Latest news with #RobertPondiscio
Yahoo
31-05-2025
- General
- Yahoo
Education 'reforms' failed. Teaching practices key to boosting Wisconsin schools
In the May 15 edition of the Journal Sentinel, there was an article, 'Teaching practices a key to success, panel says,' by Alan Borsuk, through the Marquette University Law School. This article succulently highlighted the issues in improving public school engagement and achievement while totally leaving out the simplistic, unproductive 'reform' approaches that are most often promoted for the last three decades. Robert Pondiscio, conservative senior fellow at the American Enterprise Institute, stated, 'We continue to chase silver bullets, new policies, new programs instead of helping the teachers we have be better at their jobs.' The article discussed several very good concepts which need to be explored by the media, especially the Journal Sentinel, instead of chronic reporting of statistical underachievement in public schools and the illusion that choice is somehow superior, even though reporting information is intentionally very limited. Dick Marx, Whitefish Bay Letters: Endless school referendums show why public schools suffer from lack of funding Opinion: Wisconsin is failing to fund education. State budget must make this right Here are some tips to get your views shared with your friends, family, neighbors and across our state: Please include your name, street address and daytime phone. Generally, we limit letters to 200 words. Cite sources of where you found information or the article that prompted your letter. Be civil and constructive, especially when criticizing. Avoid ad hominem attacks, take issue with a position, not a person. We cannot acknowledge receipt of submissions. We don't publish poetry, anonymous or open letters. Each writer is limited to one published letter every two months. All letters are subject to editing. Write: Letters to the editor, Milwaukee Journal Sentinel, 330 E. Kilbourn Avenue, Suite 500, Milwaukee, WI, 53202. Fax: (414)-223-5444. E-mail: jsedit@ or submit using the form that can be found on the on the bottom of this page. This article originally appeared on Milwaukee Journal Sentinel: New concepts for improving public schools should be explored | Letters
Yahoo
31-05-2025
- General
- Yahoo
Education 'reforms' failed. Teaching practices key to boosting Wisconsin schools
In the May 15 edition of the Journal Sentinel, there was an article, 'Teaching practices a key to success, panel says,' by Alan Borsuk, through the Marquette University Law School. This article succulently highlighted the issues in improving public school engagement and achievement while totally leaving out the simplistic, unproductive 'reform' approaches that are most often promoted for the last three decades. Robert Pondiscio, conservative senior fellow at the American Enterprise Institute, stated, 'We continue to chase silver bullets, new policies, new programs instead of helping the teachers we have be better at their jobs.' The article discussed several very good concepts which need to be explored by the media, especially the Journal Sentinel, instead of chronic reporting of statistical underachievement in public schools and the illusion that choice is somehow superior, even though reporting information is intentionally very limited. Dick Marx, Whitefish Bay Letters: Endless school referendums show why public schools suffer from lack of funding Opinion: Wisconsin is failing to fund education. State budget must make this right Here are some tips to get your views shared with your friends, family, neighbors and across our state: Please include your name, street address and daytime phone. Generally, we limit letters to 200 words. Cite sources of where you found information or the article that prompted your letter. Be civil and constructive, especially when criticizing. Avoid ad hominem attacks, take issue with a position, not a person. We cannot acknowledge receipt of submissions. We don't publish poetry, anonymous or open letters. Each writer is limited to one published letter every two months. All letters are subject to editing. Write: Letters to the editor, Milwaukee Journal Sentinel, 330 E. Kilbourn Avenue, Suite 500, Milwaukee, WI, 53202. Fax: (414)-223-5444. E-mail: jsedit@ or submit using the form that can be found on the on the bottom of this page. This article originally appeared on Milwaukee Journal Sentinel: New concepts for improving public schools should be explored | Letters
Yahoo
22-05-2025
- Politics
- Yahoo
Opinion: The Voices We Don't Hear: Teachers Who Gave Up
