Iowa Education director: Schools on wrong track

Thirty years ago, the U.S. ranked No. 1 in academic achievement and the number of college graduates in the world, and Iowa was the No. 1 state in the nation, said Jason Glass, director of the Iowa Department of Education in Fairfield Tuesday.

?We were at a pinnacle,? he said as the featured speaker at the fifth and final in a series of colloquia on educational change hosted by the department of teaching at Maharishi University of Management. ?Today, the U.S. ranks 14th in literature, 25th in math and 17th in science.

?Iowa ranks lowest among its surrounding states in academic achievement and the percent of population earning college degrees.?

Glass cited the rankings determined by the Organization for Economic Co-operation and Development?s Program for International Student Assessment.

He acknowledged U.S. education hasn?t so much deteriorated as it has stagnated, while other counties have spurted ahead.

?Everyone agrees we need to do better; where we struggle are what strategies to use,? he said.

?The conversations Americans have been having about what to do are very different than what top performing countries do,? said Glass. ?We?ve been on the wrong track. I promise to work on what I?m calling ?The Great Pivot.?

?What?s been proven to work?? he asked. ?We need to take a look at the most successful educational systems and ask what they are doing. That list is actually pretty short:

? Successful education systems set very high, rigorous expectations and the entire system is built to support that concept.

Curriculum, teacher pay and teacher education programs all are aimed to support high expectations, with goals and benchmarks specified down to grade levels, and scope and sequence of how the information is presented is specified.

?Creativity is still encouraged within parameters within the curriculum,? said Glass. ?Students [in high performing schools] are not limited to just the basic subjects. But the curriculum lays out what knowledge students will know at what grade level. And students are assessed [tested] but not using the standardized, fill-in-the-oval tests. Students have to demonstrate they?ve mastered the learning.

?In Iowa, we have 351 school districts fighting for local control, not wanting to share common curriculum.?

? A lot of attention is focused on the quality of the workforce, or who gets in to university teacher-training programs.

?In Singapore, its high performing educational system pays for their best students, about one in 10, to attend university teacher training,? said Glass. ?Not everyone who wants to be a teacher gets in. It?s a different focus than we have. Compensation and esteem for teachers is low in the U.S.?

? Customization learning for students; each standard or benchmark stays the same for all students, but how it is taught or presented is adapted to the students? abilities.

?What keeps the U.S. and Iowa from high performance in education?? Glass asked. ?Contrary to what some say, we have all the resources and all the money needed to do this.?

He referred to a 40-year old song, ?Stuck in the Middle with You,? by Stealers Wheel, with a refrain in part, ?Clowns to the left of me, jokers to the right ...?

?I?m an equal-opportunity offensive guy,? he said. ?I?ll give you the arguments from the left, right and middle.

?The left denies and disbelieves our schools need fixing,? he said. ?It wants the system left alone to heal itself. The left advocates wasting resources on class size reduction. It panders to special interest education groups and over-reacts to test scores.

?The right has false faith in local control,? said Glass. ?It believes accountability will cure academics, can we say ?No Child Left Behind?? It?s not working.

?The right has declared war on unions and has under-funded any efforts for improvements. It relies on measures that won?t scale up.

?The right accepts change for change?s sake that doesn?t work. Accepting solutions that are not at the scale of the problem, such as putting $2 million into Iowa schools? reading program, won?t touch the problem. Probably 10 times that amount might be able to make a difference.

?We?ve relied on pilot programs that run their course and fade away.

?And I am personally guilty of building an unfocused and ineffective educational policy agenda, built to appeal to politicians on both sides, and it ended up so broad as to be ineffective.? said Glass. ?I pledge to do better.?

Issues that don?t matter distract the middle view on education, said Glass.

?The state fair. It?s a great state fair, it?s huge and I enjoy it. But letting that and tourists at the lake dictate our educational agenda? Really?? he said.

?I remain optimistic. We need to harness Iowa?s tradition of getting it right. Our state needs to educate our children to be able to compete globally for jobs.?

Glass took several questions from the audience. He agrees competency-based education has validity; instead of time in grade level being the measure for student-learning, demonstrated competency determines when a student passes to the next level.

?Customizing learning to the student and acknowledging that learning can happen anywhere in the community, not just in a school room, is a step forward if we require the proof of mastery,? he said. ?That?s transformational and it?s coming.

?The goal should always be the same, what the student learns. That puts the focus on the teacher to manage all the levels of learning.

?I must carry this agenda forward, to work on the Iowa Core. Do we have clear standards? Not yet. I have a lot of work to do, but the potential is great.?