The Audacity of Hope

tolerance for mediocrity. Partly this is a result of ideological battles that are as outdated
as they are predictable. Many conservatives argue that money doesn’t matter in raising
educational achievement; that the problems in public schools are caused by hapless
bureaucracies and intransigent teachers’ unions; and that the only solution is to break up
the government’s education monopoly by handing out vouchers. Meanwhile, those on
the left often find themselves defending an indefensible status quo, insisting that more
spending alone will improve educational outcomes.
Both assumptions are wrong. Money does matter in education—otherwise why would
parents pay so much to live in well-funded suburban school districts?—and many urban
and rural schools still suffer from overcrowded classrooms, outdated books, inadequate
equipment, and teachers who are forced to pay out of pocket for basic supplies. But
there’s no denying that the way many public schools are managed poses at least as big a
problem as how well they’re funded.
Our task, then, is to identify those reforms that have the highest impact on student
achievement, fund them adequately, and eliminate those programs that don’t produce
results. And in fact we already have hard evidence of reforms that work: a more
challenging and rigorous curriculum with emphasis on math, science, and literacy skills;
longer hours and more days to give children the time and sustained attention they need
to learn; early childhood education for every child, so they’re not already behind on
their first day of school; meaningful, performance-based assessments that can provide a
fuller picture of how a student is doing; and the recruitment and training of
transformative principals and more effective teachers.
This last point—the need for good teachers—deserves emphasis. Recent studies show
that the single most important factor in determining a student’s achievement isn’t the
color of his skin or where he comes from, but who the child’s teacher is. Unfortunately,
too many of our schools depend on inexperienced teachers with little training in the
subjects they’re teaching, and too often those teachers are concentrated in already
struggling schools. Moreover, the situation is getting worse, not better: Each year,
school districts are hemorrhaging experienced teachers as the Baby Boomers reach
retirement, and two million teachers must be recruited in the next decade just to meet
the needs of rising enrollment.
The problem isn’t that there’s no interest in teaching; I constantly meet young people
who’ve graduated from top colleges and have signed up, through programs like Teach
for America, for two-year stints in some of the country’s toughest public schools. They
find the work extraordinarily rewarding; the kids they teach benefit from their creativity
and enthusiasm. But by the end of two years, most have either changed careers or
moved to suburban schools—a consequence of low pay, a lack of support from the
educational bureaucracy, and a pervasive feeling of isolation.
If we’re serious about building a twenty-first-century school system, we’re going to
have to take the teaching profession seriously. This means changing the certification
process to allow a chemistry major who wants to teach to avoid expensive additional
course work; pairing up new recruits with master teachers to break their isolation; and
giving proven teachers more control over what goes on in their classrooms.