logo
To fix our public schools, follow ... D.C.? Yes, you heard that right.

To fix our public schools, follow ... D.C.? Yes, you heard that right.

Washington Post2 days ago

Eric A. Hanushek and Margaret E. Raymond are fellows at the Hoover Institution.
Nobody is surprised to learn that the Washington Commanders pay players differently based on position and performance. Yet finding that this also holds true for D.C. public school teachers generally comes as a shock.
It is an even greater shock that D.C. students' learning has improved more rapidly over the past 15 years than that of students in 20 other urban districts whose performance we have assessed.
What's the reason for the shock? The fact that it's the near-universal approach of the 13,000 public school districts in the United States to pay teachers on the basis of experience and extent of graduate education — not position or performance. This might not be so objectionable — except for the disquieting fact that teacher salaries then end up being virtually unrelated to effectiveness in the classroom.
After more than 50 years of calls for improvement in U.S. public schools, this needs to change. And two district school systems demonstrate one way to do it.
In 2009, under the leadership of then-Chancellor Michelle Rhee, Washington implemented the IMPACT program — a revamped teacher evaluation system that is linked directly to classroom effectiveness and that provides large increases in base salaries for the most effective teachers and dismissal for the least effective. This program has shown that focusing on student learning is rewarded with improved student performance, and that student-focused incentives work.
Dallas provides a second example of the power of changing the focus of teacher pay to student performance. Under the leadership of then-Superintendent Mike Miles, Dallas in 2015 switched to a salary system based on a sophisticated evaluation of teacher effectiveness. It then used this system to provide performance-based bonuses to teachers who would agree to go to the lowest-performing schools in the district. Two things happened: First, the best teachers responded to the incentives and were willing to move to the poorest-performing schools. Second, within two years, these schools jumped up to the district average.
And yet such performance-related reforms have not caught on in the rest of the nation's schools. That's because, although it professes to foster learning, our school system is not structured in a way that encourages most districts to seek out or implement changes that systematically lead to better student performance. It is both compliance-based and a fierce defender of existing personnel and operational structures.
U.S. history is populated with calls to improve our schools. President Lyndon B. Johnson's 1960s War on Poverty emphasized improved schooling to combat the roots of poverty. A little over 40 years ago, a federal report titled 'A Nation at Risk' discussed the sorry state of our public schools and called for deep changes. More recent reports have focused on the economic and national security concerns raised by American students' inadequate preparedness.
The nation has responded to these calls by investing heavily in schools. Spending per student adjusted for inflation has quadrupled since the Johnson administration. With the added funds, we have pursued a wide variety of changes, from class-size reduction to whole-language reading. Many have simply not worked. Some have worked locally, but none has permeated the nation's schools.
Never in the past 50 years has the need for successful innovation been more critical. Student performance is now lower than in the early 1970s, when the nation started assessing student achievement. In 2022, U.S. students were 34th in the world in math, just behind Malta but edging out the Slovak Republic.
What is the difference between what we have generally tried and what has occurred in D.C. and Dallas? The common approach since 'A Nation at Risk' has been to look for add-ons, such as morning meditation or school-based health centers, that don't disturb the structure and incentives of the system as a whole. D.C. and Dallas moved to alter teacher incentives by placing student performance at the center of their policies, and they monitored the outcomes to ensure good results.
Today's policy environment offers a fresh chance to address many of the problems in our schools. The Trump administration has called for significantly reducing the federal role in education and expanding decision-making by states and localities. This shift can perhaps be leveraged into the kinds of structural changes that we have known, for the past half century and more, are what is needed.
Such extensive change requires new thinking by the states, which already have considerable flexibility that has gone largely unused. We need deeper institutional change that goes beyond simple add-ons.
A recent report by the Education Futures Council calls this changing the 'operating system' of schools. Going beyond a thorough student focus, the report's proposed new structure would emphasize incentives over mandates, recognize differences among districts and schools, build supports and development for teachers and leaders, and permit schools that know what they are doing to continue doing it. This altered vision of schools might even lead local districts to adopt and expand observably successful programs such as those in D.C. and Dallas.
This formulation, of course, is not the only option. But we know from a half-century of tinkering that the current institutional structure is unlikely to support improved outcomes. We need a deeper look at the constraints on performance that have grown to envelop our schools.

Orange background

Try Our AI Features

Explore what Daily8 AI can do for you:

Comments

No comments yet...

Related Articles

‘Come and get me': Gavin Newsom has entered the meme war
‘Come and get me': Gavin Newsom has entered the meme war

Washington Post

time24 minutes ago

  • Washington Post

‘Come and get me': Gavin Newsom has entered the meme war

California Gov. Gavin Newsom (D) has found himself in the center of the internet's spotlight after squaring off with President Donald Trump on social media over the deployment of military troops to counter protesters in Los Angeles. While police deployed tear gas and shot at protesters in Los Angeles with rubber bullets on Monday, Newsom shared a screenshot on TikTok of a Washington Post headline reporting that California would sue Trump over the National Guard's presence, paired with a trending sound sampled from the movie 'Mean Girls. ' The video was captioned 'We will not stand while Donald Trump illegally federalizes the National Guard' and was liked more than 255,000 times.

