Education Forecast for U.S. and Iowa Remains Cloudy

One particularly cloudy day last spring a 15 year old walked out the doors of Callanan Middle School. He never came back. Nobody noticed him leave and few inside the school that afternoon have given much thought to where he went. Another dropout. Another casualty of our flawed school system. Education in America weeds out kids like him not by design, but by necessity.

With great fanfare, the last U.S. President announced Leave No Child Behind, a federal program to grade schools on performance, establish strict standards for improvement and to penalize schools that fail to make the grade. Leave No Child Behind creates the institutional equivalent of the middle school dropout I mentioned. Like him, once a school falls far enough behind there is little hope it will ever catch-up to its peers. Leave No Child Behind does a great job of identifying a problem, but little to fix it.

The current administration created a new program coined Race to the Top. The name is appropriate, because like any race there will be winners and there will be losers – some will graduate and some will dropout. States and schools compete for federal stimulus money based on a new set of rules. To qualify for the competition and be able to vie for Uncle Sam’s largesse, states and school districts must tie teacher evaluations to test scores, adopt tough sounding standards, turn-around low performing schools, build student tracking systems and remove restrictions on the creation of charter schools.

The “Race,” like its predecessor, is about rewarding those schools that make the grade and penalizing those that fail. Raise test scores and the money flows. The problem is that those who want to win the Race will focus on raising test scores, even though it is widely accepted that testing prowess is meaningless if students cannot apply what they learn in the real world. In Des Moines, fourth grade test scores have improved, but our drop-out rate is still climbing. Eighth grade test scores have ticked upwards, but we still have students graduating unprepared for college or the workplace.

When announcing the Race to the Top, President Obama said, “This competition will not be based on politics, ideology, or the preferences of a particular interest group. Instead, it will be based on a simple principle—whether a state is ready to do what works. We will use the best data available to determine whether a state can meet a few key benchmarks for reform—and states that outperform the rest will be rewarded with a grant. Not every state will win and not every school district will be happy with the results. But America’s children, America’s economy, and America itself will be better for it.”

Really? This sounds a lot like politics to me. States that perform well will be rewarded. Not every state will win. As usual, some will graduate and some will fall farther behind. Boo.

Governor Culver, fresh from his Florida triathlon, announced Iowa is going to enter the Race. It has to. Iowa is awash in red ink and there is $175 million at stake. He offered no details what entering would mean, but he is busily filling out our race entry form anyway.

Because space in a blog is limited, I will not address the rich irony in “stimulus” money being used to dole out educational dollars, money that has nothing to do with stimulating the economy. Education in America creates dropouts because our system is less about helping students reach their potential and more about winning the next test score race. Knee jerk, short-term political efforts to stimulate good feelings and talking tough about education may play well with some core constituent groups, but does little to address the educational failure in the United States. Education gets talked about during elections and when times are tough. The Race provides the illusion something is being done to reform education, but doesn’t do much to solve the real issues festering in our schools.

America’s schools meet the needs of some students at the expense of others. The boy who walked out of Callanan was passed through the system until he was so far behind he saw little reason to stay in the classroom. In the long run, test scores will go up because he and many like him are no longer taking the tests. False incentive programs like the Race and Leave No Child Behind identify troubled schools and push the problems into new places, but rarely solve them. This is similar to a circus clown squeezing the air in a balloon to change its shape from a dog to a party hat.

Waving a one-time prize purse in front of cash hungry states and school districts has gotten some people’s attention. Governor Culver told the Iowa Association of School Boards, “one thing is for certain: Iowa’s school system will not look the same a year from now as it does today.” Well, Governor, it may look different next year, but it will remain the same limp balloon.

Students like the former middle schooler above will continue to fall far short of their potential and through the gaping cracks in the system. Their prospects and the forecast for our collective future will remain cloudy until we commit to more than gimmicky races and short-term programs. America’s future is tied to its ability to educate and prepare students for tomorrow’s opportunities. We must stop playing political games with education money and launch a fundamental redesign of U.S. schools.

This entry was first published as a Des Moines Register blog entry.