Lowell Milken outlines a plan for improving teacher effectiveness through recruitment, training and compensation.
According to many indicators, the United States is lagging well behind other nations in the quality of our education. Our public schools are not preparing our children to be competitive in a global economy, and America will suffer as a result. This was the dilemma laid out by Andrew Rotherham of the Education Sector think tank, who asked the panelists how the United States got into this situation and what to do about it.
Former Colorado governor and former superintendent of the Los Angeles Unified School District Roy Romer blamed our current dismal performance on a lack of political leadership. He believes that state governors should be empowered and then held accountable to develop and enforce meaningful state educational standards. Romer also shared his belief that our current educational shortfall is so bleak that it will affect our prosperity and quality of life for at least a generation. He also made this plea to parents: "Your most important economic asset is your eighth grader."
Eli Broad of The Broad Foundation placed the blame squarely on the American people for being complacent. After World War II, the United States was on top of the world and the G.I. Bill ensured that we would stay on top by providing higher education to our returning soldiers. We are now lagging because we got overconfident. Broad would like to see a national science curriculum to help address the problem. Unfortunately, each of the 15,000 local school boards in America has the ability to set their own curricula and achievement standards. Furthermore, teachers in high-demand subjects and tough schools are not properly compensated.
Lowell Milken of the Milken Family Foundation, Knowledge Universe Education and the Teacher Advancement Program expanded on Broad's comments. He argued that more than a century's worth of lessons regarding management and performance have been ignored by the teaching profession. Teachers have no incentives for better performance. There is no career progression; there is minimal continuing education. High turnover and burnout are but a few of the symptoms. Most teachers come from the bottom half of their graduating classes in college. Inner-city schools get hit the worst because their teachers are generally the least qualified, the least prepared and the most overwhelmed. Meanwhile, older teachers settle into the easier jobs — without any further prompting for improved performance.
Milken called for more parental involvement and improved teacher effectiveness. However hard it may be to change the characteristics of a child's family involvement, teacher quality is something that we can fix. Milken believes this is possible through applying proven recruitment, compensation and management principles that work in other fields. He argued that teacher effectiveness is the single overwhelming indicator of educational outcomes.
Michael Morris of American Electric Power Company expressed his concern about the quality of education because it affects the quality of his work force. Today's teachers lack subject matter expertise and passion, he felt, and there are fewer quality teachers from the hard sciences and technical fields. Coming from a CEO, his advice was well-received: "If you raise expectations, then people will meet them…Raise the bar as high as you can, and they will exceed it every time." Morris opened up a copy of the Financial Times and read from its pages about a charter school in Cleveland that holds classes from 7:00 AM to 5:00 PM for eleven months a year with phenomenal results. "Kids love the rigor, and they step up to the challenge." Morris also suggested enhancing vocational programs in schools to ensure that students who do not excel academically could still receive decent work force preparation.
Gary Becker, a Nobel Laureate from the University of Chicago, at one point noted that our educational problem is due to poor economic incentives for teachers. At another moment he said that our K-12 teachers have let us down. He indicted the entire public school system, highlighting the importance of school choice. The room fell silent, however, when Becker reversed his earlier claims and suggested that our educational quality is just fine, but national averages are being brought down by the poor, urban minority students who lack the desire to do well in school. Becker bluntly maintained that those few students among this group who do possess the ability or innate desire to do well are ridiculed by the rest for "acting white." Most of the panelists steered clear of Becker's comments, but Broad responded: "We'd rather blame everyone else than look in the mirror."
Global Conference 2013
Former Prime Minister Tony Blair, philanthropist Bill Gates and Strive Masiyiwa of Econet Wireless discuss advancing prosperity in Africa.
