How to fix USA schools

By Marty Nemko

In the last 35 years alone, we have bet $3 trillion in tax dollars that we can improve the schools. Unfortunately, we’ve lost the bet. According to educational assessment’s gold standard—the National Assessment of Educational Progress—student achievement has barely budged since NAEP began measuring the impacts of the school reform movement in 1969. In international comparisons, American students score near the bottom among industrialized nations. Even our top students are now sinking compared with other countries’ best students.
As disheartening, the definitive study of the effectiveness of Title I, the expensive linchpin of the federal government’s efforts to help low-performing schools, finds that Title I hasn’t even made a dent into the differences between society’s have and have-nots—and since 1989, the achievement gap has actually increased.

Why Are the Schools So Bad?
Why have we lost our $3 trillion bet on school reform?
Some people believe that it’s because the schools need still more money. This is a view promulgated mainly by self-serving educators. Fact is, study after study has found that increasing school spending has not improved student achievement.For example, a truly massive spending increase in the Kansas City schools resulted in no improvement whatsoever.And the states that spend the most (New York and New Jersey spend over $10,000 per year per student) report among the lowest school achievement while the states spending the least (Utah and New Hampshire which spend just $3,000) report top achievement.
We blithely accept that millions of children consider school boring. We cannot accept that. Kids will not learn if they are bored. School cannot always be fun, but it cannot regularly be soporific if we expect kids to learn, let alone to remember what they learned more than a day after the exam. Another part of the problem is the unfortunate truth that educational research is still in its infancy. Although politicians and educators won’t publicly admit it, we still don’t know what works—especially with kids from low socioeconomic backgrounds. In designing school program and policy, we still rely largely on conjecture and on flimsy research data.
Another reason why school reform has been so unsuccessful is that most education policy is made by elected officials: school board members, state superintendents, and state and federal legislators. As a result, the decision to support an education policy is heavily made on whether, as a sound bite, it’s appealing to voters, especially to vocal special-interest groups. Too often, politics take precedence over pedagogy. As a result, many school reforms not only don’t improve education, as this paper will assert, they actually hurt kids.

WHAT TO DO?

Better Teachers
I walk into classrooms, even in supposed “good’ schools, and I routinely see things that sadden me. For example, I walked into a room in a suburban school and saw “grammer” and “calender” on the chalkboard. “What’s the big deal,?” you ask. Kids are expected to make such errors. The problem is that those words were written by the teacher.

Reinventing Teacher Training
It is difficult to imagine why university professors rather than K-12 master teachers are the designated trainers of K-12 teachers. Most university professors are researchers, rarely master K-12 teachers. Many have never taught K-12 at all. And because so many professors are hyperintellectual, enjoy esoterica, and are more comfortable with data than with children, there’s particular reason to doubt that they are the best people to train K-12 teachers.

Better Curriculum
Think back to the last class or workshop you attended. How much do you remember? If you’re like most people, not much. And that was when you were an adult, you chose the class, and perhaps paid for it. We must ask ourselves: What are the most important things kids need to learn? We must teach those first. Reading, sure. Number sense, yes. Writing, of course. How to use a computer. Sure. Appreciating the complexity of major life dilemmas, yes. Interpersonal communication skills, absolutely.

Create a National Curriculum
Imagine what would be possible with a national curriculum. For every major concept, K-12, there could be a superlative lesson plan. Take the classic frog dissection lesson. Instead of killing millions of frogs, a high-quality interactive video-based course (too expensive to develop locally, but affordable nationally), distributed on the internet, would allow students to simulate the frog dissection. Click on an icon and you get a mini-lecture or demonstration by a nationally renowned teacher. A lesson plan would be included for the in-classroom teacher, including stimulating questions, group activities, and homework assignments. Why should 70,000 biology teachers each have to try to figure out a wonderful way to teach the frog dissection lesson, not to mention bring in and then kill 30 frogs per period?

An Obvious Idea: Increase Time on Task
The research shows, and it’s only common sense, that the more time spent learning, the more that students will learn. Yet the average school year in the US remains at 179 days. Compare that with England: 192 days. Canada: 195. Russia: 208. Germany: 240. Japan: 243. China: 248. That means that American kids spend 26 weeks a year in school compared, for example, with 35 weeks in Japan. With a difference like that, it would be a miracle if Japanese kids didn’t outscore US kids. There’s no miracle.
Now let's look at the length of the school day. The average US student spends only 5.6 hours a day in school. That comes to 1,000 hours a year or a total over 13 years of 13,000 hours. Only 70% of that time is devoted to instruction: there’s homeroom, lunch, PE, recess, etc. That brings us down to 9,000 hours of designated instruction time. Even some of that isn’t used on instruction. Too many teachers don’t consider time to be the valuable commodity it is. They may routinely start class late (“We’re waiting for a few students.”) and end early (“Well, there are only five minutes left in the period, so you can start on your homework.”) Or they use activities such as “sustained silent reading” to kill time. So our kids get perhaps 8,000 hours of instruction over their entire K-12 school career to learn the ever-growing amount of material that we throw at them. That’s just 77 eight-hour days per year!
Students should spend 220 eight-hour days in school. With the involving curriculum described above, most kids, even Jeremy, won’t mind the longer school year. That must be our goal: to make school pleasurable enough that kids are glad it’s a school day. We must think big.

Restore Achievement-Grouped Classes
Imagine that you wanted to learn Spanish. Would you sign up for a class that had beginners, intermediates, and fluent Spanish speakers in the same class? Of course not. Yet, that’s how we increasingly group classes K-8 and even in high school. High achievers fare even worse in mixed-achievement classes. In the past, there were classes for gifted children so they didn't need to be held back while waiting for slower children to learn. Today, however, able students are now usually relegated to mixed-achievement classes, where they too often are bored, and spend much time helping that student who is—figuratively or literally-- still struggling to read Dr. Seuss. Learning to help others is beneficial, but too often denies able students of their right to learn. How short-sighted: a student has more ability so let's not teach her more, let's have her help the weak students. That’s a path likely to reduce everyone to a lower common denominator.

To read complete article: http://www.martynemko.com/articles/how-to-fix-the-schools_id1495

Dr. Nemko was senior author of California's procedures for high school
accreditation and program review. He has taught at UC Berkeley and been a consultant to 15 college presidents and to such organizations as the Educational Testing Service and Consumer Reports. He is the author of four books and 300 articles. His book, “How to Get Your Child a Private School Education in a Public School” was named one of the year’s Ten Must books by the American School Board Association.