U.S. Secretary of Education Arne Duncan visited Sacramento earlier this month to challenge local officials, union members, nonprofits and legislators to make California a leader in the Obama administration's Race to the Top initiative to turn around public schools. The following are excerpts from an interview with Bee editorial writer Pia Lopez and comments made at the Sacramento Public Library.
On California's role in reform:
California has an eighth of all the students in the country. You can't overstate how important California's success as a state is to our success as a country. I do absolutely think California is at a crossroads, a fundamental fork in the road. This is a time where we need real courage and real leadership. The status quo isn't going to get us where we need to go. California has to, at its heart, decide: Is the state going to continue to lead the country? Or is the state going to retreat to the sidelines or take a step backwards?
The state has about 550,000 freshmen but only about 480,000 seniors. This state is losing 70,000 of its young people every single year. That could fill up a football stadium. And where are these young people going? The vast majority are dropping out (of school). And when they drop out, there are no good jobs out there.
California has to lead the country to make that dropout rate as low as possible. California has to lead the way in increasing the graduation rate as quickly as we can.
On the proper role of the federal government in public education:
The Department of Education historically, since its inception, has been a compliance-driven bureaucracy. We're trying to get out of the compliance business and get into the business of investing in what works. We have unprecedented discretionary resources. Race to the Top is about $4 billion. We have at least another $6 billion coming in additional discretionary resources.
The best ideas are never going to come from Washington. The best ideas are going to come from the local level, from teachers, great principals, districts making a difference in students' lives.
To create a sense of urgency, the best thing we can do is invest in great, great work.
On the principles behind reform:
High standards matter. California's had high standards.
Good assessments matter.
Great teaching, great principals matter. Talent matters tremendously in education. Somehow we're afraid to talk about excellence in education. I'm not sure why.
Good data matters. Understanding which teachers make a difference in students' lives. Understanding which schools of education are producing the teachers that are producing the students who are learning the most.
I don't focus on absolute test scores. I don't really care about that. I care about growth and gain and improvement each year.
And what are we doing to turn around chronically underperforming schools? Today, America has about 5,000 schools that continue to underperform year after year. Two thousand high schools produce half of the dropouts in the country. Their kids are years behind grade. And this is true not just for one or two years, for five years or 10 years but for 20 or 30 years. Decades.
If we were to take – we have about 100,000 schools in our country – if we were to take the bottom 1 percent each year, the bottom thousand, and year after year turn them around, over the next four or five or six years, we could basically eliminate those dropout factories from our nation.
On linking student achievement and teacher effectiveness:
In California's evaluation system, like most places, there's no correlation between student performance and teacher evaluation. I think that's a problem. I think how students do should be a part of teacher evaluation. The other extreme is having 100 percent of evaluation based on test scores. I think that's equally bad. I'm trying to argue for a middle ground.
Any good evaluation of anyone, not just of teachers, looks at multiple indicators: Peer evaluations. Principal observation. The leadership you take. And also student work, student achievement. There's always a balance in this.
