 | MESPA Home > Press Room | | American's Best Idea
8/17/2011 10:53 AM
Some months ago, I happened to watch a few episodes of Ken Burns’ documentary on America’s National Park System. The film bills national parks as America’s best idea. We surely owe the preservation of these national treasures to visionary thinking and wise policymaking. But America’s best idea? Not by a long shot. That accolade belongs to America’s public education system.
In public schools from coast to coast and border to border, principals and teachers steadfastly carry on the critically important work—many see it as a calling—of educating our children to live and work in a world most adults can scarcely imagine. For 90 years, the National Association of Elementary School Principals (NAESP) has been supporting and honoring accomplished principals at the national level in partnership with our friends and colleagues in state associations who provide vitally important services and benefits at the grassroots level.
Working together, NAESP and our state associations provide a lifeline of valuable benefits and services to accomplished, dedicated principals who lead effective schools with little fanfare, even though the job grows tougher and the rewards seem diminished. Today, the principalship stands out in bold relief against a complex backdrop—conflicting federal guidelines and state requirements, skimpy funds to cover outsized mandates, and now, unfortunately, an increasingly one-sided and often ill-informed discussion about the effectiveness of public schools and how to “fix” them.
There’s no question that underperforming schools must be transformed into effective learning communities as quickly as possible. Not one educator I know disagrees with this urgent imperative. Further, there’s no question that every public school must constantly improve. Our children deserve it, our society requires it, our world depends on it.
That said, there’s an undeniable difference between fixing schools and improving schools. NAESP does not believe that every school in the United States is failing. The fact of the matter is this: According to reports from the U.S. Department of Education’s National Center for Education Statistics for 2010, 49.4 million students were enrolled in 98,817 public elementary and secondary schools. Do we as a nation really believe that all these schools require fixing and large numbers of students receive a substandard education? I certainly don’t, and I bet you don’t either.
Every day, millions of educators and children go about the business of teaching and learning, but education is only part of the enormous mission we require of public schools. We’ve always demanded that public education fulfill even larger ambitions. Public schools are crucibles where our society carries out the sometimes painful, always messy job of making democracy work, of addressing social injustices and inequities, of putting public policy and law into practice. Today, for example, we ask our schools to teach “21st century skills”—thinking critically, solving open-ended problems, communicating and collaborating across cultures, and using information to create new opportunities.
As educators strive to anticipate the specific skills and knowledge young people might need in the 21st century, we would be prudent to recall the 19th century wisdom of public education advocate Horace Mann. Education, he wrote, is the “balance wheel of the social machinery.” Lightly scratch our lasting values, bedrock principles, and greatest social achievements over the past 150 years, and you’ll find public schools: educating waves of immigrants and preparing them for citizenship; teaching children who otherwise were doomed to labor in factories, mines, and similarly dangerous workplaces; providing equal access to millions of girls and minority children; and fighting the war on poverty, just to name a few. The promise of public education endures in these grand social agendas: An equal chance at education means an equal chance to realize prosperity, achievement, and personal fulfillment, especially during difficult economic times.
We all have a stake in stewarding this promise. At the national and state levels, association representatives, elected leaders, policymakers, and the media set the tone of the conversation about public education. Will the conversation move us forward, or will it divide us along ideological fault lines? At the local level, every person inside the orbit of a neighborhood school is invested in and dependent upon its success. Will we acknowledge the positive role of public schools in helping to create and sustain our society and build on that legacy, or will we continue to paint all schools with the same tarry brush?
It’s time to stop the blame game where principals and other educators, schools, and children are caught between polar-opposite points of view. Instead, let’s get serious about reforming underperforming schools, supporting educators and students, closing the achievement gap where it exists, and learning from, strengthening, and celebrating effective schools. Most important, let’s give credit where it’s due: our public education system and tens of thousands of principals who create a lasting foundation for learning, drive school and student performance, and shape the long-term impact of school improvement.
NAESP is proud to partner with all of our state affiliates—and all of you individually—in the noble endeavor to educate every child to his or her potential.
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| by Gail Connelly | Executive Director
National Association of Elementary School Principals
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| | Originally printed in Education Week.
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