EDITOR’S PAGE Radically Retooling the School Factory

They are lined up now, freshly scrubbed, clutching new No. 2 pencils, terrified. It is the beginning of a new school year.

What will happen to the hundreds of thousands of Dallas children who will move through our schools over the next nine months? Will they be challenged, and loved, and guided gingerly over the craggy shores of learning? Or will the system fail them, dooming them to lives of unfulfilled potential?

This is the central debate that grips educators and policymakers across this country. And there is a widespread belief that despite major reforms in nearly every slate, including ours, precious little progress has been made.

A story on the front page of The Dallas Morning News caught my eye recently. It reported that the Dallas Independent School District had failed to reach its end-of-the-decade goal of having 85 percent of its students achieve “on grade level.” The article did not emphasize that when the target had been set back in 1979, fewer than 35 percent of the district’s students could read, write, or compute on a grade level commensurate with their age. Nor did it stress that improvement had been steady between 1979 and 1987, especially among minorities.

But the truth is, whatever strides have been made, they are not good enough. Twelve thousand dropouts a year is not good enough. Turning out seniors who are largely unemployable in the Information Age is not good enough. To quote former DISD superintendent Linus Wright, who made this comment after he left Dallas to become Under Secretary of Education: “We must begin admitting that something is terribly wrong with the system.”

In the fresh debate over education, the reforms of House Bill 72 are piddly little tinkertoys. The new thinking calls for radical changes like “choice,” which pits public school against school in a frenzy of free-market competition, and front-line “empowerment,” which embraces the notion of beefing up the authority of the folks closest to the students-principals and teachers.

Interestingly, a recent poll conducted by Goals For Dallas tried those solutions on a sampling of Dallas citizens who lived within the boundaries of DISD. An overwhelming majority-almost two-thirds-favored both ideas. Not surprisingly, those same people registered serious dissatisfaction with how our schools are being run now. Pollster George Shipley explains the discrepancy as an example of “the people being ahead of the politicians.”

And indeed they are. Business leaders, academicians, and concerned parents across the country are beginning to lose patience with the continuing stagnation of student achievement levels. Several have taken to the stump to argue for a major retooling of our educational system. Blazing the trail is Xerox chairman and CEO David T. Kearns, who, with Denis P. Doyle, senior research fellow at the Hudson Institute, has written a compelling game plan called Winning the Brain Race: A Bold Plan to Make Our Schools Competitive.

Kearns and Doyle believe that our schools are mired in 19th-century thinking, still geared to an age when low-skill jobs were plentiful and assembly-line environments called for a work force trained to respond to rote commands. Obviously, the world has changed. Workers need much more than highly developed hand-eye coordination. Today’s and tomorrow’s jobseekers must think for a living.

Kearns calls upon his experience with Xerox, which faced sudden extinction in the Seventies when it suddenly woke up to the fact that it was being badly battered by competition. Schools ought to emulate the modern-day high-tech company, Kearns believes, which he describes as organizationally lean and “flat,” reliant on the knowledge and talent of the workers closest to the problems. “At a time when both creativity and independent judgment are critical, particularly on the part of building principals and teachers,” he writes, “giant school districts are organized like a dinosaur whose head is barely able to communicate with its tail.”

Kearns believes that no school administrator, save the chief executive, should earn more than the highest-paid principal or teacher. Doctors and lawyers, he points out, hire administrators to manage their business affairs, but they certainly don’t allow them to earn more than they do! Administration should be a service center, not a command post.

Of course the flip side of teacher autonomy is teacher accountability and performance. No high-tech product manager lasts long if he consistently turns out clunkers. In this brave new world of schools, the bottom line is student achievement and the teachers are responsible for it. The carping against testing and the blaming of apathetic students will have to go. In an article in The Wall Street Journal, Rochester, New York, superintendent of schools Peter McWalters, who is spearheading a drastic restructuring of his school district along the lines advocated by Kearns, says “Teachers are angry about student attitudes, and they’re absolutely right. But it’s not going to get any better-that’s the client, folks. An effective school can find ways to get around this.”

Rochester has embraced the fundamental notion that nothing will change until teaching is elevated to a true profession. Teachers who demonstrate superior ability can earn up to $70,000-more than double the upside potential of a teacher in Dallas. They set curricula, devise strategies and tactics (no district-mandated “Six Steps of Teaching”), and they set educational goals and priorities based on the needs of the individual school community. In return for professional latitude, the teachers’ unions have agreed that pay ought to be based on merit and test results. Poor performers and incompetents are out. Period. In Texas, it is hard to imagine such bold thinking on the part of either the administrators or the unions. Neither can I fathom who in Dallas would come forward with the same brand of brassy leadership that is in full bloom in Rochester. Perhaps if our school board could stop arguing about the injustices of the past, it could see the stark reality of the future. Maybe then we could join this piercing new prescription for change.