A version of this essay originally appeared on Robert Pondiscio's SubStack. Earlier this month, I was flattered to be invited to a conference at Marquette University Law School, sparked by an article I'd written making the case that education reform has misfired by prioritizing testing, measurement, accountability, and other structural reforms instead of trying to improve classroom practice. A highlight of the convening was the final panel of the day, featuring four teachers and administrators who acknowledged that many of the challenges I cited—poor preparation, chronic problems with student behavior and classroom management, and the overwhelming demands placed on teachers—were real and concerning. But they pushed back politely on my assertion that we have made teaching 'too hard for mere mortals.' I was particularly struck by remarks from Taylor Thompson, an earnest and winningly dedicated first-year fourth-grade teacher from Oshkosh, Wisconsin. '[Teaching is] not an impossible task. It's demanding. It's hard. Each day is not rainbows and singing and dancing,' she said, but it's not impossible 'if you are a collaborative person, work with your peers, and you have a community of coworkers and principals who don't allow you to silo into your own rooms and do your own thing. It can be a very, very empowering job.' Thompson brought with her materials from the Core Knowledge Language Arts curriculum; having worked on CKLA's launch during my time at the Core Knowledge Foundation, I was heartened that it contributed to her success. That said, I couldn't help but wonder if her first-year experience would be different—if she'd even have had the time and energy to come to Marquette at all—had she not been given CKLA but an empty plan book, and expected to spend 10, 20, or more hours a week scouring Google, Share My Lesson, or Teachers Pay Teachers for lesson plans and materials? When it was my turn to respond, I told the audience that what they'd just heard didn't contradict my argument; it amplified it. I suggested to my hosts that what we really needed was one more panel: earnest, well-intended people who wanted to teach but grew overwhelmed and walked away from their classrooms. Their absence from the conversation—not a flaw of Marquette's thoughtful event but a field-wide oversight—limits our ability to address the issues driving nearly half of teachers to quit within five years. Those stories are legion. Related After leaving the classroom, I worked briefly at an outfit called Prep for Prep under Ed Boland, who later left the organization to teach in a New York City public high school armed with little more than idealism. His 2016 memoir, The Battle for Room 314, described the relentless student misbehavior, homophobic slurs, and physical fights he endured. He wasn't a minimally prepared Teach For America corps member or, like me, the product of an 'alt cert' teacher prep program. He had two years of graduate school and six months of student teaching that he described as 'a mix of folk wisdom, psycho-jargon, wishful thinking, and out-and-out bullshit.' After one freakishly difficult year, Boland returned to his old job. 'I had taken courses in lesson planning, evaluation, psychology, and research. Next to nothing was said about what a first-year teacher most needs to know: how to control a classroom,' he wrote. NPR's All Things Considered not long ago ran a story about Liz Stepansky, the daughter of two school teachers who wanted to follow in their footsteps, thinking teaching would be a path to a stable, meaningful life. But when she took a job teaching at a South Carolina middle school, she found that she 'had no idea' what she was in for. Her middle school students 'dialed 911, threw balloons filled with bleach and ink in hallways and constantly pulled the fire alarm.''I'd go home and sometimes I'd spend an hour grading papers. And then I'd go back the next day and do it all over again,' she told NPR. 'I remember my paycheck being $800 and something every two weeks.' She transferred to another school, faced similar frustrations and threw in the towel. She's now a speech pathologist. It's not hard to find stories of earnest, well-intended people who want to teach but find the job untenable. But I can't recall hearing from a single one at any of the education and policy conferences I've attended over the last twenty years. Inattention to abandoned careers and disappointed hopes allow false and misleading narratives to gain traction. Last summer, I was invited to give testimony before the U.S. Senate Committee on Health, Education, Labor, and Pensions. Senator Bernie Sanders was proposing a $60,000 minimum teacher salary to address teacher shortages. 'By all means, pay teachers more,' I testified. 'But don't harbor any illusions that doing so will solve the problem.' Higher pay doesn't fix shoddy preparation, unruly classrooms, or the ever-escalating burdens we pile on teachers' plates as we treat schools as not just academic spaces but something akin to the social service agencies of last resort. 