Eduflack was reminded (like I really needed a reminder) of the disconnect between the education policy world and the real world yesterday at a forum sponsored by the U.S. Chamber of Commerce’s Institute for a Competitive Workforce and Talkers Magazine on our nation’s future education agenda.  The headline — lots of interesting comments, some that were greatly reassuring we were on the right track, education reform-wise, and some that were downright disturbing.

First for the best of times.  The forum was framed by two important voices in this debate — the Chamber’s Arthur Rothkopf and Education Trust’s Kati Haycock.  There are few better voices in DC to help identify the problems in public education AND identify the real solutions we can adopt to improve instruction and better prepare our students for the rigors of tomorrow.

Kicking off by stating “the business community is dissatisfied with the quality of what it receives” from the staid and traditional K-12 system, Rothkopf laid out a clear six-point plan for education reform:

* NCLB (or whatever we choose to call it) must be reauthorized, strengthened, and improved

* Better teachers, with performance measured and better, merit-based pay going to the educators who deserve it

* Better management of the system, with more accountability

* Better data (along with better application of the data)

* Higher standards (though no mention of a single national standard)

* More innovation, with an emphasis on investments in charters and online education

By this time, Eduflack was ready to jump to his feet, crying out an “amen.”  But he waited, knowing the true voice of all that is right and effective in education reform — EdTrust’s Haycock — was about to take hold of the microphone.  She didn’t disappoint.  Haycock clearly laid out the problem, “the deeper you dig, the more worried you become” when it comes to K-12 instruction.  She reminded the audience this isn’t just an issue of poor kids or an issue of kids of color, and that even our nation’s highest achievers simply can’t measure up compared to the highest achievers of other industrialized nations.  Ultimately, the problem flows from the choices we make in education — choices like what to expect from our students and what to teach our students.

Haycock’s remarks were not all doom and gloom.  She reminded us (as Eduflack has been saying for years) that there are placed that are doing it right, schools and districts where we’re boosting achievement and closing the achievement gap.  Places where we are simply doing what works.  She rattled off schools in Georgia, Delaware, Kansas, and New York, for instance, that can serve as beacons for teaching at high levels and achieving at even higher levels.

And then the worst of times, the moment when I was slapped upside the head with a reality stick.  The program moved from Rothkopf and Haycock to four local radio talk show hosts — selected by sponsor Talkers magazine — to represent Main Street USA and what is being heard on the airwaves throughout the United States.  Here in policyworld, we frame education reform around issues such as accountability, quality, results, and research.  We talk about processes and outcomes.  We look to separate the status quo from the innovation.  Oh what a sheltered world we live in.

From listening to our esteemed talk show hosts, the ed policy community may as well be living on Mars.  They focused on issues such as student discipline, asking why today’s students don’t fear their teachers the way we did decades ago.  They talked about the failures or parents (who bear some responsibility, don’t get me wrong, but are more a part of the solution, not a major part of the problem).  That their former great high schools are now low-income high schools.  They talked about students being down because all their potential jobs have gone to India (how 2005/World is Flat).  And they even said that vo-tech high school students enrolled in cosmetology courses are getting the higher-level math skills they need to succeed, so we shouldn’t worry at all.

It wasn’t all bad.  Talker Joe Madison declared that “Education is the new currency of the 21st century.”  For the most part, the talkers tried to personalize the story.  Communication-wise, such an approach is a good thing.  It makes it easier for stakeholders to relate and understand the issues at hand.  Unfortunately, here they were personalizing the trivial.  The word accountability didn’t come out of the talkers’ mouths until the very end.  The issue of national standards never came up.  To the contrary, we had one talker actually saying it was unfair to expect a state like Mississippi to perform as a state like Massachusetts does?

Unfair?  I would say not.  If we are truly worried about jobs going away and kids being unmotivated because they don’t see employment opportunities, we need to raise standards.  More importantly, we need to show a potential employer that a high school graduate in Mississippi has the same math and problem-solving skills as a graduate in Massachusetts, Arizona, or North Dakota.  We need to show all our schools are making the grade, not just a select few in a select few states.

Fortunately, Rothkopf and Haycock were able to bring us back to reality.  With Rothkopf, it was the realization that the math, science, and problem-solving skills needed to succeed in college are the same skills one needs to succeed in the workforce (a statement that high school reform and STEM advocates, including Eduflack), have long trumpeted.

Before departing, Haycock left the audience with the sobering fact that the greatest obstacle facing school improvement is one of complacency.  Yes, improvement comes from innovation and new ideas focused on achievement and success.  But those improvements require the rocking of boats, the upsetting of apple carts, and the changing of minds — just the sort of things the status quoers fight against.  

What lessons are to be learned here?  More than anything, we need more people calling in to radio talk shows to discuss issues such as student achievement, school accountability, and research-based decisionmaking.  When we talk of such issues in DC, they tend to drop like a stone, with a thud to the bottom.  Discuss them in public forums like talk radio, and they have the possibility of skipping across the pond, causing ripples that can be unmeasurable.