In this edition of The Hoover Institution Briefing on Reforming K‒12 Education, the Education Futures Council releases its first report on the immediate need for serious reform in America’s public education system. Paul Peterson coauthors an essay documenting the stubborn challenges facing that system. And “Checker” Finn reflects on his six decades spent as an education researcher and academic.
FEATURED ANALYSIS
Education Futures Council Releases Landmark Report
Hoover’s new Education Futures Council released its first report, Ours to Solve, Once— and for All, on October 22, describing urgent reforms needed in America’s public education system to respond to a “matter of public emergency” regarding outcomes in schools.
The report calls for a comprehensive new approach that focuses on organizing for student-based results. It proposes a comprehensive new operating system for American public education—one that flips US K–12 education from top-down to bottom-up, organizing for results centered on students, especially those from disadvantaged populations. The report advances solutions that focus on, among other components, minimizing mandates and embracing incentives, as well as cultivating and rewarding professional mastery in the education workforce.
Read the report here.
What We Know About Our Schools
Recognizing that successful K‒12 schools are fundamental to human capital formation, Senior Fellow Paul E. Peterson has coauthored a new essay for the Tennenbaum Program for Fact-Based Policy with Georgetown University’s Nora Gordon, identifying the current roster of challenges facing American public schools. They find that after continuous improvement of per-pupil funding rising in lockstep with average test scores and overall enrollment, the three measures started to diverge after 2010. While funding continues to rise, test scores have largely declined along with overall enrollment.
In the essay, Peterson and Gordon also find that “inequities have lessened but continue to abound in American schools. Racial, ethnic, and economic differences in student achievement remain large, school quality continues to differ according to the wealth of each respective community, and racial segregation persists.”
And even though many have identified teacher quality as a main driver of positive education outcomes, Peterson and Gordon find that efforts at teacher development and retention are poor, and there is absolutely no plan anywhere to attract specialized teachers (for math, science, etc.) to the highest need schools.
Read more here.
Chester Finn: Once a Hedgehog, Now a Fox
Writing in Education Next, Chester E. (Checker) Finn Jr. uses the premise of a seminal 1953 essay by Isaiah Berlin to chart his transformation from an education “hedgehog,” viewing reform with a single unifying idea, to a “fox,” drawing on a variety of experiences from the world and understanding that nothing can be reduced to one single unifying idea.
Looking back, he finds some interesting but often overlooked truths about public education. For instance, few education reformers ever focus on the fact that children spend a surprisingly small amount of time in school each year. He calculates that just 9 per cent of a pupil’s childhood, assuming perfect attendance (something also declining in recent years), is spent at school.
In his list of ten lessons learned from six decades in education reform, perhaps this sentence sums up his experiences best: “Besides being enormous, sluggish, decentralized, loosely coupled, and leaderless, this enterprise [America’s education system]—like most—is populated by millions of adults who don’t like to change their ways.”
Read more here.
HIGHLIGHTS
America’s Schools Facing a “Public Emergency”: Education Futures Council Report Urges System-Level Reforms to Better Serve Students
Education news website The74 covered the October 2024 release of the Education Futures Council report Ours to Solve, Once—and for All with an article detailing its contents. The articles lists the report’s recommendations, including treating individual schools as the “apex organization” in the education system, able to independently make decisions to best address the needs of their students.
Read more here.
Good Teachers Hold the Key to Learning Loss Recovery
Citing his research that indicates COVID-19 school closures cost students exiting K‒12 education up to 5 per cent of their lifetime income in the form of learning loss and related lost productivity, Senior Fellow Eric Hanushek writes about potential remedies for this situation in Education Next. Instead of leaning on solutions others have suggested to fix this problem, such as extending the school year into the summer or implementing universal afterschool tutoring programs, Hanushek suggests something different altogether.
What if the best-rated teachers in each school district were given an incentive to take on more students, so that the pupils who fell most behind during the pandemic have a chance to make up some lost ground? A major stumbling block for this idea is opposition from teachers’ unions, Hanushek contends.
Read more here.
The Education Exchange: The Windy Education City: Turmoil in Chicago’s Schools
On a recent episode of the Education Exchange podcast, Hoover fellows Paul E. Peterson and Michael T. Hartney talk about the challenges facing US school districts as federal programs meant to help them through the COVID-19 pandemic expire. They then turn to the unfolding drama in Chicago, where unusually contentious school board elections have drawn millions in campaign contributions, and the board’s president recently resigned in disgrace.
You can listen to the episode here.
Spotlight: Education Futures Council
The Hoover Institution formed the Education Futures Council in fall 2023 to review and analyze the state of public education in America. One year later, it released a report, Ours to Solve, Once—and for All, highlighting challenges facing the K‒12 education workforce, students, and the school system as a whole. Hoover Institution Director Condoleezza Rice is cochair of the council, joining members former NFL quarterback Andrew Luck, New Schools Ventures Fund CEO Frances Messano, former Indiana governor and former Purdue University president Mitch Daniels, Arizona State University COO Chris Howard, and Digital Promise Global CEO Jean-Claude Brizard.
For more insight on important education issues visit:
https://www.hoover.org/focus-areas/reforming-k-12-education
