For those intrigued by the new report Tough Choices or Tough Times, Colorado is ground zero for reform. This is the place to be for anyone eager to jump into the nuts-and-bolts debate on whether and how the K-12 education system can be transformed.
“No state has expressed more excitement,” former Secretary of Labor William Brock told the Denver Post about the report’s reception here.
Brock and National Center on Education and the Economy President Marc Tucker, both members of the New Commission on the Skills of the American Workforce that generated the report, recently shared their thoughts with a teeming crowd of 600 at the Colorado Convention Center in Denver. The January 17 event was co-sponsored by the Donnell-Kay Foundation and the Piton Foundation.
In attendance was Speaker of the House Andrew Romanoff, who immediately upon the report’s release in December expressed interest in moving the plan forward in Colorado. New Lieutenant Governor Barbara O’Brien offered one of the enthusiastic introductions from the platform.
Notably, both Romanoff and O’Brien are Democrats. To their credit, they are willing to think—and act—outside the education establishment box.
The amazing level of interest witnessed here in Colorado suggests that free market reformers risk ignoring the report at our peril. With this consideration in mind, I had perused through the report before attending the forum.
Regardless of your opinion of its merits, Tough Choices or Tough Times cannot be labeled a tepid call to trim a little fat from the K-12 education system. Tucker and Brock said we can no longer afford to tinker around the edges. Instead, they expressed a remarkable sense of urgency surrounding the need to bring wholesale reform to the way the nation runs its public schools.
Brock, who served in President Reagan’s Cabinet, painted a bleak portrait of our nation’s prospects of preserving its high standard of living. Growing numbers of engineers from India and China provide much cheaper labor than Americans with comparable skills. The United States needs to raise the output of its students’ math and science skills to compete, breaking the industrial mold by producing more workers who will find success through creativity and innovative thinking.
While Brock highlighted the problem, Tucker outlined the Commission’s comprehensive list of solutions: refocus teacher recruitment, overhaul teacher compensation, raise standards significantly, streamline assessments, reconfigure school governance, focus funding on students’ needs, to name a few.
Both the report and the speakers emphasized that the reforms will only work as a package deal, not as piecemeal fixes. In part, they say this is because certain reforms bring large-scale savings and others require significant investment. All told, “we need less money than one might think,” about $8 billion, or less than 2 percent of national current education spending.
Such an admission may irritate some apologists for the status quo. In 2005 the Colorado School Finance Project, a non-profit group funded by school employee interest groups, said that Colorado alone needed $800 million to $1.5 billion more in new funding to provide an “adequate” education.
Of course, their findings presume current funds are being used efficiently. Yet the executive summary of Tough Choices or Tough Times frankly proclaims: “We tolerate an enormous amount of waste in the system.”
Supporting its claim, a new Education Sector report by Dr. Marguerite Roza conservatively estimates that 19 percent of current education spending is diverted into areas consistently shown not to improve student achievement. As Rosa points out, a large portion of the misplaced spending priorities is reflected in how we pay teachers.
The Commission says we should trim public educator pensions to compare with generous private sector packages and raise starting teacher salaries to match the national average to recruit qualified candidates from the top third of the market. Tucker said extensive polling confirms that the reshaped compensation packages would bring more of the brightest and best into the nation’s classrooms.
The report further calls for the abolition of tenure, which keeps many poorly-performing teachers in classrooms, and the distribution of performance-based incentives for instructors who demonstrate excellence. These ideas reflect essential common sense yet fly in the face of the vested interests of unions and other establishment groups.
Then again, so does advocating for universal public school choice through a system of contract schools operated by independent contractors rather than micromanaged by government bureaucracies. Money would be attached to the child based on need (read: Weighted Student Funding), and “[p]arents and students could choose among all the available contract schools.”
As one who accepts the notion that the current system needs to be shaken up and put back together, I could gladly shout an “Amen” from the pew in support of these seemingly radical ideas.
The teachers union lobbyists sitting nearby were probably a little less comfortable. The call for universal preschool may have suited their tastes more.
Despite a favorable interest in some of the proposals, market reformers cannot in good conscience make the wholesale leap onto the Commission report’s bandwagon. Even the best aspects of the overall plan are tied to an overarching scheme that would centralize greater responsibility for education at the level of state government.
The strongest lovers of educational freedom may want to reject the report, but they at least should seek to inject a bit of wisdom first. We can start on the common ground that the current system needs some serious repair.
Tough Choices or Tough Times has opened the door wide for a significant education policy discussion, and nowhere wider than in Colorado. Those who believe in the transforming power of choice and competition should find a platform and join the conversation.
Ben DeGrow is an education policy analyst for the Independence Institute, a free market think tank in Golden, Colo. He also keeps his own Web log at bendegrow.com.