Will Bush upgrade high schools?
President Bush once made improving American high schools a top priority for his second term. It’s a task widely regarded as vital to the nation’s future. But his plan is going nowhere in Congress.
Business leaders, governors and pundits say, and test scores confirm, that U.S. high schools are failing to equip graduates with the skills they need to compete in a global economy.
Yet Bush’s proposal to extend his No Child Left Behind (NCLB) regime of standards, testing and accountability to high schools hasn’t even been introduced in Congress.
And both houses rejected Bush’s $1.5 billion plan for funding high school reform when it refused to eliminate federal aid for traditional vocational education.
Instead, the Senate in March voted 99-0 to reauthorize the $1.3 billion Perkins Act without writing in any performance standards for shop courses. In May, the House passed a bill with modest upgrades, 416-9.
In an interview, Education Secretary Margaret Spellings told me that “the people who don’t want to change (are) our problem — the people who live off the vocational education program. They’re a very powerful interest group.”
Spellings said that the administration probably won’t propose a full-blown high school reform plan until the 2001 NCLB law, which currently applies only to elementary and middle schools, comes up for reauthorization in 2007. And, as Spellings said, the need for applying NCLB-style reform to high schools was demonstrated anew in the latest National Assessment of Educational Progress, released in July.
It showed that American 9-year-olds have made significant improvement in reading and math, especially in the past five years. Thirteen-year-olds made have made some progress, but 17-year-olds have made none at all.
“There are a lot of pundits talking about when the changes happened,” she said. “All I know is that we have had more progress in the last five years than in the entire history of the test, starting in the early 1970s. So, you do the math.”
If it’s true that NCLB has had a major impact on student performance in lower grades, then why doesn’t the administration press harder for high school reform and put real money behind it?
A new study issued recently by some of the nation’s major business organizations called for doubling the number of graduates in science, technology, engineering and math by 2015, partly by upgrading math and science teaching in U.S. schools.
The report noted that in a recent international assessment of problem-solving skills among 15-year-olds, the U.S. had the smallest percentage of top performers and largest percentage of low performers of any participating developed country.
It also reported that the percentage of U.S. students planning to pursue engineering degrees declined by one-third between 1992 and 2002.
Spellings told me, “We need to engage the general public around this crisis because people do not turn on their TV sets and see any Russian satellites up there. How do you make this compelling for the American people?”
One answer clearly would be for the president to take it on and propose a major initiative to upgrade math and science education, research and foreign language instruction. First, though, he’d have to understand that there’s a problem.
(Morton Kondracke is executive editor of Roll Call, the newspaper of Capitol Hill.)