Trump tariffs may remain in effect while appeals proceed, U.S. Appeals court decides
Trump tariffs may remain in effect while appeals proceed, U.S. Appeals court decides

Yahoo

time24 minutes ago

  • Yahoo

Trump tariffs may remain in effect while appeals proceed, U.S. Appeals court decides

By Dietrich Knauth (Reuters) -A federal appeals court allowed President Donald Trump's most sweeping tariffs to remain in effect on Tuesday while it reviews a lower court decision blocking them on grounds that Trump had exceeded his authority by imposing them. The decision by the U.S. Court of Appeals for the Federal Circuit in Washington, D.C. means Trump may continue to enforce, for now, his "Liberation Day" tariffs on imports from most U.S. trading partners, as well as a separate set of tariffs levied on Canada, China and Mexico. The appeals court has yet to rule on whether the tariffs are permissible under an emergency economic powers act that Trump cited to justify them, but it allowed the tariffs to remain in place while the appeals play out. The tariffs, used by Trump as negotiating leverage with U.S. trading partners, and their on-again, off-again nature have shocked markets and whipsawed companies of all sizes as they seek to manage supply chains, production, staffing and prices. The ruling has no impact on other tariffs levied under more traditional legal authority, such as tariffs on steel and aluminum imports. A three-judge panel of the U.S. Court of International Trade ruled on May 28 that the U.S. Constitution gave Congress, not the president, the power to levy taxes and tariffs, and that the president had exceeded his authority by invoking the International Emergency Economic Powers Act, a law intended to address "unusual and extraordinary" threats during national emergencies. The Trump administration quickly appealed the ruling, and the Federal Circuit in Washington put the lower court decision on hold the next day while it considered whether to impose a longer-term pause. The ruling came in a pair of lawsuits, one filed by the nonpartisan Liberty Justice Center on behalf of five small U.S. businesses that import goods from countries targeted by the duties and the other by 12 U.S. states. Trump has claimed broad authority to set tariffs under IEEPA. The 1977 law has historically been used to impose sanctions on enemies of the U.S. or freeze their assets. Trump is the first U.S. president to use it to impose tariffs. Trump has said that the tariffs imposed in February on Canada, China and Mexico were to fight illegal fentanyl trafficking at U.S. borders, denied by the three countries, and that the across-the-board tariffs on all U.S. trading partners imposed in April were a response to the U.S. trade deficit. The states and small businesses had argued the tariffs were not a legal or appropriate way to address those matters, and the small businesses argued that the decades-long U.S. practice of buying more goods than it exports does not qualify as an emergency that would trigger IEEPA. At least five other court cases have challenged the tariffs justified under the emergency economic powers act, including other small businesses and the state of California. One of those cases, in federal court in Washington, D.C., also resulted in an initial ruling against the tariffs, and no court has yet backed the unlimited emergency tariff authority Trump has claimed. Errore nel recupero dei dati Effettua l'accesso per consultare il tuo portafoglio Errore nel recupero dei dati Errore nel recupero dei dati Errore nel recupero dei dati Errore nel recupero dei dati

Judge tosses lawsuit over Trump's firing of US African Development Foundation board members
Judge tosses lawsuit over Trump's firing of US African Development Foundation board members

Associated Press

time25 minutes ago

  • Associated Press

Judge tosses lawsuit over Trump's firing of US African Development Foundation board members

A federal judge has tossed out a lawsuit over President Donald Trump's dismantling of a U.S. federal agency that invests in African small businesses. U.S. District Judge Richard Leon in Washington, D.C., dismissed the case on Tuesday, finding that Trump was acting within his legal authority when he fired the U.S. African Development Foundation's board members in February. In March, the same judge ruled that the administration's removal of most grant money and staff from the congressionally created agency was also legal, as long as the agency was maintained at the minimum level required by law. USADF was created as an independent agency in 1980, and its board members must be confirmed by the U.S. Senate. In 2023, Congress allocated $46 million to the agency to invest in small agricultural and energy infrastructure projects and other economic development initiatives in 22 African countries. On Feb. 19, Trump issued an executive order that said USADF, the U.S. Institute of Peace, the Inter-American Foundation and the Presidio Trust should be scaled back to the minimum presence required by law. At the time, USADF had five of its seven board seats filled. A few days later, an administration official told Ward Brehm that he was fired, and emails were sent to the other board members notifying them that they had also been terminated. Those emails were never received, however, because they were sent to the wrong email addresses. The four board members, believing they still held their posts because they had not been given notice, met in March and passed a resolution appointing Brehm as the president of the board. But Trump had already appointed Pete Marocco as the new chairman of what the administration believed to now be a board of one. Since then, both men have claimed to be the president of the agency, and Brehm filed the lawsuit March 6. Leon said that even though they didn't receive the emails, the four board members were effectively terminated in February, and so they didn't have the authority to appoint Brehm to lead the board. An attorney for Brehm did not immediately respond to a request for comment. Another lawsuit over the dismantling of the agency is still pending before the same judge. In that case, two USADF staffers and a consulting firm based in Zambia that works closely with USADF contend that the Trump administration's efforts to deeply scale back the agency wrongly usurps Congress' powers. They also say Marocco was unlawfully appointed to the board, in part because he was never confirmed by the Senate as required. Leon's ruling in Brehm's case did not address whether the Trump administration had the power to install Marocco as board chair on a temporary basis.

DOWNLOAD THE APP

Get Started Now: Download the App

Ready to dive into the world of global news and events? Download our app today from your preferred app store and start exploring.
app-storeplay-store