Currengt Issues in Public Education

This past week I had the opportunity attend a press conference and lecture given by Dr. Frederick Hess. Harvard educated, Dr. Hess is currently a researcher for the American Enterprise Institute (AEI) in Washington, DC. Through the course of his discussions, Dr. Hess covered a wide variety of topics concerning the current state public education in the United States. He noted that there are over 100,000 schools in this country and over 14,000 school boards, a system that he believes is anachronistic.

While the US lags behind other developed industrialized nations (17 out of 74 in reading and 31 out of 74 in mathematics), it spends more educating each pupil than any of the other countries. Clearly money is not the solution to fixing the issues in our public education systems.

Dr., Hess noted that over the years, there have been a lot of “great new ideas” that school administrators latch on to as the magic bullet to fix education’s problems. But ultimately programs like “the small high school," whole language learning, block scheduling, and project based learning have had limited successes and were not widely adopted.

Another issue that was addressed was that of teacher retention. Dr. Hess believed that recruitment techniques needed to change. We can no longer rely on hiring a teacher and expecting that person to stay on the job in one school or district for 30 years. Like the Teach for America Program, founded by Princeton graduate Wendy Kopp, we need to set our sights on a shorter time frame, accepting the notion that a skilled individual may be willing to devote 2 or 3 years to being a teacher and then move on to another field of endeavor. The fact of the matter is that we need 300,000 teachers per year and we must devise a way to find and recruit them.

Dr. Hess also commented on the length of the school year. In other countries students are in school for over 200 days a year but here in the US most students attend classes for 180 days. Hess noted that as much as one third of the school day is spent on administrivia, like taking attendance, school assemblies, and dealing with discipline issues. Only 65% of the school day is actually spent on learning.

Hess left his audience with an important question to ponder, “Should every school be required to meet every need for every child?”

Dr. Hess’ latest book, “Cage- Busting Leadership” is now available from Harvard Education Press.

c. 2013 J. Margolis