America Has 'Solved Every Problem in Public Education,' But How Are We Still Failing? 5 Questions with John Engler
Business Roundtable President John Engler talks with media as he leaves the White House after a meeting with White House Chief of Staff Jacob Lew and Treasury Secretary Tim Geithner regarding the fiscal cliff, Wednesday, Dec. 19, 2012, in Washington. (AP Photo/Carolyn Kaster)
This spring’s rollout of new Common Core assessments across the country is forcing policymakers and educators to face tough questions: Are our schools good enough? Are these new standards and assessments a path toward making them better? Do we even have the political will to improve schools?
John Engler, the former three-term governor of Michigan, has worked on these issues through the public, private, and nonprofit sector. He says flatly, “Today, the blue collar job has become a 'blue tech' job and requires skills and competencies that someone doesn’t just pick up by showing up in class. You actually have to learn things. And that means higher standards.”
Engler served as chair of the National Governor’s Association, CEO of the National Association of Manufacturers and today is president of the Business Roundtable, an association of CEOs who lead companies that collectively produce $7.4 trillion in revenues each year and employ more than 16 million people. As a governor from 1991-2003, Engler made education a top priority and continues that work at BRT. Last week, he told RealClearEducation why he sees improving education as critical to business and the U.S. economy.
Why does K-12 accountability matter to BRT and the business community?
Along with higher education and the military, we’re the destination for millions of high school graduates every year. What I tell people is that there are two things in the world that are mobile: capital and people. When you’re running a global enterprise, these companies need to have access to the very best talent. We need that $700 billion dollars invested each year in K-12 to be effectively managed to help every individual be prepared to work in the 21st Century.
We’re strong supporters of higher standards. We believe that Washington has struggled to understand the reality of the world today. Governors absolutely get this: I think they’ve known for a long time that state A is competing against states B and C. But today, nations are behaving like states, competing against one another, and that’s forced everyone to up their game. There are between four and five million U.S. jobs that are unfilled because we don’t have people skilled to take those jobs. At the same time, we have several million young people who are not in school or work, and they’d be great candidates for those jobs, so we have to get our efforts in schools and training aligned for the workforce of the modern economy
So is Common Core the answer?
We think [the Common Core State Standards] do a good job, but the more important decisions are the ones made in thousands of school districts across America. Accountability is a part of that. My education reform agenda has three components:
1. When a child leaves high school, should they go to college, they can without remediation. We spend billions on remediation today.
2. If they don’t go to college directly, or decide never to go, that that still doesn’t mean they’re done, because they’ll have skills to go to the workforce and get a real job. In America right now, there’s a self-imposed limit on work people don’t ever want to do. I grew up on a farm milking cows, which is pretty high on that list. You also see pictures of crops left in the fields in California because there was no one to harvest them. Similar stories exist in the poultry, construction, hospitality industries. You would want people to be able to go to school and get the skills required to be able to do work that’s available.
3. The dropout rate has to be zero, because the single largest error a young person can make is to not finish high school. We include military as part of the workforce discussion, too. Today, the Pentagon says just 1 in 4 Americans are eligible for military service, and of those who aren’t eligible, 50 percent can’t qualify physically, 50 percent can’t qualify academically.
What's BRT's bottom line on testing policy in a new Elementary and Secondary Education Act? What should the federal role be with regard to low-performing schools?
Our bottom line is fewer tests but better tests. There needs to be accountability, everybody gets measured: Everyone in the workforce is evaluated, certainly we should do the same in our schools. We need to know there’s mastery of the content. I don’t disagree that there are too many tests, but that doesn’t mean there shouldn’t be any. The tests we do give should be the best possible. I have one nonnegotiable request: America’s No. 1 goal in education should be, at a minimum, that our schools can teach reading to students so that they are 100 percent proficient by the 3rd grade – today that’s 36 percent, and that’s not nearly good enough.
We need to have systems in place that identify a low-performing school, but the remediation is on state governments, not Washington. Washington doesn’t even pay for 10 percent of education in America, it’d be useful to use that investment as a way of identifying things that are working. There is a national interest in quality schools in America, so Washington should talk about the importance in competing globally. They can play a role in sampling to be able to see this is how the states stack up, be clear about which states are doing better, which schools have more room for improvement. That kind of transparency matters a great deal.
Michigan is in a Governor vs. school board fight right now. You had your own battle with the school board while governor. What does your ideal state-level education governance structure look like?
Michigan is burdened w almost an impossible structure. It’s one of a dozen states where the elected governor is deprived the opportunity to appoint the state superintendent or the board of education, who hires the superintendent. So you have this department that’s really apart from the governor, but it’s the governor who’s looked to provide leadership, but he/she cannot actually manage the one department that is supposed to be in charge of education.
The governor should appoint the superintendent directly. That’s what the majority of states do and the board should be a part of the governor’s cabinet so they can work with the governor and the governor can be held accountable.
On education more generally, what do you think the parties are right and wrong on?
I do think that the education issue defies some traditional political alignments. Where I think anyone in elected office has to be is on the side of kids, and I don’t how anyone – Republican, urban, rural, Democrat, Independent – can sit back and say that a proficiency level of 3 percent on a NAEP test in the 12th grade is acceptable -- how does anyone remain quiet and sit silently by when that’s the case? Because presumably some students are still getting a diploma. We all ought to get together on the idea that we shouldn’t be kidding ourselves about our performance and our results.
In education, we can have one school doing a terrific job and a school a mile away not so much, and you'd think that mile is like going over Mt. Everest to figure out what they're doing right and bring it back. Usually what poor performing schools will do is hire a consultant, do a study, and test it, rather than copy what's already working next door.
I believe we’ve actually solved every problem we have in public education in America, somewhere in America, but what we don’t do well at all is replicate our success stories.
