Although it was a very close vote in the Senate, Betsy DeVos is now the secretary of education. But if you think the confirmation battle was tough, the challenges she will now face are truly daunting.
The battle over the DeVos nomination was just the latest episode in a decades-old debate among education leaders: Is it better to put someone in charge who has spent a career inside traditional education, or bring someone in who has watched and participated from the outside?
I don’t think there’s any doubt that embracing innovation and policy changes that will deliberately upset the status quo is the way to go, and DeVos will most likely do just that as education secretary.
There’s no time to lose.
The education system is struggling. Recent scores on the Nation’s Report Card show that considerably fewer than half (40 percent) of fourth-graders are proficient in math. Even fewer (36 percent) are proficient in reading. In fact, less than half of students at all grade levels are proficient in any of the nine curriculum areas studied.
While it is certainly true that proficiency scores do not tell the whole story on a school-by-school basis, these aggregate scores for the nation as a whole tell us something of fundamental importance: Overall, our children are not receiving an education that prepares them for being successful, productive members of society. Instead, we are sending them into adulthood without the skills and abilities they need.
In failing them, we fail the nation.
We cannot, in the new president’s favorite phrase, “make America great again” without fixing our educational system.
The proficiency-versus-growth debate, highlighted during the DeVos confirmation hearing, is useful but somewhat misleading. If we are to succeed in fixing our schools, we must measure both. Each tells us something important, but in very different ways, about how schools and teachers are performing.
Measuring proficiency and growth tell us where we are, but it tells us nothing about how we got here. Nor do they show us how we can become more successful. In that regard, they can become a serious distraction, diverting our attention to the past, not the future.
In the 23 years since I founded the Center for Education Reform, it has become readily apparent to me that in a school environment, flexibility and innovation beat rigidity and uniformity every time. Schools are not factories turning out widgets where size, weight and shape are all that matter, and must all be the same. They are little worlds where a nearly-infinite variety of children, able to learn at different rates and in different ways, must receive the best education we can provide. It is crucial that creativity and flexibility be central to that process.
It’s also indisputable that rigid and do-it-by-the-book approaches are commonly associated with traditional public schools, while flexibility and innovation are much more common in charter, private and experimental schools. There are exceptions in either group, evidence that great teachers can succeed in either environment if given a chance, and that private and/or charter schools do not always make the right choices when it comes to innovating. But in the latter case, they’re allowed to fail, while traditional schools almost never are.
It’s a steep hill to climb, and it’s important that we choose the right road to get to the top.
Jeanne Allen (@JeanneAllen) is a contributor to the Washington Examiner’s Beltway Confidential blog. She is CEO and founder of the Center for Education Reform.
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