Hard choices to improve education

Education is a key to economic mobility in America. An additional year of schooling raises earnings by between 6 and 10 percent per year. According to Bureau of Labor Statistics data, the unemployment rate for those without a high school diploma is 8.6 percent. For college graduates? 2.9 percent.

Few things prevent poverty more effectively than educational attainment. There’s universal agreement that we should do better.

But what exactly is “better?” And how do we get there?

An AEI video series out this month, featuring two prominent African American educational leaders—D.C. Public Schools chancellor Kaya Henderson and former Milwaukee Public Schools superintendent Howard Fuller—and AEI's Rick Hess and Arthur Brooks, tackles these tough questions and should inform the debate.

All seem to agree on common themes: Our educational system should provide children with the opportunity to grow their unique gifts—not just the ones that are easiest to measure; that no silver bullet will solve education’s challenges; and that education reform—and the way it is communicated—must involve the communities, parents, and students affected by change.

More specifically, four key lessons stand out.

First, don’t limit education’s goals with the rhetoric employed to spur change. Rev. Al Sharpton and Sen. Ted Cruz agree on one thing (maybe only one thing): that education is a civil right. But as Rick Hess argues, terming education a “civil right” implies that our efforts should focus only on boosting the proficiency of underachieving students and fixing failing schools. That’s a limiting notion. And it ignores the reality that while attending school may be a right, educational advancement requires effort by teachers, students, and parents.

Second, focus on what families really desire—not just what experts say they should want. According to Henderson, “Parents like me want to know that their kids are going to go on to something amazing. Not that their kids have scored X on the CAS or Y on the NAEP.” Reading and math are critical, but pursuing those scores shouldn’t crowd out other enriching activities that serve as gateways to opportunity to many students.

Third, silver bullets don’t work. As Henderson argues, charter schools, great teachers, and high stakes testing can be useful. But they aren’t panaceas.

Fourth, those affected by educational change must be critical definers of and participants in that change. Howard Fuller defends the value of school choice in empowering low-income families to attend better schools, but notes that the effort is run by rich white people and primarily affects poor black and brown kids. If school choice is to succeed in the long term, he argues, those it affects most must buy into its proposition and have agency in making it happen.

Change requires a holistic understanding of the aspirations that parents have for their students, hard choices and sustained leadership, and an acknowledgment that silver bullets don’t work.

Robert Doar is the American Enterprise Institute’s Morgridge Fellow in Poverty Studies and is the former commissioner of human services for the Bloomberg Administration in New York City. Brad Wassink is program manager at AEI. This piece first appeared on InsideSources.com.