The education summit Leadership for Change turned out to be a pretty big event by any measure. More than 800 people representing business and civic leaders, public education advocates, legislators, school board members and superintendents heard from a host of national and state speakers about the urgent need for comprehensive reform of public education.
The summit was the brainchild of state Rep. Steve Carter who is now chairman of the House Education Committee. Nine organizational partners helped put on the event, including CABL.
It was an impressive and diverse lineup of speakers including Gov. Bobby Jindal; Sen. Mary Landrieu; former Florida Gov. Jeb Bush; Howard Fuller, a former school superintendent in Milwaukee and founding chairman of the Black Alliance for Educational Options; Joel Klein, executive vice president of News Corp., and the former head of the New York City school system; Tony Bennett, Indiana’s Superintendent of Public Instruction; and Louisiana Superintendent of Education John White.
As you can imagine, there was a lot said and even more to digest, but there were some clear and overriding messages that emerged from the summit that are worth noting.
The need for public education reform is urgent.
The world’s not like it used to be, jobs aren’t like they used to be and we compete not only with other states but the rest of the world. Our future prosperity will be based on increasing the educational attainment of our citizens. We have to do a better job than we’re doing and we have to improve now.
In education reform the key is to focus on what happens to the children, not the adults.
Too often in the education reform debate legislators and policy makers get sidetracked on issues affecting the grownups when the single overarching purpose of public education is to educate children. Period. Many of the people who oppose education reforms do so because the changes mess up their politics or for various reasons they aren’t in their own self-interest. That might well be true, but it doesn’t really matter if the point is to give children the best education we possibly can.
Major reform is hard, it makes enemies and it requires persistence.
The experience in every state that has undertaken comprehensive education reform has been the same. There’s a vast group of people with a personal, political or financial self-interest who come out of the woodwork to oppose major change. They’re living and working in the status quo, the status quo is comfortable and they don’t want anyone to upset any of their apple carts. They will fight at every level to keep things the way they are.
Of course, there’s nothing wrong with political discourse and debate. That’s healthy and it’s a critical part of the fabric of our society. It’s not the debate that’s the enemy of reform. It’s when those engaging in the debate try to distract decision makers from the purpose of reform – to do a better job of educating all of our children.
Not every reform is perfect. Some fail. And if we want to debate the merits of particular reforms and whether they will really help children learn, that’s fine. If we want to review and analyze the reforms and make suggestions that will make them better, that’s fine, too. But if we simply oppose them because they might change the way the adults do things disregarding the fact that almost half the schools in Louisiana receive a grade of D or F, then something is terribly wrong.
Those are all among the messages that emerged from the education summit, based on the experiences of reformers who changed public education in their states and who are now seeing positive results. Those lessons are well worth considering as we head into a legislative session where education reform will be a major topic and political controversy is guaranteed.
And there are a couple of other things to keep in mind, as well. While we have made real and meaningful improvement, Louisiana still ranks near the very bottom nationally in terms of education performance. Even some of our best school districts are mediocre by national standards. Change is necessary. And whether it comes sooner or later, it’s ultimately unavoidable. The world will change us eventually if we don’t change ourselves now.
Sure, change is scary and it can be difficult. But when it comes to changing things in public education, there’s a fairly simple litmus test that any of us can use to see if we’re heading in the right direction. Will the changes being proposed stand a reasonable chance of helping children learn more? As long as the answer is yes, we should be fine.