California secretary of education says quality of teaching is the critical factor
Alan Bersin
BY LISA TREI
As American high schools confront demands for reform, the most critical factor influencing student achievement remains the quality of teaching, California Secretary of Education Alan Bersin said April 5.
"It's about the teaching, in order to improve the learning," Bersin told an audience attending the Cubberley Lecture at the School of Education, a semi-annual series established in 1933 to deliberate on current issues in education. "We can restructure our high schools as much as we like, but unless we improve the quality of teaching in our schools, we will not see student achievement improve."
Bersin is teaching a seminar this year with Linda Darling-Hammond, the Charles E. Ducommun Professor in the School of Education, on applied policy analysis. He discussed prospects for change in a lecture titled "Reinventing the American High School: Back to the Future?" From 1998 to 2005, Bersin was superintendent of public education for San Diego City Schools, the nation's eighth-largest district, where he helped improve student achievement and modernize the system's business infrastructure. School of Education Dean Deborah Stipek, who introduced Bersin, described his role in San Diego as "leading the most innovative and important district reform effort that the country has ever seen."
Bersin gave an overview of the American high school during the 20th century and how increasing access has influenced its structure and goals. In 1900, 10.2 percent of 14- to 17-year-olds were enrolled in high school; that figure jumped to 99 percent by 2000. According to Bersin, modern-day reform efforts began with Brown v. Board of Education, a Supreme Court decision that called for a quality education for all students, regardless of race, ethnicity or socioeconomic status. "Now, 51 years later," he said, "we have still not delivered [the promise of] equal education to the children of America."
From the mid-1950s to the mid-1980s, judges micromanaged American schools as they enforced court-ordered desegregation decrees, Bersin said. "When education was returned to educators in the mid-1980s, it was done within the regime of standards-based reform," he said. Instead of the traditional practice of comparing the performance of students against other students along a bell curve, students were compared against fixed standards at each grade level in core subjects. "That was a revolutionary notion," Bersin said. "Much of what we are doing in American public education today is attempting to build capacity to deliver on the promise of the second part of Brown v. Board of Education: to provide a quality education for each of our students."
Although progress based on standards has moved forward in the elementary and middle grades, high school achievement rates have stalled, Bersin said. "Staying in high school does not seem to do much to increase the capacity of our students," he said. For every 10 students who start high school in California, only seven will graduate, and fewer than four will go to college, he said.
Only 54.1 percent of Latino and 54.6 percent of African American males who entered public high school in California graduated four years later in 2004, according to Bersin. In contrast, 74.8 percent of white and 86.8 percent of Asian males graduated during the same period.
In addition to the academic achievement gap, the unequal distribution of quality teachers in America remains a serious problem for public education, Bersin said. "Unlike any other profession I know, we send the newest practitioners into our toughest schools … and then we wonder why 50 percent of them leave the profession within the first five years."
Schools need strong leaders, and monetary and nonmonetary incentives must be introduced to encourage teachers to stay in their jobs, Bersin said. "That's what every other sector does and every other profession relies upon," he added. "The real issue is about how quickly we can accelerate the quality of the teaching profession."
Bersin said he wants to make the high school curriculum more engaging and relevant for more students without retreating from established academic standards. "When the California high school exit exam involves a 10th-grade English language arts standard and a sixth- to seventh-grade math standard, with some algebra in eighth grade, we should see that we have a long way to go," he said. "The answer is not to retreat from the academic mission but rather to build capacity and deliver it to more students."