 |
|||||||||||||||
|
In the 1960s former HGSE Dean Francis Keppel left Cambridge to play an historic role as President Kennedy’s Commissioner of Education; five years later (1965), Congress passed the Elementary and Secondary Education Act (ESEA), of which Keppel was the principal architect. ESEA was the first comprehensive federal education law providing funding for K-12 education and Keppel is often remembered for his belief that “education is too important to be left solely to the educators.” In 2001, ESEA was reauthorized as the “No Child Left Behind Act” (NCLB), the current federal policy for our nation’s public schools. This year marks the fortieth anniversary of ESEA. How far have we come and what have we learned since 1965? In the following interview, Ellen Condliffe Lagemann, Warren Professor of the History of American Education and Dean, reflects on the history of federal education policy over the past forty years and considers HGSE’s role in shaping education’s future.
Q: In your opinion, what has been the most significant change in education policy over the last forty years? A: Today, there is wide consensus around the value of standards in education. In 1965, when ESEA was signed into law, this idea was not even on the horizon. The challenge now is to develop sufficiently powerful instruction in full-service schools, so that we really fulfill our promise to educate all children well. We also need to focus on teacher quality and instruction so that teachers feel supported and part of a professional network. In the 1960s, teaching was a lifetime career. Today, the average teacher leaves after just three years. Once we’ve addressed the challenges, we will begin to balance accountability standards with opportunity standards—which is still an undelivered promise. Q: It's said that Dean Francis Keppel was a pioneer in developing relationships between graduate schools of education and public schools. Working with public schools is central to your work at the Ed School. As an historian of education, how do you think the public schools system has changed since the 1960s? In 2005, how can we, as a graduate school of education, have an impact on public schools? A: Public schools have changed as much as American society. Whereas HGSE during Keppel’s era was closely linked to local and affluent school districts like Newton and Brookline, it is now closely linked to school districts with largely poor, students of color like Boston and Cambridge.
We can have a positive impact on districts like this in three ways: first, we must train outstanding leaders for the profession; second, we must aggregate our research and internship work in a few places; and finally, we must develop “usable knowledge” – the tools teachers and learners themselves can use to improve learning. Relying on those as immediate strategies, we must also stay focused on our long-term strategy: to strengthen the education profession. We are doing this through the invention of a core curriculum built around a distinctive version of the case method. If we get this right—and I believe we will get it right—we will boost the competence and status of the entire profession and contribute significantly to possibilities for all to learn. Q: From an historic perspective, do you think that the state policy or federal policy has more impact on changing public schools? A: Federal and state policies both have significant impact on public schools. At the moment, the federal government has set expectations and left it to the states to carry those out. State legislatures refer to this as “unfunded mandates” and get very upset about them. In my own view, in order to leave no child behind, there needs to be more conversation and collaboration between federal and state authorities, even if that is difficult, in practice, to achieve. Q: Though ESEA was intended to address the gap between educational services for low-income students and affluent students, we still struggle with what many call the “race achievement gap” in schools. Why does this problem persist? A: No one really understands why the race achievement gap has been so persistent. We have organized the Achievement Gap Initiative, led by Ron Ferguson of the Kennedy School of Government, to try to analyze problems related to the “gap” and address them. This Initiative, which is university-wide, will bring faculty from across Harvard together to work on these problems, which are a major barrier to equity. While this program is still in its infancy, I’m very excited about its promise. I am confident that through rigorous education research, we can make huge progress in this area. Q: What do we need to focus on in the near future to make sure that we fulfill our responsibilities to educate all the nation's children? A: To educate all children well we need to develop models for instructionally effective, full-service schools. As our recently renewed collaboration with the Sesame Workshop shows, we also need to continue to identify and support links with appropriate outside agencies – schools, school districts, non-profit and even profit-making agencies engaged in the dissemination of educational services. Links of this kind can help to ensure that HGSE works on cutting edge problems and tests the results of its research in the field. I also hope that links of this kind can help us address the problems of scale in education—the problems associated with spreading innovations from one site to ten, from ten throughout a district, from a district across the country, and eventually around the world. For More Information
HGSE News, Harvard Graduate School of Education
|
||||||||||||||