'We are asking teachers to do too many things to do any of them well at any salary,' I said. Teaching's aspirational nature attracts optimists, but crushing demands betray them. A RAND study I cited in my Senate testimony found 99% of elementary teachers create their own materials, stealing time from honing their craft and working more closely with children and their parents. A 2024 Pew survey showed only 36% of teachers feel adequately resourced; a 2022 NEA poll revealed nearly half plan to quit due to poor school climate. These are systemic failures, not personal ones. Related Teaching is among our most optimistic and aspirational professions, drawing idealists who believe education can transform lives. But celebrating only the successes—teachers who beat the odds, schools that defy demographics—distorts our vision. As I quipped at Marquette, it's like watching Aaron Judge hit 62 home runs and concluding, 'See? It can be done!' And it can—if you're Aaron Judge. Other fields learn from failure—medicine from misdiagnoses, aviation from crashes. I urged Marquette's audience to imagine a panel of teachers who quit—not to shame them, but to learn. What broke their optimism? What tools were missing? Thompson's success shows what's possible with support. But for every Thompson, countless idealists leave because they were overmatched, felt unprepared or betrayed by poor training or simply couldn't manage chaos. A few days later, Alan Borsuk, who organized and moderated the event at Marquette, told me about a conversation he'd had with a school administrator who was in attendance who disagreed with the notion that teachers who leave are failures. 'She said one of the best teachers they have whose students have done well for year after year is leaving after this year,' Alan said. That teacher, she insisted, was not a failure. Exactly! That teacher didn't fail. We failed that teacher. Education reform must weigh frustration alongside triumph. We need convenings where former teachers speak without judgment: their failures and frustration studied, not stigmatized. There's no magic wand that will make the job easy or friction-free, but when you connect with students and go home feeling successful, there's no job that compares to being a classroom teacher. You feel on top of the world. It's immensely satisfying work. The question ed reformers and policymakers need to ask now is what can we do to make more teachers feel successful and their jobs more doable.
Forbes
24-04-2025
- Business
- Forbes
Disrupting U.S. Schools Wasn't Possible Before. That May Be Changing
Whereas disruptive innovations of schooling in the U.S. weren't possible before, in many states, the ... More conditions are being laid that make it increasingly possible. As Robert Pondiscio observed recently, K–12 schools have largely been spared disruptive innovation of the sort that has transformed everything from retail to consumer package goods, telecommunications, computing, steel, newspapers, and more. Yes, there have been disruptive innovations in how students learn. Namely in the form factor. Consider that even just 15 years ago the dominant curriculum companies were clear: McGraw-Hill, Pearson, and Houghton Mifflin Harcourt (HMH). All textbook companies. Fast forward and digital-native companies have been disrupting the staid and supposedly impenetrable market of textbooks. Yes, the textbook companies are still around and transforming themselves—HMH, McGraw-Hill and Savvas (a spin-off of Pearson). But there are new entrants in the previously-impenetrable core curriculum market—entities like Amplify, Great Minds, Curriculum Associates and Imagine Learning. But one big reason our book Disrupting Class used the word 'class' and not 'schools' in the title was we didn't see a real opportunity for true, disruptive innovation of U.S. public schools at the time. That was because schooling is compulsory for the most part. And everyone had access to what, from a consumer perspective, appears to be a free public school. As a result, there was little nonconsumption of schooling. What's more, because of the 'free' element of public schools, there was no true 'overserving' of individuals—a phenomenon that occurs when people won't pay higher prices for product improvements and instead make tradeoffs. They'll give up increased features for a lower cost, more stripped-down product. Without nonconsumption and overserved consumers, disruptive innovation is not possible. The same has not been true within schools. There were and are plenty of examples of students who want a specific course but their school did not offer it or couldn't offer it at a convenient time for the student. There were and are also lots of examples of similar nonconsumption at the level of tutoring or unit recovery and the like. Our book was called 'Disrupting Class' because our hope was that by disrupting within schools—at the level of how classes are offered because there was lots of nonconsumption at that level—we could see a move away from the dominant monolithic education system. That hasn't happened, however, because most schools have crammed technology