Hosted by The Center for Education Reform
Hosted by The Center for Education Reform
ON EDUCATION REFORM
By U.S. Senator John Kerry (D-MA)
Excerpted from a graduation speech to Northeastern University, June 16, 1998
'Our school buildings are little more than a skeleton of the structure a good schooling demands. Books are scarce and there is a great divide between the amount of money...our cities spend...Those who can are hiring private tutors and schooling the young in church schools and at home. As it stands in this era our schools - those designed to educate our children in the new century - simply will endure no longer.'
1998? No! This expert was focused on the crisis of the age in 1830. His name is Horace Mann, a son of Massachusetts and the first Superintendent of Schools in the United States...For the generations that followed Horace Mann, we made the right decisions and led the world in the quality and universality of our schools. No one could honestly make that claim today. For the second time in our nation's history, we must entirely re-structure public education and for the first time, we must rethink the way in which we use our school buildings themselves. While good things are happening in many of our schools - and I will say more about them - there is a set of implacable facts that scream a larger truth at us: This is the last week of the school year in America, when principals across the country will hand diplomas to a student population where fully one-third of the recipients are below average readers, one-third read at basic level, and only one-third are proficient!
What is the measurement of that diploma when 29% of all college freshmen require remedial classes in basic skills?; when our high school students edge out only South Africa and Cyprus on international tests in science and math. And what are we doing to prepare, guide and protect our children for success?... We all know that every child can learn. But we also know that not every child is learning. Despite the obvious measure of the challenge, for the most part, we are now only tinkering at edges carefully circumscribed by political timidity and powerful interest groups.
We are stuck in ideological cement of our own mixing, and because of it, American parents are voting with their feet - and with their cars. Every morning, more and more parents - rich, middle class, and even the poor - are driving their sons and daughters to parochial schools where they believe there will be more discipline, more standards, and more opportunity. Families are enrolling their children in Charter schools, paying for private schools when they can afford them, or even resorting to home schooling - the largest growth area in American education. We're not hearing the real voice of those concerned about the state of education in America today. Listen to what Hugh Price, President of the Urban League, recently said: "We love our public schools, but we love our children even more." That truth makes it clear that this is no passing fad - it is not merely the issue of the moment. In my judgment, the challenge of restoring the quality of our public schools is nothing less than the battle for their survival, as well as the survival of the fabric of our country...
On balance - in every political discussion of education - both parties choose to focus only on the easy, the obvious and the predictable -- poll tested, sound bite ready. To my fellow Democrats, let me say simply: if we don't come up with real answers for what ails our schools, then our defense of public schools will become the defeat of the public schools. We can't afford to be uncritical apologists for public schools that work for our bureaucrats, but not for our kids. Make no mistake: the public school system should survive not because it is there today; not because of politics or patronage; and certainly it should not survive if it cannot do the job - no: the public school system should survive because such a system is our only hope as a nation of making real the promise of this country - it is the only way to break down the barriers established by our own worst instincts - barriers of race, creed, class and color and to build up the foundation of democracy. Anything less would Balkanize America by money, race, religion and politics.
... If we are to have a debate about true education reform, we must search out the truth -- and that search begins with the essential knowledge that there is no Republican truth, no Democrat truth -- no ideological silver bullet and, most of all, no quick fix. ... The truth is there's a crisis of leadership in our public schools today. There's a crisis of leadership when you have some school committees that put politics ahead of children and learning; there are school boards larded down with decades worth of bureaucracy; and too often there are too many teachers' unions which blur the lines between management and labor and fight for turf when they should be fighting for the tools to succeed. There are too many parents who believe their job ends when they send their child to the school door and too many who send their child through that door hungry, exhausted and angry. ... It is time that we change the governance structure of schools across the nation. We have vast bureaucracies in many school boards, bureaucracies that seem to remove even the semblance of accountability from the system. We impose so many rules and regulations on our principals 'from above' that we forget teaching happens 'on the ground' - in a school building, in a classroom. But you won't find accountability there because it's been fractured and scattered in hundreds of different offices and titles. We're left with a system where no one is held responsible for our kids. Yet nothing is more important than leadership and accountability. The chaos in governance leads to an unacceptable turn-over in principals and superintendents. We ignore the great unheralded crisis in our public schools: the challenge of recruiting strong principals. The average term of a superintendent is three years - hardly time to change the culture of a school, build relationships, and establish continuity. All too frequently new voices on school boards install new programs with a new direction that itself is all too frequently changed.
We have clogged, bureaucratic systems where bargaining agreements have become embedded into the system, and places where a principal can only hire a teacher from another district if a majority of teachers in that school vote to approve; systems where principals are forced to hire the most senior teacher in the system rather than the teacher they want to recruit. We already know the solution. There is evidence all around us of how to build public schools that work. .... In almost all of the success stories, you have a principal with effective leadership skills, empowered to create an effective team - to recruit, hire, and transfer teachers and engage parents
...So let us now turn to a bold answer: Let's make every public school in this country essentially a charter school within the public school system... We need to put into place adequate evaluation processes for existing teachers together with significant professional development opportunities... We need to give teachers the chance to hone their skills. ....For decades, private schools have had the pick of the top graduates from the best colleges. You might wonder why... Because in most states public schools can't even bid for their talents under current certification rules. We've built an education school monopoly that bars or limits liberal arts students from teaching in public education. In almost all districts in the country we hire only education majors to teach -- and that's precisely why you have one-third of your teachers in Science and Math teaching 'out of field,' teachers who did not major or minor in the subjects they teach... I believe every principal in this country ought to have the same right as headmasters at private schools - to hire a liberal arts graduate as a teacher and to measure their competency.
...Finally, with these tools in place, we must end teacher tenure as we know it and replace it as in Massachusetts with a fair dismissal policy. I believe every teacher should have due process and protection from arbitrary, capricious political firing but no teacher should have a lock on any job and it should not take tens of thousands of dollars and years in the court to let go a teacher who will not or can not help our kids succeed. In addition the perception is widespread that teachers hide behind the protection of tenure, that the institution defends teachers who even co-workers are convinced can't perform up to standards. So insulated by tenure are these teachers that principals who actually want to make decisions can't even transfer them out of their schools...
We should not embrace private school vouchers until we have exhausted all these steps to make every public school work. Those who speak on behalf of private school vouchers - many of them with the best of - - say that we are dealing with a moral issue. They are right. They say vouchers can save 1,000 students in a school district of 5,000 from schools that are broken. They say the moral dilemma is that those of us who believe in the public schools won't lift those 1,000 students out of the system. Let me tell you, they have missed the moral dilemma entirely. The real moral dilemma in this country is why, in a school district of 5,000, the richest nation on the face of the earth is not committed to saving every student.
...Shame on us all for giving up on the vast majority of our children before we've even joined the real fight. Shame on us also for not realizing that there are parents in this country who care little about politics or party, who, today, support vouchers not because they are enamored with private schools, not because they hope to hasten the decline of public schools, but because they want a choice for their children. [Emphasis added.] They want alternatives - and seeing none in our rigid system, they are willing and some even desperate to look elsewhere.
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(Editor's note: Our apologies for not being able to print the whole speech, and yes, we were very selective in our editing to show you areas that are both striking and unusual for their passion. We direct you to Senator Kerry's website for the full text, at http://www.senate.gov/~kerry/releases/edsp616.htm. Senator Kerry deserves credit for recognizing some of the very real impediments to reform - both politically and from the BLOB. )
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