When George Bush convenes the education summit next week, he'll preside over an occasion heavy with symbolic significance. This is only the third time a president has called together the governors of all the states to discuss a particular issue. Theodore Roosevelt convened the first summit to talk about conservation; Franklin Roosevelt called the second to talk about the Great Depression. So merely by calling this summit, President Bush is implying that he considers education important - and in trouble.
But beyond the symbolism, beyond acknowledging we have a national problem, what should the summit try to accomplish? What needs to go on the agenda? During his campaign, President Bush announced that he wanted to be the "education president." And yet it's hard for a president of the United States to fulfill that promise. Education is not a federal responsibility; it's largely a state or local matter. So we have to ask both "What's to be done?" and "Who should do it?"
The top of the agenda should be the issue of national goals and standards and a system of assessments to go along with them. We've had a school reform movement going for six years now, and we still haven't decided what our students should know and be able to do - in fact, we've hardly opened the discussion. This is partly because many people get nervous when they hear the words "national" and "education goals" in the same sentence. They're afraid any such goals will be the first step towards a rigid, federally controlled education system.
But it's possible to set national goals and standards -- even establish a national assessment program and still leave a tremendous amount of flexibility for states and local school districts. National goals and standards do not have to spell out - they should not spell out - exactly what facts students in third or tenth grade need to know or what books they need to read. There are legitimate differences of opinion in matters like these. But we could all agree about the kind of book students at that level need to be able to read, the kind of essays they should be able to write, the math skills they should have. And we could assess how well students meet these goals -- with good tests instead of the idiotic, low-level multiple-choice tests we now use.
Just think for a minute what such national goals and standards, linked to a national assessment, could do for our schools. We know schools respond to mandated tests. And we know many teachers are now forced to spend many class hours teaching their students how to score well on multiple-choice tests. But what if the pressure were on teachers to help students learn how to read and discuss worthwhile books, to write well-reasoned discussions of complex issues and to take apart and explain a gasoline engine so they could do well on exams that tested these skills. Schools would be very different from what they are now.
And there would be another difference: For the first time, people in a community would really have some firm basis for evaluating their schools; they would know how their students were doing compared with the students in the next county or state. No report now tells us how many kids who graduate from a given school can understand and editorial in a local newspaper and how many can multiply fractions. The kind of national assessment I've been talking about would give us a real system of accountability - and for those who wanted it, a real basis for a system of parental choice and even for deciding which schools are so deficient they should be put out of business.
Who should take charge of this effort? The federal government shouldn't play a major role in developing the standards because they will require a broad consensus. The summit seems the ideal place to start the discussion, which might then be carried on in various forums throughout the country. But developing and supporting the assessment would be a good role for the federal government. The feds already fund the National Assessment of Educational Progress, which might be able to handle the new job by calling on additional experience and expertise.
I have two more top-priority items for the summit agenda. One of them is the question of how to get schools to engage in the constant self-examination that allows successful organizations to renew themselves and change as problems change. It's something schools seem unable to do; yet it's more important than any single reform anyone has suggested. Incentives seem to be one answer. But I'll talk more about them and the question in next week's column.
The other item that the president and the governors must wrestle with - and perhaps it should be the first thing on the agenda - is how to prevent and deal with the problems increasing numbers of our kids bring to school with them, problems that affect their ability to learn and that our schools alone cannot overcome: lack of prenatal care, poor nutrition, drug dependency, lack of medical attention, poverty, welfare dependency and more.
This is my list. Others will have theirs. After all, reasonable people can differ, and the summit is the beginning of a process, not the end. But one thing is clear: It will be a terrible letdown and a waste if the summit deals with trivialities, if, as some people have suggested, symbolism is all the president has in mind, and the education summit turns out to be just another media event.