Solutions

The School of Education’s (SOE) Dean David Andrews called  on a group of  nationally recognized policy makers, academics and business leaders to address two questions: 1) what should the nation’s top two or three priorities be to improve education? And, 2) how can schools of education contribute to achieving these priorities? Their complete responses are posted below. We also summarized their contributions into five key components of education reform that are posted on our education blog at soetalk.com.

On a quarterly basis, SOE will reach out to key individuals in education and related fields, both public and private, asking for their insight on major reform initiatives. Their responses will be posted on soetalk.com. Our goal is that our contributors will ignite frank, energetic, and thought provoking dialogue that ultimately takes on a viral life of its own and engages all parts of the education community. We also encourage others to offer their thoughts and ideas on soetalk.com.

Andres Alonso, Chief Executive Officer, Baltimore City Public Schools

Andres Alonso

There can only be one priority [to improve education]: achieving true educational equity for every student in America. In the hyper-competitive global economy of the 21st century, education is fate. We have an obligation to ensure that every student has access to a high quality education that meets his or her individual needs. Everything else is a means to that end.

We must proactively prepare our principals, teachers, staff, students and families to embrace the tremendous opportunities presented by the Common Core Standards. These standards will fundamentally change teaching and learning in America, because they raise our expectations for what students should know and be able to do. Because the Common Core Standards focus on the depth and quality of the content that is taught, they will promote deeper understanding among students, while allowing for differences in the way students learn—and providing a more realistic standard for measuring educational progress in the real world.

We need to improve the instructional leadership capacity of our principals and teachers, and ensure that we have effective professionals in all of our classrooms, in all of our schools. We need to shift our emphasis away from one-size-fits-all categorizations like “Highly Qualified,” and move toward a process for identifying and measuring effective educators in a more comprehensive, real-world context. The new data tools we have developed will give us the ability to do just that.

Finally, and probably most importantly, we need to mobilize communities so that they take responsibility for outcomes in all public schools, regardless of whether their children attend those schools or not. In too many places, the most influential people in communities abandon public schools, so that true accountability for their results ends, rather than demand that those public schools improve and become part of the forces ensuring that the schools can serve all kids.

Andres Alonso, Baltimore’s longest serving CEO, is considered one of the nation’s leading educational reformers. In 2009, he was named “School Superintendent of the Year” by the Fullwood Foundation. Read his full biography at the Baltimore City School’s website.

Robert Balfanz, Center for Social Organization of School, Johns Hopkins University School of Education

The second decade of the 21st century needs to be one of the half dozen or so times when education plays a transformational role in our nation’s journey. Horace Mann’s common school, the land grant colleges, the high schools built to educate the nation’s immigrants in the early 20th century, the GI bill and the response to Sputnik all propelled our society forward. We need another jolt. The human capital revolution has overtaken our commerce. As the most recent severe recession has ferociously driven hom