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Q: Since the publication of "A Nation at Risk," have there been any significant changes in the respective roles of school administrators and teachers? What do you imagine as the ideal roles for these educational leaders? A: In A Nation Reformed, Timothy Knowles reports the presence of a new academic imperative facing public school leaders. There have been many changes in the kinds of work they are expected to do. Whereas they used to be concerned mainly with the bureaucratic management of schools—keeping the buses running on time, balancing the budget, etc.—they now are called on to serve as instructional leaders in a way that they previously were not. They need to be able to observe and assess with precision the instruction that is going on in the classrooms, and they need to be able to define ways of improving teacher performance in the classroom. They are also expected to find a way to bring all of the resources in the school—the time allotted to teachers for teaching and professional development, the money, and the people—into alignment with instructional goals. In addition, school administrators need to sell their instructional plans to policy makers, to parents, and—most importantly—to the teachers in their schools. So there are leadership skills both in instruction, and in motivating and mentoring teachers. Good administrators and principals always had these skills, but now every administrator and school leader needs to have them.
Teachers are facing changes as well. Now, rather than acting in isolation in their classrooms regarding their curriculum, lesson plans, grading standards, and accountability measures, teachers must learn to work in concert with their school’s instructional and accountability requirements. Those that don’t are bound to fail as teachers, with extremely rare exceptions. Q: In the last twenty years, do you think schools have become more effective in providing all students with an equal opportunity to learn and achieve at a high level? A: This is one of the most pressing questions facing us in education, and it is very a difficult question to answer in a general way. Usually, people who have this question end up asking which schools and which students are achieving at an appropriate level. One of the problems with standardized tests is that they lead to the kinds of generalizations that complicate the work of teachers and administrators. In many cases, they skew the ways in which we measure school performances, thus making it more difficult to tell if schools are truly effective at providing all students with an equal opportunity to learn. When standardized tests are used as the principal measure of school performance, it’s very hard to know whether students are really achieving to the extent that they should be Having said that, one of the most fascinating pieces in A Nation Reformed? is an essay by Jeff Howard, in which he discusses what he sees as our failure to educate poor and minority students for the 21st century. Howard argues that we have not consistently held these students, and the teachers and/or administrators who teach them, to high standards and expectations, nor have we adequately provided the resources they would need to reach these high standards. He refers to a thinly veiled cultural prejudice, suggesting that the failure to hold all students to high standards is rooted in the belief that some children don’t have the same intelligence and gifts as other children. Howard states that, in addition to certain social disadvantages, this belief is very destructive when we evaluate the educational standards that we have for poor and minority students. This argument is a provocative one, and one that many people would argue with. Nonetheless, it has some merit and is worthy of our consideration. Q: After editing A Nation Reformed?, can you evaluate the declaration that American schools were—and perhaps still are—“at risk?” A: Yes and no. In 1983, there was a pervasive sense throughout the United States that schools were failing, that they were not providing the same quality of education that schools in other industrialized nations were. You can raise several questions about these claims. When "A Nation at Risk" was published, the United States trade deficits with Germany and Japan were of great concern, and many people felt that the United States could not compete with those nations unless it improved its school system. Once that economic situation had turned around—when we had erased such deficits and when the Japanese and German economies had gone into recession while the United States economy was booming in the 90s—nobody attributed the changes to the nation’s schools. It’s sometimes difficult to say whether we were making the judgments about our educational system because of facts or because of feelings. But I would say that, during the early 80s, there was a broad consensus in the United States among policy makers, many school practitioners, and parents that schools were failing. Now, are they still failing today? Are we still “at risk?” I believe we’ve made tremendous progress in the last twenty years in engaging the tough question of what we want our schools to do for us. What are schools for? Are they for creating good citizens? Are they for creating good workers and worker bees that can fill our factories and our offices? Are schools primarily social institutions where we learn how to live in a democracy and how to be artists and how to create beautiful buildings? The answer, of course, suggests that they need to do and be a little of all of these things. Schools need to provide all children with the intellectual tools they need in order to have an opportunity to compete for jobs during the 21st century. I think it’s fair to say that whenever and wherever we can find a child who is not getting a high-quality education, we are still at risk. Without giving every child the opportunity to have a high-quality education, we put our country at risk. Rather than asking ourselves, “Are we at risk today?” perhaps we should ponder, “What can we do to ensure that no individual child is at risk as he or she goes out into the world to live his or her life?” As long as some of the nation’s children are at risk, we are all—in a sense—at risk.
HGSE News, Harvard Graduate School of Education
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