trillion – higher. The report’s authors called this gap ‘the economic equivalent of a permanent national recession.’”

“The implications could not be clearer: The United States must recognize that its long-term growth depends on dramatically increasing the quality of its K-12 public education system.”

“How bad is it? – By practically any measure, the quality of public K-12 education in the United States is dismal. Of the high school seniors who in 2009 took the biennial National Assessment of Education Progress (NAEP) tests, administered by the U.S. Department of Education, fully 74% scored below proficient in mathematics, 62% in reading, and 79% in science. Within those sorry aggregate scores lay the familiar disparities among black and Hispanic Americans, who lag behind their fellow students on the exams by as much as 20 to 30 points. Poor K-12 achievement has a direct impact on success in higher education. Even though U.S. students have been getting into college in ever increasing numbers over the past 20 years, the college graduation rate has not risen. Over the past 30 years, nearly every labor-intensive service industry in the U.S. has seen dramatic increases in productivity, while public education has become roughly half as productive – spending twice the money per student to achieve the same results.”

“While the U.S. stagnates, other countries are pulling ahead. For instance, in 2009 the latest round of comparative international exams administered by the Organization for Economic Co-operation and Development (OECD), American 15-year-olds ranked 25^th in math, 17^th in reading, and 22^nd in science among its 34 member nations. Chinese students took the tests for the first time in 2009 and blew everyone away, ranking first in all three subject areas. More than 50% of China’s students scored in the top two levels (out of six) in math, while less than 10% of U.S. students did.”

“in 1990 the U.S. was first in the world in the percentage of 25- to 34-year-olds with college degrees. Today it is 10^th and dropping. Meanwhile, the need for those degrees in the workplace continues to intensify. In the recession year 1973, 28% of jobs in the workplace required a college degree. By 2007 the percentage had grown by 42%. By 2018, the U.S. Department of Education estimates that it will be 45%. Where will these degrees come from?”

“Forty years of education research confirms that the quality of a student’s teacher is the biggest factor in boosting that student’s performance. Good teachers make so great a difference that the lag in black and Hispanic children’s test scores disappears when they have teachers who, four years in a row, perform in the top quartile of teachers in their school or district. There are 3.5 million K-12 classroom teachers in the United States, according to the U.S. Bureau of Labor Statistics, making them the second largest workforce after retail clerks. They are employed by more than 14,000 separately governed school districts. Needless to say, incremental efforts to improve teacher effectiveness, while important, are complex and slow going.”

“Even in those places that have gone the furthest, progress has been nowhere near fast enough. New York City is a sobering example. The administration and unions there negotiated a contract that ended seniority preferences and gave principals broader hiring power. Years of investment in building a stronger applicant pool have paid off in some six applicants for every open teaching position. The city has invested tens of millions of dollars in better data systems, calculates the value each teacher contributes to student performance, and grades each school relative to other schools and its own past performance. These and other reforms have resulted in NAEP scores that rose 3% annually in math and reading between 2003 and 2011, even as national rates remained flat. But at that pace it will take more than 40 years for 80% of New York City students to reach math and reading proficiency, let alone the level of excellence that Chinese students are already achieving. For the U.S. to remain competitive, its students must go further faster.”

…

Childress wrote this over 10 years ago, and she could have written the same today. Of course, the COVID pandemic impacted student learning in this country, along with almost every country around the world. But, even before the pandemic, the United States showed almost no improvement in NAEP scores or college readiness. The academic results for black, brown, and pool students over the past decade have not improved.

So here are a couple question to think about?

Are we willing to double-down on Childress’s 2012 suggestion that the only thing we really need to do is improve our teaching workforce? Should we wait another 10 years, only to find out that this country’s commitment to identifying, selecting, compensating, and retaining a talented teaching cohort will continue to stall?

A beginning teacher in Iowa will make $47,500 beginning in the fall of 2024, up from $33,500. Is less than $50,000 the best way to attract our best and brightest to the classroom?

Doubtful.

When will we realize that our current public education system is unable to do what we need it to do moving forward?

Another 10 years? 20? 50?

Til tomorrow. SVB