Education reform is another Vietnam. We’re fighting a war that we have neither the will nor the willingness to win. While the executive branch spills symbolic rhetoric such as “no child left behind,” the legislative branch refuses to commit the resources to the field. As if in parody of the 1960s poster that whimsically proposed better funding for schools while making the Air Force hold bake sales to buy bombs, the Colorado Senate sends a bill for funding full-day kindergarten to the Veterans and Military Affairs Committee to be killed. Career leadership operates out of an outmoded mindset. Troops in the trenches suffer the demoralizing barrages of a nation that blames them for being there. The technology and methods aren’t suited to this new breed of warfare.

The current education reform movement started over a decade ago with a broad and bipartisan agenda: let’s set high standards for all, and then go about meeting them. It has fractured into a competing and distracting set of denominators which cancel each other out. If we wanted to kill education reform, we couldn’t come up with a better set of diversionary tactics:

Vouchers. The bottom line should be, who cares? Sure, if you believe the rhetoric, we can "rescue" a few students from the “depraved” conditions of urban schools, but what about the rest? Unless we can find more than a handful of church schools where college educated professionals are willing to work for McDonald’s wages, giving vouchers to private and parochial schools will be only a drop in the bucket of systemic reform.

Testing. Let’s not confuse the diagnosis with the cure. Colorado, like most states, has invested in a very expensive and time-consuming set of thermometers (the funding for the best of which, such as the performance-based writing assessment, is being cut back). Now we are pointing to the patient and saying, we see that you are not well, so heal thyself. Amidst continual squabble about the best cures, such as the merits of whole language versus phonics, we’re committing the resources to neither. We have plenty of tests to show that our schoolchildren are lacking in literacy and numeracy; but show me the teacher in a public school classroom who has the time, the training, and the resources to make a dent in the problem.

Bilingual education. There is a complex and—as with most science—conflicting body of research that points to the best strategies for helping second language learners speak English, while simultaneously learning the other stuff they’re supposed to pick up in school. There are multiple defensible lines of attack which would better be determined in the field than from command central. The legislative and policy debate is distracting from, rather than contributing to, the solution.

In God We Trust. In a theocracy, divine authority supercedes the authority of the state. It’s as if the legislature realizes it has so gutted the credibility of any civil authority to guide and regulate what goes on in the classroom, that it needs to bring in the watchful eye of the Lord to mind the chaos it has wrought. The Colorado Senate President, who propones religion in schools, has signed a pledge opposing government funding for education. My neighborhood grocer has a sign above the register: “In God We Trust. All Others Pay Cash.” It’s time we render unto Caesar and pay, not just pray, for the education we want for our children.

How might we reverse the tide? The first phase of the reform movement was spent debating and deciding what standards we want children to achieve—as in warfare, we have a clear objective. Let’s get back to how. Here are two lessons from modern warfare:

Light action. The research is overwhelming that a quality teacher, not a political agenda, is the most important influence on student achievement. We need highly trained, professional teachers, who are emboldened with the credibility and flexibility to do what’s best for the kids in their classrooms. They need to be organized into effective teams with strong local leadership and collegial relationships. We need to invest more in training these troops. What works in the jungle is not the same as what works in the desert. We need to stop legislating a comprehensive agenda that attempts to impose a uniform strategy for multiple contexts. Marching in formation is obsolete.

Overwhelming force. We need to be willing to dedicate the resources to win this war. Education funding is currently the opposite of strategic planning. In education, we start with how much we have, and then we decide how we’re going to spend it. We need, instead, to start with our objectives, and plan backwards from there. When we do, we will not design a plan that puts 37 students in a classroom; that gives a teacher 180 students (and papers to grade) per day; that provides textbooks and reading materials inappropriate to the language and learning needs of the students. We need to be sparing in our commitment of troops and weaponry, but without an increase in personnel and materiel, we will certainly lose.

Education reform should be the moral equivalent of war, not the political equivalent of Vietnam. Let’s stop the infighting and fight to win the war, or we may as well surrender and admit defeat.

Resources:

• HeadFirst Colorado is a non-profit organization which aims to foster informed debate and decisions on issues that affect the quality of education in Colorado schools.
• Visit the Connect for Kids’ education topic pages

Talk Back

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Rob Stein is Head of School at Graland School in Denver.