Yes, public education in America is more expensive and less effective than in other countries. So how can we turn it around? Our panel weighs in. The United States bests almost every country in the world in many areas, but when it comes to educational achievement, American students are just plain mediocre. According to the most recent (2012) results of the Programme for International Student Assessment (PISA) — a test of critical thinking administered every three years to about half a million 15-year-olds around the globe — U.S. students are lagging behind those in many other countries, including China, Finland and Korea, in math, reading and science. Compared with other developed nations, the U.S. performs average or below. Worse, among the 34 countries surveyed, the U.S. school system ranked fifth in spending per student, at $115,000. That’s a hefty chunk of change for so-so results. PISA scores aren’t the only measure of an educational system, but most experts agree that American schools are in need of a major overhaul. The question is: What kinds of reforms will result in lasting, meaningful changes? As part of NationSwell’s Ask the Expert series, we asked our panel to share their ideas on how best to improve K-12 public education. Read on for their thoughts, and then join the conversation by leaving your own ideas in the comments box. MORE: The Radical School Reform That Just Might Work 1 Invest in Training Teachers — and Their Bosses The quality of a child’s teacher is the single most-important school-related factor of his or her success. And there’s no question that the country’s schools of education need to do a better job of producing properly trained teachers — and principals, says Steve Fink, executive director of the Center for Educational Leadership at the University of Washington. “We also have to understand that as a nation, we haven’t invested in the training of our educators like we have in the training of our doctors and our lawyers. Even the best education program is going to produce a novice teacher,” he says. Better teacher training is but one step. We also need to improve the quality of our school and district leaders, so that they’re better able to lead. They need to get smarter about what good teaching actually looks like, and then help grow and develop their teachers and principals. At the Center for Educational Leadership, says Fink, “We work with teachers to improve their teaching, while simultaneously working with the school principals to help them learn how to support teachers, and simultaneously working with district leaders, superintendents and central office leaders to teach them how to support principals.” DON’T MISS: In New Mexico, High Schools That Inspire Would-Be Dropouts 2 Don’t Focus on Punishing Bad Teachers. Learn How to Make Good Ones Instead You can’t hold people accountable for things they don’t know how to do. In other words, says Fink, if we as a nation aren’t adequately teaching teachers how to be effective, we can’t reasonably expect them to be up to the task. “Accountability only works if we actually help people learn and grow and teach them what they need to know in order to be held accountable. Instead we are doing the opposite,” says Fink. “We throw high-stakes testing at kids, and when test results are great, we give teachers more money. When they’re bad, we punish them and sanction them, and close down [schools]. … There’s literally zero research to support that any of these policies actually work.” So what does work? That’s harder to say. Clearly, there are good teachers and there are not-so-good ones, but researchers haven’t yet been able to put their finger on exactly what characteristics make a teacher great in the classroom. “It’s not attributable to years of experience or what kind of degrees the teachers have,” says Laura Hamilton, a senior behavioral scientist at the RAND Corporation, a federally funded think tank. “It’s something less concrete and harder to pin down.” There are many new initiatives to improve teacher evaluations and performance — both of teachers and their students — though it’s not clear yet whether they’ll work. “But I think that focusing not on identifying bad teachers and firing them, which some of the debate has been about, but identifying teachers’ individual strengths and weaknesses and trying to help them get better, is promising,” Hamilton says. 3 Modernize the Teacher’s Job No teacher is an island. And yet in the traditional education model, each teacher works alone, isolated in his or her own classroom without adequate communication or support from the school — or from peers. This is “really a factory-style model,” says Lynette Guastaferro, executive director of Teaching Matters, a nonprofit advocacy group in New York City. What we need to do is revamp the organization of education and schools to mirror the way “modern American companies work,” she says. First, schools need to be restructured to support teacher effectiveness. Guastaferro says that means working with school leadership to make sure that they are conveying to teachers clear and consistent standards about what they