Public education needs a new definition, the CEO of the Education Leaders Council said recently at a luncheon on the campus of North Carolina State University.
Lisa Graham Keegan, head of an organization committed to improving the nation’s public schools, spoke Sept. 8 at the event, sponsored by the North Carolina Education Alliance. She is also a former superintendent of the Arizona public school system.
Keegan has been a vocal advocate of performance-based change for public schools for many years, and offered her thoughts in a talk titled “The Abyss Gazes Also: Staring Down the Face of the Opposition in Education Reform.”
“When you take on the monster, it is important not to become the monster… what it is that you oppose,” said Keegan in her opening remarks.
‘Inside the box’ thinking
Lack of improvement in public schools is the result of “inside the box” thinking about how to produce better public schools, Keegan said. That kind of narrow approach to possibilities won’t work, she said. “They are trying to repair a system. They don’t realize that they are working inside a box, and there are all kinds of ways to get out.”
Because public education largely assigns children to schools, it cannot attract “the best and the brightest,” to the profession, she said. That means that the school system cannot keep improve itself, and predictably, it poorly serves certain children.
Calling the public-school system a “Soviet-like monopoly,” because of its centrally governed, inflexible character, Keegan said, “There is no other system where we expect that to work except in public education.”
As an alternative, Keegan proposed a new definition for public education. The changes she proposed encompass aims as well as methods for reforming schools. To revamp public education, she said, we must first ensure that schools work for the benefit of every child.
Public support for the education process, and a policy that allows dollars to follow children into schools that work best for them, are the other essential components she identified.
Choice for students and teachers
Keegan is confident about the benefit of increased choices for children, asserting, “Kids won’t lose if dollars follow the child” in a voucher plan. She concedes that schools might lose, ”if they are lousy schools.”
On the other hand, she said that failing schools should be treated like failing practitioners in other professional fields. “Would we continue to patronize a doctor who hasn’t been able to cure us for 27 years, on the fear that if we take our business away, he’ll only get worse,” she asks?
The voucher plan that Keegan envisions would reward schools that succeed by allowing education funds to flow to them.
Keegan is promoting charter schools, magnet schools, and vouchers as ways to bring innovative methods and fresh skills into education. Traditional public schools hinder these efforts, but charters, magnets, and private schools could ”allow great teachers to bring in their own staff… and eliminate people who don’t fit,” Keegan said.
In addition to choice for parents, the changes Keegan envisions will bring in master teachers to evaluate teachers against a school’s own high standards. As for American Board certification, Keegan said that “the eye ought to be on who’s getting results,” not on credentials. Likewise for teacher training. “It is not worth it right now to pretend that we can reform the colleges of education,” she said.
The Education Leaders Council was founded in 1995 by Keegan and a group of other education chiefs. The leaders hope to address the problems of a system that they believe will not, or cannot, reform itself without fundamental change.
Karen Palasek is an assistant editor at Carolina Journal.