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Education plan to target worst schools
College students in classroom.
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Kai Ryssdal: Hot on the heels of health care reform and financial reform, we have education reform. Education Secretary Arne Duncan went to Capitol Hill to talk about overhauling No Child Left Behind, including a $4 billion bump in federal education spending. A chunk of it's going to go to improving the nation's lowest-performing schools. Marketplace's Nancy Marshall Genzer reports.
NANCY MARSHALL GENZER: Education secretary Arne Duncan testified at back-to-back hearings today before the House and Senate education committees. He told the House committee we have to educate our way to a better economy.
ARNE DUNCAN: Twenty-seven percent of America's young people drop out of high school. That is economically unsustainable, and morally unacceptable.
So, the Obama administration has decided to focus on the lowest performing schools. And the new plan doesn't rely solely on test scores to measure success, like No Child Behind does. If a student doesn't test well, but advances a grade, that's progress.
Gary Huggins analyzes education reform at the Aspen Institute.
GARY HUGGINS: If someone takes a student, a year-and-a-half or two years worth of progress in a year, that's success. So in many ways that's more fair.
The Obama administration is proposing $400 million in school turnaround grants. But the bottom 5 percent of schools wouldn't get any money unless they took drastic steps like firing teachers or converting to charters.
Rebecca Kelly teaches fifth grade at an elementary school in Detroit. She says there are some things that teachers can't control.
REBECCA KELLY: You know, sleep, warmth, hunger, love. You can't learn unless all of those basic needs are met.
Kelly's school has pulled itself up and is now one of the top performers. But that only happened after it got a federal grant to buy food for students to take home.
In Washington, I'm Nancy Marshall Genzer for Marketplace
Refusing grants to the worst-off schools is good. Why should poor performing school be given government funding to continue when there are higher performing school that would benefit more from this money. Jenny from http://www.schoolgrantsresrouce.com
Refusing grants to the worst-off schools is good. Why should poor performing school be given government funding to continue when there are higher performing school that would benefit more from this money. Jenny from <a href="http://www.schoolgrantsresrouce.com">School Grants</a>
It may sound heartless, but refusing grants to the worst-off schools is sound thinking. (So I'm rather surprised to hear it under this administration ...) If we continued to give money to non-performing schools, but not to effective ones, schools have an incentive to drop performance and none to improve. If you tax something, it will decrease; if you subsidize something, it will grow. So we ought to subsidize what works, not what doesn't.
Even our best efforts to improve education for poor students are doomed. Many, if not most, kids who drop out or grossly underperform in school come from homes or family circumstances which are unstable. We can only hope to improve their educational prospects and overall success by first addressing the factors contributing to their troubled homelife. One key, and relatively cheap means of improving family "quality" is to assist young or troubled would-be parents in postponing children until they are in a financial, emotionally mature and stable place to raise kids.
President StayTheCourse may have ridden off into the sunset, but this isn't really a revamp/repeal of No Child Left Behind. It's just shuffling deck chairs.
Kids drop out of academics because academics isn't for everyone. If you can't solve for the roots of a 2nd order equation, don't hammer them into submission. Divert their energy into apprenticeships and useful development suited for them.
It's a shame that the US hasn't instituted more vocational training schools as a valid alternative to traditional high school.