should be teaching and how they will be assessed in terms of their effectiveness. Second, schools should identify who their best, most effective teachers are and then empower them to lead and help train other teachers. “What this does is two things,” says Guastaferro. “It helps solve the problem of [teacher] retention and it helps to reduce isolation, allowing [teachers] to problem-solve together.” The idea, basically, is to modernize the job by radically rethinking the role of teachers and their place in the educational structure. They should be allowed to be critical thinkers and problem-solvers — that’s the whole point of the Common Core, after all. “This new generation of young people who come into education [aren’t] looking for 30 years in a system and a gold watch in the end,” says Guastaferro. “Right now, we’re lucky if they will stay in the job for five to seven years. You have to give this generation a career path and status in their work.” ALSO: The Man Behind ‘No Child Left Behind’ Has a Surprising Answer on How to Improve Education 4 Think in Terms of Tradeoffs, Not Absolutes The common wisdom is that children learn better in smaller classes than in big ones. But reducing class size is an expensive proposition — you need more teachers and more classrooms. Here’s another costly measure: extending the school year. Yet we also know that over summer vacation, kids from poor families fall behind because they’re not engaged in the kinds of enriching activities that kids from affluent families are. Few public school systems have the money to extend both the school year and shrink class size. “So I did a little thought experiment,” says Matt Chingos, a fellow in the Brown Center on Education Policy at the Brookings Institution, a Washington, D.C.-based research group. “What if we wanted to extend the school year … [and] compensated for that by making classrooms a little bigger?” If you look at the research on the costs and benefits of class size versus the costs and benefits of time spent in school, what you find is that the “positive effect of spending more days in school is larger than the negative effect of having larger classes. It’s important to think about these tradeoffs,” he says. The bottom line is that every change to public education requires an investment of funds, and the question is: Is this the best way to spend public money? “You want to look from the beginning of pre-K all the way up to the end of high school for opportunities to maximize the effectiveness of the significant public resources that are put into our education system,” says Chingos. “There are opportunities at all points to make good investments or bad investments.” 5 Let Kids Learn at Their Own Pace Schools and school districts have been hot to adopt all kinds of new technologies — from handing out personal iPads to “flipping” the classroom structure — to try to teach more effectively. Some of these things have had a limited effect on student achievement, some of them haven’t had any effect, says RAND’s Laura Hamilton. But one especially promising strategy involves using adaptive learning programs to tailor instruction to each individual student — that is, “breaking away from the traditional classroom model where one teacher tells 25 kids to do the same things at the same time,” Hamilton says. Such technology-based curriculums allow kids to work at their own pace and set their own goals. It also lets teachers give more focused attention to smaller groups — while other groups work independently — instead of always teaching the whole class at once. “But it’s not just a matter of buying these programs and sticking them in the classroom. Teachers need to understand how to use these tools effectively and how to get good information about the kids’ skills and interests so they can tailor instruction in ways that are appropriate,” Hamilton says. DON’T MISS: To Change Public Education, This Nonprofit Is Hacking the System 6 Get Families Involved Early A substantial amount of research suggests that early childhood education, when done well, may be key to kids’ achievement in the long-term. “Some of the programs that have been successful are those that include some sort of a family outreach component, so it’s not just getting the kids to the program for several hours a day, it’s involving the parents and other family members, so they are contributing to kids learning,” says Hamilton. “I think kids can benefit from that all the way through high school.” 7 Address the Issue of Poverty Where you live often prescribes your destiny when it comes to public education. Which is why we end up with disproportionate numbers of poor kids in certain schools and wealthy ones in others. “I think there’s this argument in education: It’s poverty or it’s teacher quality. It’s actually both,” says Lynette Guastaferro of Teaching Matters. “At some point we have to address this issue of the concentration of poor kids, because that issue has gotten radically worse over the last 30 years. Until we solve that, we’ll only be filling the glass halfway.” MORE: Ask the Experts: Why Should Americans Care About Income Inequality?