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Eight great education ideas for the Obama administration

Posted on November 13, 2008 by Staff

By Margot Carmichael Lester and Steve Peha

During the final presidential debate, we waited eagerly for the candidates’ responses to Bob Schieffer’s question about education. We weren’t impressed with what we heard. Vague chatter about vouchers and turning retired military personnel into teachers didn’t thrill us.

Maybe that’s because we work in schools all the time and know how hard it is to create real change and that there are deeper problems facing our pubic-education system. Here then, are eight ideas for the Obama administration that will stop paying lip service to education reform and start making real changes that benefit our teachers, administrators and kids.

1. Create and fund the $100,000 teacher. In his book, The $100,000 Teacher: A Solution to America’s Declining Public School System, Brian Crosby makes the case for highly paid teachers and how they could be compensated out of existing public school funding.

2. Make higher education more affordable to qualified students. According to the College Board, average tuition and fees at four-year public institutions increased 51 percent over the last five years. The College Opportunity and Affordability Act of 2008, which increased the federal Pell Grant program and textbook pricing reform, among other things, is a start. But continued federal leadership in this area is needed.

3. Create a national policy enabling high school graduates who are undocumented immigrants to receive in-state tuition at public universities receiving federal funding. The National Immigration Law Center estimates that 65,000 undocumented students who came to the United States before age 15 and have lived in the United States at least five years graduate from high school annually. The kids are here to stay, and it’s in our best interest to offer affordable higher education to those who want to pursue it.

4. Adopt the Teach For America model as a domestic Peace Corps for education. Teach for America places about 3,700 new teachers a year in low-income communities across the country, but that’s not nearly enough to address the national teacher shortage. We suggest adopting the TFA model and creating a national teacher corps – a domestic Peace Corps for education. This would create a short-term infusion of new teachers with good training and support to work in the districts with the highest need. It also would bring non-traditional educators into the system.

5. Reform No Child Left Behond (NCLB) to fund best-practice training in literacy and classroom management. Currently, money schools receive through the Federal Title programs (via NCLB) isn’t always used to train teachers in effective methods. By requiring that a portion of these funds be spent in literacy and classroom management (two of the highest impact areas) struggling schools would likely make more progress than they are now.

6. Reform NCLB to fund best-practice training for administrators. Currently, administrators receive almost no training. Yet they are the leaders of their schools. Targeting a small portion of federal funding to be spent on high-quality instructional and operational training for principals and assistant principals would make many schools more successful.

7. Conduct a national literacy training program for all public-school teachers at all grades based on best-practice methods. Test scores increasingly show that American students are losing ground – particularly in the fundamental areas of reading, writing and thinking. This means that literacy is no longer just for elementary school. Yet most schools of education don’t teach basic literacy methods to candidates planning to teach middle or high school. To meet the needs of students who are lagging behind, and those who are new to English, we need a national best-practice literacy training program to provide teachers with the skills they need to improve student achievement.

8. Make the NAEP the single official student assessment for all states. Right now, our testing system is in chaos because states differ widely on the definition of grade-level performance. The NAEP test, which is taken now by small numbers of students in all 50 states, has been recognized as the most consistently reliable measure of student achievement.

Provided that NCLB is fully funded in its 2009 re-authorization, it’s possible that each of these reforms could be implemented, at least at a pilot level, with minimal impact on the federal education budget. Reforms like these are not only doable, they get to the heart of what is wrong with our education system rather than merely tinkering at the margins, as most current proposals have.

3 thoughts on “Eight great education ideas for the Obama administration”

  1. Elliott says:
    November 13, 2008 at 2:45 pm

    Why not just expand Teach For America, rather than create a whole new government controlled entity? The organization already receives funding from both public and private sources, and boasts an incredibly bipartisan support base.

  2. Brian Crosby says:
    November 13, 2008 at 4:40 pm

    Thanks for mentioning my first book. My latest book just came out, Smart Kids, Bad Schools: 38 Ways to Save America’s Future. I also founded the American Education Association. Let’s hope the Obama administration truly transforms public schools.

  3. jojo says:
    December 12, 2008 at 9:15 pm

    One great idea for the writer of this article:

    1. lay off the pipe.

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