Karl Weber - Waiting for SUPERMAN : How We Can Save Americas Failing Public Schools

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Table of Contents

PROLOGUE

THE PROBLEM

A Nation Still At Risk

In 1966, the famous Coleman Report alerted the American people to the unfolding tragedy of a dysfunctional educational system. Funded by the U.S. Department of Commerce in response to the concerns about educational inequality raised by the civil rights movement, the Coleman Report highlighted the alarming extent to which students from low-income minority groups were falling behind their more fortunate counterparts, creating a nation with two separate and radically unequal educational systems.

Seventeen years later, the National Commission on Excellence in Education issued its report on the declining quality of American schools in general. Titled A Nation At Risk: The Imperative for Educational Reform, the report startled the nation with its warning of a rising tide of mediocrity in our schools and its grim declaration, If an unfriendly foreign power had attempted to impose on America the mediocre educational performance that exists today, we might well have viewed it as an act of war.

More than four decades have passed since the publication of the Coleman Report, and almost three decades since A Nation At Riskdecades of debate, dissension, finger-pointing, and confusion. School systems around the country have made countless attempts to improve the overall quality of education, pursuing a wide variety of strategies. Families and communities have turned to private schools, charter schools, magnet schools, parochial schools, home-schooling, and a series of other attempted remedies. Major national efforts such as the No Child Left Behind legislation spearheaded by President George W. Bush and Senator Edward M. Kennedy have been mounted. Hundreds of billions of dollars have been thrown at the problem. Yet in the aggregate, the problems the Coleman Report and A Nation At Risk identified have not been alleviated. In fact, by most measures, they have only gotten worse.

Here are just some of the damning statistics that illustrate how serious the problems with American education have becomeand suggest some of the causes:

Eight years after the passage of No Child Left Behind, the United States has four years left to reach the acts goal of 100 percent proficiency in math and readingbut most states currently hover around 20 percent or 30 percent proficiency.

Among thirty developed countries, the United States is ranked twenty-fifth in math and twenty-first in science. When the comparison is restricted to the top 5 percent of students, the United States is ranked last.

Barely half of African-American and Latino students graduate from high school. African-American students graduate at 51 percent, Latinos at 55 percent, while their white counterparts graduate at (a still lower than optimal) 76 percent.

The economic costs of failing schools are enormous. For example, in Pennsylvania, 68 percent of state prison inmates are high school dropouts. The state spends $33,000 a year on each prisoner, and the total cost of the average prison term is $132,000. By contrast, the average private school costs $8,300 per student per year. So for the same amount, Pennsylvania could have sent a prison inmate to a private school from kindergarten through twelfth gradeand still had more than $24,000 left for college.

Fifty years ago, only 20 percent of high school graduates expected to go to college. Most of those who did would become doctors, lawyers, engineers, clergymen, and top corporate executives. The next 20 percent were expected to go straight into skilled jobs as accountants, managers, technicians, or bureaucrats, while the bottom 60 percent would become workers on farms and in factories, in an economy where those occupations generally paid wages sufficient to support a family. Based on these numbers, a system of tracking or grouping by ability emerged that served American school systems reasonably well. Today most middle-class high schools still track their students in this manner, even though the economy now requires a much higher percentage of college graduates. The gap between what we need and what we are producing is large, and growing. In fact, by the year 2020, 123 million American jobs will be in high-skill/high-pay occupations, from computer programming to bioengineering, but only 50 million Americans will be qualified to fill them.

The average college graduate earns 73 percent more than the average high school graduate in a lifetime. Based on this relationship, The Alliance for Excellent Education has estimated that the approximately 1.2 million students who should have graduated with the college class of 2008but failed to do sowill cost the nation nearly $319 billion in lost income over the course of their lives.

High school graduates on average live up to seven years longer than high school dropouts.

In 1970, the United States produced 30 percent of the worlds college graduates. Today it produces only 15 percent.

At Americas top 150 colleges, 90 percent of incoming freshmen come from families in the top half of U.S. annual income statistics.

Since 1971, education spending in the United States has more than doubled from $4,300 per student to more than $9,000 per student (adjusted for inflation). Yet in that same time period, reading and math scores have remained flat in the United States, even as they have risen in virtually every other developed country.

Teachers unions, originally formed in the mid-nineteenth century, began as leading voices in the national movement for womens rights and the rights of all working people. Today they are also major political forces. Taken together, the two biggest teachers unions, the National Education Association (NEA) and the American Federation of Teachers (AFT), are the nations largest contributors to political campaigns. Over the past twenty years, they have given more than $55 million to congressional candidates and their parties, more than the Teamsters, the National Rifle Association, the AARP, the National Chamber of Commerce, or any other organization. More than 90 percent of this money goes to Democrats.

As a profession, teachers enjoy some of the strongest protections of any group of workers. For example, in Illinois, 1 in 57 doctors loses his or her medical license, and 1 in 97 attorneys loses his or her law license, but only 1 teacher in 2,500 has ever lost his or her credentials.

In New York state, disciplinary hearings for teachers last eight times longer than the average U.S. criminal case. The cost to the State of New York of teachers awaiting these hearings is $65 million a year.

Recent research into teacher effectiveness demonstrates that the performance gap between the best teachers and the worst teachers is far greater than commonly supposed. On average, a teacher in the bottom quintile of effectiveness covers only 50 percent of the required curriculum in a school year, while a teacher in the top quintile covers 150 percent. Research reflects the cumulative impact of the difference on a group of students over multiple years: In Dallas, students who had three consecutive years of effective teachers improved their math test scores by 21 points, while students with three years of ineffective teachers fell 30 points behind.

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