How to Fix the Education Crisis

Economic success begins in the classroom—which does not bode well for the future of the U.S. economy. American students rank 25th in math and 21st in science, compared with students in 30 industrialized countries, and the Broad Foundation estimates $192 billion in lost income and taxes due to dropouts each year. So how do we fix American education? To answer that question—the second in our quarterly Fix This series—Bloomberg Businessweek Chairman Norman Pearlstine gathered Steven Brill, author of Class Warfare: Inside the Fight to Fix America’s Schools; Margaret Spellings, Education Secretary from 2005-2009, now president and CEO of Margaret Spellings & Co as well as a strategic adviser to the U.S. Chamber of Commerce and president of its U.S. Forum for Policy Innovation; Dean Kamen, founder of FIRST (For Inspiration and Recognition of Science and Technology); Michele Cahill, vice-president for national program and director of urban education at Carnegie Corp. of New York; and Louis V. Gerstner Jr., former chairman and chief executive officer of IBM and co-author of Reinventing Education: Entrepreneurship in America’s Public Schools. Their conversation has been condensed and edited.

What do we need to do to get things working?

Gerstner: We know what it takes to fix the public schools. We need to do four things that are so self-evident it’s hard to believe we’re still debating it. First, we need high academic standards and a curriculum that will allow our kids to meet them. Two, we need to have a system to measure whether the kids are meeting those standards. Three, we need far better teachers in our schools. Four, more time on task. We need a longer school day and a longer school year. Those four things are hard to argue against, so why are we not making progress? We’re not making progress because we’re not executing.

Cahill: The rest of the world has gone faster and further. They’re executing on a vision and a plan. We are still talking about whether or not young people can achieve who live in poverty, whether we’re going to have a system that has high expectations for everyone.

Spellings: We do know what to do, but we’re really, as a country, not serious. Today about half our minority kids get out of high school on time, and we think that’s acceptable. If half the lunches that were served today in schools across America were tainted, people would be outraged.

Does it matter what is taught? Does the emphasis have to shift?

Cahill: It’s the what, how, and who of education. The what has to be high levels of knowledge or deep levels of knowledge, but most importantly the ability to apply that knowledge in new and unfamiliar situations. It isn’t solely in the old way of teaching, it’s actually being able to inquire, to know science, and be able to use evidence to make decisions to problem-solve. We need people who can think logically, quantitatively, but in addition can understand data. We don’t have to go very far from our financial crisis to see that every citizen needs to understand a level of mathematics.

Kamen: Education is not filling a pail, it’s lighting a fire. And you can build the best system and the best process, but you can’t open up a kid’s head and pour this stuff in. What FIRST is all about is the recognition that, assuming we have good schools and assuming we have good teachers, we still have another major problem in this country. It’s a culture problem. Both parties are running around saying it’s about jobs, it’s about jobs. Kids need more than jobs. They need careers, they need passion to solve real problems. FIRST started with 20 companies adopting 20 some high schools 20 years ago, and now we have teams that came to this year’s championship from 60 countries. We have 22,000 schools that sent teams. When you look at the data on 20 years worth of comparative schools, no matter where they’re from, rich or poor, when you look at kids that have been through a FIRST experience, that have met with real scientists and real engineers when they were still young, their perception of what’s possible was permanently changed.

Steve, I haven’t met many parents who want dumb kids, yet as you lay out in your book it seems that the barriers to really changing things remain significant.

Brill: I’m sort of the new guy on the block here. I happened to have stumbled into something called the Rubber Room where they put the minority of the minority of the minority of teachers in New York City whom they’ve identified as completely incompetent. They were kept there on payrolls for three to five years while they awaited hearings. And that really was just the tip of the iceberg. The iceberg is that you have 3.2 million teachers in this country—it’s the largest occupation in the U.S. other than retail sales clerks—and yet it is the only occupation in the U.S. where performance basically doesn’t count. What counts is how long you’ve been breathing.