into their traditional classes and the value network in which schools operate—the policies, regulations, boards, unions, and more that dictate their priorities—have kept the traditional schooling model largely intact despite any disruption within. Fast forward to today. Forty percent of students nationwide now attend schools of choice, which means they do not attend their neighborhood, district public school. But within this growth of school choice, what's most interesting, as far as disruptive innovation is concerned, are those states that have introduced education savings accounts (ESAs). With an ESA, families get an allotment of dollars in, yes, a savings account, from which they can spend it on a variety of educational products and services. These range from schools to classes to tutoring to lessons, therapy, educational products and more. If you don't spend the money in a given year, that's OK, because you can rollover the savings for future use. As a result, now we're not just talking about students choosing different schools or educational options. Instead, families have an incentive to consider the relative value of different educational goods and services, make tradeoffs, and choose accordingly. That opens up the market for a variety of school types priced differently and for families to factor pricing in their decision-making as they choose the right mix of services for them. As ESAs grow, this creates the true conditions for disruptive innovation of schooling because now there is an opportunity for lower-cost educational products and services fueled by technology enablers to enter the market, start among those who are overserved by the full bundle of public schooling, and improve over time. For families who stay in the traditional neighborhood school district yet don't want to use its full bundle of services—and would like a more tailored set of services for their child—they may come, over time, to see this as an 'expensive' choice. Why? Because they are sacrificing receiving several thousands of dollars in their ESA that they could allocate to different educational options to create the right mix of services for their child. In other words, traditional public schools might not feel 'free' any longer. That would create the opportunity for lots of low-end disruptions to emerge in the market. Which could in turn shake things up in favor of the customized educational options each student needs to succeed. Then perhaps we'd be on the road to Disrupting Schools.
Yahoo
18-04-2025
- Business
- Yahoo
Opinion: Can American Schools Fuel Trump's Proposed Manufacturing Revival?
A version of this essay appeared on Robert Pondiscio's Substack. President Donald Trump's vision to revive American manufacturing — a linchpin of his economic and national security strategy — rests on a bold promise: a renaissance of high-tech factories staffed by skilled tradespeople. The White House, defending steep tariffs to incentivize domestic production, argues that decades of trade deficits have 'hollowed out' America's manufacturing base, resulting in 'a lack of incentive to increase advanced domestic manufacturing capacity.' This, in turn, has 'undermined critical supply chains; and rendered our defense-industrial base dependent on foreign adversaries.' Get stories like this delivered straight to your inbox. Sign up for The 74 Newsletter Commerce Secretary Howard Lutnick painted a bracing picture of this industrial renaissance. 'There's going to be mechanics, there's going to be HVAC specialists, there's going to be electricians — the tradecraft of America,' he exclaimed on CBS's Face the Nation earlier this month. 'Our high school-educated Americans, the core to our workforce, is [sic] going to have the greatest resurgence of jobs in the history of America, to work on these high-tech factories, which are all coming to America.' It's a stirring vision, but it hinges on a question that's been largely ignored amid the political and economic debates over tariffs: Does America's education system have what it takes to produce the workforce needed to staff a manufacturing revival? To put the question bluntly, is it any better at career and technical education than teaching kids to read and do math proficiently? The evidence suggests a mixed picture: CTE is a comparative bright spot in America's challenged education system, but serious hurdles, from misaligned training to automation's rising demands, raise doubts about whether schools are equipped to meet the moment. Fewer than 40% of the country holds a college degree, so Lutnick is correct to say high school-educated Americans are the 'core' of the workforce. But manufacturing is no longer reliably safe terrain for an unskilled worker with minimal education. Even before Trump took office, a 2024 report forecast a need for up to 3.8 million additional skilled manufacturing employees by 2033 — while predicting that half of those could