23rd
Wow. Change.
David Brooks bring great news about education reform under the Obama administration:
These changes mean that states are raising their caps on the number of charter schools. When charters got going, there was a “let a thousand flowers bloom” mentality that sometimes led to bad schools. Now reformers know more about how to build charters and the research is showing solid results. Caroline Hoxby of Stanford University recently concluded a rigorous study of New York’s charter schools and found that they substantially narrowed the achievement gap between suburban and inner-city students.
The changes also will mean student performance will increasingly be a factor in how much teachers get paid and whether they keep their jobs. There is no consensus on exactly how to do this, but there is clear evidence that good teachers produce consistently better student test scores, and that teachers who do not need to be identified and counseled. Cracking the barrier that has been erected between student outcomes and teacher pay would be a huge gain.
While a lot of what Brooks praises is the start of reform, these are significant starts to large institutional change necessary not only to keep America competitive in the future but hopefully to save a generation of children increasingly be left very far behind. Teachers’ unions have fought for a long time against performance-based pay, keeping bad teachers in the classroom, and finding some type of performance-based pay structure could radically improve American education.
