Give Success a Big Payoff
The politics of education boils down to this: If every fourth-grade student could read at a fourth-grade level, there would be no politics of education. Unfortunately there is, with a vengeance.
The recently released Academic Performance Index, with a rating of 10 being best, places more than half the Los Angeles Unified School District elementary schools at 1 or 2--the bottom of the barrel. Some schools in other areas with similar demographics perform even more poorly. However, it is scant consolation for a parent whose child reads at the 10th percentile to know that other children with a similar background are doing even worse.
Even before the API test, the depth of the failure was known. If students were truly held back for failure to perform at grade level, two-thirds of all eighth graders and 40% to 60% of all students in second through eighth grade would not be promoted.
Though there are some bright spots in the district--academic decathlon success and magnet schools, for example--we must be honest and say that, as a whole, the LAUSD has suffered a catastrophic educational collapse. Is there any strategy that could turn this around?
There is. First, we must focus on a critical educational mission of the district that affects everything else: teaching students to read at grade level by the end of the third grade. Second, we must dramatically allocate resources and incentives to succeed at that mission. Third, we must extend success at that mission to the whole district.
Without being able to read at third-grade level by the end of third grade, students cannot learn science, mathematics, history, literature, government and all else we want them to learn by the time they move into society. With that skill in all our students, immense numbers of our educational and societal problems can be solved.
How do we achieve that goal? By allocating the district’s resources, incentives and employee assignments with an unprecedented focus.
We should start with the entire cohort of the 60,000 kindergarten students who will enroll next September. We should offer this to any qualified teacher willing to volunteer to teach in a school ranked 1 or 2 by the API: “Take a class of kindergarten students. Teach that class for the next four years. If the results of the third-grade reading tests show 80% of your students are reading at the third-grade level, you will receive a bonus of $50,000.” Other bonus plans should be offered to those willing to teach at schools with higher initial rankings.
The principle is simple: Recruit and motivate the best teachers to go to the toughest classrooms by rewarding them with substantial financial incentives when they succeed.
If every teacher in the program succeeded, the cost would be no more than $100 million a year. The district budget is $7.5 billion. So, for less than 2% of the budget, we would have developed a successful elementary reading program.
The principle of awarding bonuses to teachers based on student performance could be applied to subsequent grades as well, with the same motivational results.
The district has the tools to be able to identify master teachers and principals and differentiate, compensate and reward them based on their impact on the performance of their students. Indeed, after making adjustments for inflation, it is possible to base all compensation increases on performance. Historically, that would represent revolutionary change--exactly the kind necessary to rescue children from bleak futures.
Crises in welfare, affordable housing and medical care all are in an important sense income crises. Better education, in addition to improving lives, leads to higher incomes.
Failure to read at grade level, the core of educational defeat, is related to our unwillingness to differentiate teaching success and provide a system to reward, and thus motivate and recruit, those educators who teach successfully as measured by student-tested achievement.
Mayor Richard Riordan is correct when he says that failure to have students read at grade level is “evil.” It takes a political leader whose moral sense transcends his political interests to speak that blunt truth and act upon it.
We in the district should wake up every morning with moral outrage that hundreds of thousands of students’ lives will continue to be destroyed unless we make focused, urgent and decisive change. We must, and we shall.
