Light a fire for education
The interim president at Lewis-Clark State College seemed uneasy with the question.
During a Jan. 13 forum in Coeur d'Alene, Dr. Tony Fernandez was asked how well-prepared Idaho high school graduates were in making the transition to his college. He admitted that roughly half of them are not adequately prepared; that some 50 percent need remedial courses in math, in English or in both.
While that percentage may vary somewhat on Idaho's other campuses, it directly speaks to the need for significant change in the way we're preparing our students. If a large percentage of college-bound students hasn't grasped the basics, imagine how much worse off are those who dropped out or otherwise fell by the educational wayside after graduating high school.
Since Superintendent Tom Luna and Gov. Butch Otter kicked off the 2011 legislative session with proposals that would bring massive change to public education in Idaho, those entrenched in continuing to do things the same way as always have pushed back vigorously. These are almost all members of the current educational fraternity. They either don't know how to do their jobs better or they don't want to, and either way, our students lose. We all lose.
It's our hope that as the Senate Education Committee considers the Students Come First legislation this week, emphasis is placed on helping willing and capable educators do better. We believe the great majority do want their students to improve and are willing to change to make that happen. Incentives for teachers whose students improve performance are important, but they're not the whole answer.
Susan Moore Johnson, a professor at Harvard University's Graduate School of Education and a merit pay researcher, told The Globe and Mail newspaper recently that when teachers don't succeed, "it's for a lot of complex reasons - the most important being that they probably don't know how to do any better than they're doing."
Rather than firing across adversarial lines, we hope the education community will come together to support change. They need to not just for themselves and the kids, but for the future of every Idahoan.
Idaho public education's staunchest supporter, the J.A. and Kathryn Albertson Foundation - an organization that has invested more than $400 million in Idaho's students, educators and schools over the past 15 years - declared in a full-page ad last Sunday that Students Come First is essential.
"For the first time in our history as a supporter of Idaho's education system, we are compelled to sound the alarm - loudly and widely," the ad reads. "Given the current economic climate and our poor position in the global workforce, the status quo is not an option and will only harm Idaho."
The foundation's research shows that only 1 in 4 high school graduates is deemed college ready; that Idaho is in the bottom 10 states for college-going rates and dead last in the nation for our postsecondary retention rates; that in the future, most jobs will be for either highly skilled workers or the low-skilled working poor and that Idaho is preparing its students for the latter; and that by 2018, 61 percent of jobs in Idaho will require postsecondary credentials - and we're not on track to be able to fill the 146,000 skilled jobs that will be waiting.
May cooperation kindle the flame of change, and may determination see it through.