One of interest re Class sizes
Neil Rossen
might be useful
WSJ
APRIL 2, 2010.Escalante Stood and Delivered. It's Our Turn.
The teachers union opposed his effort to expand his class beyond 35
students.
By
ANDREW J. COULSON
Jaime Escalante, the brilliant public school teacher immortalized in
the 1988 film, "Stand and Deliver," died this week at the age of 79.
With the help of a few dedicated colleagues at Garfield High in East
Los Angeles, he shattered the myth that poor inner-city kids couldn't
handle advanced math. At the peak of its success, Garfield produced
more students who passed Advanced Placement calculus than Beverly
Hills High.
In any other field, his methods would have been widely copied.
Instead, Escalante's success was resented. And while the teachers
union contract limited class sizes to 35, Escalante could not bring
himself to turn students away, packing 50 or more into a room and
still helping them to excel. This weakened the union's bargaining
position, so it complained.
By 1990, Escalante was stripped of his chairmanship of the math
department he'd painstakingly built up over a decade. Exasperated, he
left in 1991, eventually returning to his native Bolivia. Garfield's
math program went into a decline from which it has never recovered.
The best tribute America can offer Jaime Escalante is to understand
why our education system destroyed rather than amplified his success—
and then fix it.
A succinct diagnosis of the problem was offered by President Clinton
in 1993 at the launch of philanthropist Walter Annenberg's $500
million education reform challenge. "People in this room who have
devoted their lives to education," he said, "are constantly plagued by
the fact that nearly every problem has been solved by somebody
somewhere, and yet we can't seem to replicate it everywhere else." Our
greatest challenge is to create "a system to somehow take what is
working and make it work everywhere."
The most naïve approach has been to create a critical mass of
exemplary "model" schools, imagining that the system would
spontaneously reconstitute itself around their example. This was the
implicit assumption underlying the Annenberg Challenge and, with donor
matching, more than $1 billion was spent on it. As a mechanism for
widely disseminating excellence, it failed utterly.
President Obama wants a government program for identifying and
disseminating what works. In his blueprint for reauthorizing the
Elementary and Secondary Education Act released in March, he proposed
the creation of "'communities of practice' to share best practices and
replicate successful strategies."
He's not the first to advocate this approach. The secretary of the
Massachusetts Board of Education pursued the same idea—in 1837. Horace
Mann, father of American public schooling, thought that a centrally
planned state education apparatus would reliably identify and bring to
scale the best methods and materials in use throughout the system.
Despite a century-and-a-half of expansion and centralization, this
approach, too, has failed. Without systematic incentives rewarding
officials for wise decisions and penalizing them for bad ones, public
schooling became a ferris wheel of faddism rather than a propagator of
excellence.
Rather than repeating the errors of the past, we would do well to look
to the successes of the present. The highly regarded KIPP network of
charter schools now operates 82 sites around the country. This is a
great boon to the many students benefitting from its services, and
clearly a step in the right direction. But its growth is only a pale
shadow of the scaling-up we've come to expect in other sectors—think
of Facebook or the iPod.
Is expansion on that scale achievable in education? Consider the Kumon
chain of after-school tutoring centers. Founded in 1954 by Japanese
math teacher Toru Kumon, it now serves more than four million students
in 42 countries. Not only does the tutoring sector reveal the
feasibility of globe-spanning education growth, it offers a glimpse of
how brilliant educators can and should be treated. Thanks to profit
sharing and Web broadcasting of their lectures, top teachers in
Korea's tutoring sector earn big salaries and have virtual class sizes
in the scores of thousands. The combination of high technology and
market incentives not only allows but compels tutoring firms to
recognize and make the most of their top teachers.
Asian tutoring services are often criticized for focusing too narrowly
on exam preparation. But in Japan, Korea and other East Asian
countries, college admission hinges almost exclusively on high-stakes
entrance exams, and degrees from elite colleges play a far greater
role in determining career opportunities there than in the U.S. If
parents demanded a broad liberal arts education, these
entrepreneurially run schools would respond or be driven from the
market.
America not only needs more teachers like Jaime Escalante, it needs an
education system that recognizes them and helps them to reach a mass
audience. The tutoring sector is a proven model for doing so: Unleash
the freedoms and incentives of the marketplace, so teachers like
Escalante become the Steve jobs or Bill Gates of education, profiting
from their exceptional ability to serve our children.
Mr. Coulson directs the Cato Institute's Center for Educational
Freedom.
Copyright 2009 Dow Jones & Company, Inc. All Rights Reserved
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Al Hamilton
WSJ
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