Conference: Plenty at stake for nation's education system

The United States is at risk of becoming a second-rate country. Many methods used in the educational system are “fundamentally obsolete,” and school officials need to be more transparent about student performance.

Those were messages author Tony Wagner presented to educators at a three-day national education conference held at Albemarle County’s Monticello High School this week. The good news, Wagner said, is that the country can better its educational system by improving teacher and student assessments, creating a more fair funding structure and teaching students to be analytical, as opposed to primarily memorizing material.

“I just think people need to realize what’s at stake,” Wagner said in an interview Wednesday. “We don’t have a lot of time. Our kids’ lives are at stake, and our country’s future.”

Wagner, author of the “The Global Achievement Gap: Why Even Our Best Schools Don’t Teach the New Survival Skills Our Children Need — And What We Can Do About It,” was among numerous nationally known education experts who discussed ways to keep students more engaged in classrooms, use technology to advance student learning and provide resources to help teachers produce more effective classroom lessons.

Hundreds of educators from school districts throughout the country attended the EduStat University 2009 conference this week. Schoolnet, a provider of educational software, launched the annual EduStat conference in 2004 for policymakers and educators to collaborate on ways to improve the educational system.

Experts on Wednesday morning addressed ways to close the global achievement gap and the gap between what is being taught and tested in American schools compared with what students actually need to succeed after high school.

Under the federal No Child Left Behind Act, American students are taught to memorize, unlike in some high-performing European countries in which students are asked to use reason and be more analytical, said Wagner, who was the keynote speaker Wednesday.

Instead of lengthy multiple-choice exams, Wagner said, students would be better served by being given two hours to write a response to one question: Which amendment in the Bill of Rights is most important to the country’s “preservation of democracy”?

Andrew Rotherham, co-founder of Education Sector, a national policy think tank, said that the country has to move away from what has become a common practice: educators structuring lesson plans on what they suspect will appear on No Child Left Behind exams.

“If you teach a powerful curriculum, [exam results] are going to take care of themselves,” Rotherham said.

Rotherham said it’s essential, however, that school divisions are more transparent and give honest answers about poor exam results and high dropout rates.

As for improving teachers, Wagner suggests video cameras be used in new teachers’ classrooms at least five times per year, so that other educators can provide them feedback. This should be done to help teachers continuously improve lesson plans, he said, as opposed to using the videos as a weapon against teachers during teacher evaluations.

“I’ve never taught a perfect lesson,” Wagner said. “You can always do better. Most teachers would agree.”

As for resolving the disparity between economically disadvantaged students and those from middle- and upper-class families, Wagner said that one problem is that students who live in low-income regions receive the least resources. He said that education should be primarily funded by the federal government and funds be mostly distributed evenly — with additional money provided to schools that need the most help.

“Today we have the opposite. It’s the wealthy suburban schools that can spend double or triple, per student, [that of] the economically disadvantaged schools,” said Wagner, who is the co-director of the Change Leadership Group at the Harvard Graduate School of Education.

Maury Brown, the communications coordinator for Albemarle schools, said that Albemarle was asked to host the sixth-annual conference because of the school division’s effective use of data and technology to improve student achievement. The theme of this year’s conference was “Reimagine Education,” which Schoolnet leaders say was inspired “by the national movement toward increased accountability and the mounting evidence that thoughtful data collection and analysis drives achievement.”