go unfilled if skills and applicant gaps go unaddressed. Let's start with the good news. CTE delivers tangible outcomes where core academics often stumble. While only 26% of eighth-graders scored proficient in math on the 2022 NAEP, the Nation's Report Card, CTE programs demonstrably funnel kids into the workforce. High schoolers who take multiple CTE courses tend to outperform peers who don't in earnings and employment rates. Even more encouraging, a 2022 report published by the Annenberg Institute at Brown University found these CTE 'concentrators' are 8.4 percentage points more likely to avoid poverty and are significantly more likely to earn above the poverty threshold seven years after high school. They are also less likely to be disengaged — neither employed nor participating in education or training. Related These are positive outcomes, and unsurprising. With 85% of 2019 high school graduates earning at least one CTE credit and 77% of CTE students graduating on time — often despite being at-risk — CTE's focus on jobs over test scores suggests that K-12 can do something right when the goal is paychecks, not just test scores. At its best, CTE aligns education with the practical demands of the labor market, offering pathways to careers that don't require a four-year degree but still promise stability and dignity. But those successes are not universal, and the broader K-12 system's weaknesses cast a long shadow over Trump's manufacturing ambitions. A 2019 report by my former colleagues at the Thomas B. Fordham Institute found that CTE programs often fail to align with the needs of local job markets. Nothing useful comes from schools churning out workers trained as welders in regions where robotics or advanced manufacturing jobs dominate — or might in the future. More concerning, only about 5% of CTE concentrators focus on manufacturing, lagging behind other fields such as health science, agriculture, business management, and hospitality and tourism. tourism. A report co-authored by Boston College's Shaun Dougherty found that schools have an even tougher time filling CTE teaching positions than openings in academic subjects, and that CTE teachers in high-growth areas with occupational licenses are much more likely to leave the profession and enter industry, where they can earn more. The broader K-12 system's academic struggles don't inspire confidence, either. That 26% math proficiency rate among eighth-graders isn't just a statistic; it's a flashing red warning light. The elephant in the room is automation, which shifts manufacturing job demands toward advanced skills like robotics and computer numerical control programming, which involves writing instructions, or code, that tells a machine how to operate and perform tasks like cutting, drilling or milling. In sum, manufacturing is no longer about low-skill, repetitive tasks, but about sophisticated, tech-driven processes. If three-quarters of students can't master middle school math, the demands of modern manufacturing are likely beyond them. The poor performance of K-12 education doesn't augur well for a renaissance in even semi-skilled labor. Specialized CTE high schools and postsecondary schools perform well, but most such students are still in traditional settings, notes Dougherty. 'I don't think that we have evidence that in … comprehensive high schools where we're offering CTE, that we are systematically doing better in teaching CTE than we are in math and reading,' he tells me. Finally, and perhaps ominously, there are factors schools can't fully control. Soft skills like initiative and work ethic are critical in manufacturing, yet they're notoriously hard to teach. Tim Taylor of America Succeeds, a nonprofit aimed at mobilizing business to support education, shared an anecdote about an Austin, Texas, manufacturer who handed out 75 business cards at a career fair, inviting students to come for a job interview. Only three showed up. Taylor's organization emphasizes mid-skill, mid-wage jobs as the goal — not low-skill, low-wage work that's easily automated or offshored. But fostering the initiative to seize those opportunities requires more than curriculum; it demands a cultural shift. Related So, can American education rise to the challenge of Trump's manufacturing revival? The answer is a qualified maybe. CTE is a proven pathway for getting kids into the workforce, and its focus on practical skills makes it better suited than traditional academics to meet industry's immediate needs. Getting serious about this revival will take more than tariffs and rhetoric. It means ensuring CTE programs are tightly aligned with local economies and forward-looking enough to prepare students for an automated future. It means fixing the academic foundations — math, literacy, problem-solving — that underpin technical skills. And it means cultivating a culture that values hard work and opportunity, not just credentials.
