I asked a high school kid if he knew who the vice-president of the United States was. He thought for a moment and then said, “No”. I told him to take a guess. He thought for another moment, looked at me skeptically, and finally gave up. “I’m sorry,” he said. “I don’t know.”

The latest federal test results showed some improvement in public school math and reading scores, but there is no reason to celebrate these minuscule gains. The Americans need so much more. A four-year college degree is now all but mandatory for building and sustaining a middle-class standard of living in the US.

Over the next 20 or 30 years, when today’s children raise their children in an ever more technologically advanced and globalised society, the educational requirements will only grow more rigorous and unforgiving.

What’s needed is a wholesale transformation of the public school system from the broken-down postwar model of the past 50 or 60 years. The US has not yet faced up to the fact that it needs a school system capable of fulfiling the educational needs of children growing up in an era that will be at least as different from the 20th century as the 20th was from the 19th.

“We’re not good at thinking about magnitudes,” said Thomas Kane, a professor at the Harvard Graduate School of Education. Kane and I were discussing what he believes are the two areas that have the greatest potential for radically improving the way children are taught in the US. Both are being neglected by the education establishment.

The first is teacher quality, a topic that gets talked about incessantly. It has been known for decades that some teachers have huge positive effects on student achievement, and that others do poorly. The positive effect of the highest performing teachers on underachieving students is startling. What is counterintuitive, but well documented, is that paper qualifications, such as teacher certification, have very little to do with whatever it is that makes good teachers effective.

Studies have clearly shown that the good teachers and the not-so-good ones can usually be identified, if they are carefully observed in their first two or three years on the job — in other words, before tenure is granted.
The second area to be mined for potentially transformative effects is the wide and varied field of alternative school models. The Americans should be rigorously studying those schools that appear to be having the biggest positive effects on student achievement. Are the effects real? If so, what accounts for them?
The Knowledge Is Power Programme, to cite one example, is a charter school network that has consistently gotten extraordinary academic results from low-income students. Like other successful models, it has adopted a longer school day and places great demands on its teachers and students.

If kids are to have a fair chance at a rewarding life over the next several decades, the Americans have got to give them a school system adequate to the times. They need something better than a post-World War II system in a post-9/11 world.

NYT