Commissioner Lyonel B. Tracy says the ‘Tough Choices or Tough Times’ report ‘could very well be a prelude to rewriting the No Child Left Behind Act in its national and international impact.’
A report proposing sweeping changes in the way the country educates its children is being embraced by officials in New Hampshire and other states.
The report, “Tough Choices or Tough Times: The Report of the New Commission on the Skills of the American Workforce,” offers a plan for a complete overhaul of the education system in the United States. Its authors, including Marc Tucker, vice chair at the commission, say their recommendations could save the nation as much as $60 billion annually and far better prepare American students to compete on an international level.
Some of the recommendations are:
• Allowing 16-year-olds to sit for examinations that, if passed, will allow them to go directly to college
• Placing much more emphasis on hiring the best and brightest to be teachers — and paying them upwards of $110,000, in some cases
• Providing mandatory early childhood education
• Developing standards, assessments and curricula that also take into account a child’s abilities in creativity and innovation
Some of the recommendations stem from New Hampshire’s education reform efforts. The state was one of a dozen that the commission focused on in producing the report.
New Hampshire Education Commissioner Lyonel B. Tracy called the report “one of the most significant and meaningful documents in education to come out in my lifetime.”
Tracy said the report “could very well be a prelude to rewriting the No Child Left Behind Act in its national and international impact.”
The report, according to Tucker, took about 18 months to prepare, including what he called “serious talks with more than a dozen states from all points and corners of America.”
He said, “These states know that the only way to make significant improvements in student performance is to reshape the system of education itself — something that hasn’t been done in this country for over 100 years.”
The report was initially released in 2006, and education leaders in New Hampshire, Massachusetts and Utah were among its early adopters. The resulting recommendations stem from their experience with the changes.
The price tag
New Hampshire was one of the states taking part in the initial phase of the report after its success with the Project Running Start program, which allows 10th graders to take classes at the state’s community colleges for college credit.
As a result, Tracy said, the next step for New Hampshire will be to develop a “state board of examination.”
“We will take the best tests from around the country and around the world, and by working in conjunction with high schools, we will develop a curriculum and board exam for 10th graders,” said Tracy.
If students pass the board exam, they may then go on to college, bypassing the last two years of traditional high school.
If this proposed exam sounds a bit like SAT or other standardized tests, Tracy says it should not.
“SATs or ACTs are for admissions offices and should not be compared to the board exam system that is based on a high-level curriculum,” he said. “We are not reinventing the wheel, but moving forward with something that other countries are already doing.”
Massachusetts will be focusing on creating a better system to recruit, train and retain educators, providing universal pre-kindergarten for all students, creating a network of new high-autonomy, in-district school models to facilitate teacher ownership and initiating conversations about teacher pay and benefits packages.
Utah is looking at developing high-performance schools and districts, which will help students compete with those around the world.
One of the more significant questions to be answered is how to pay for it all.
The report’s authors suggest a mechanism that sounds familiar:
“The proposal to abandon local funding of schools in favor of state funding using a uniform pupil-weighting funding formula, combined with the addition of $19 billion to the system as a whole, will make it possible, for the first time in the history of the United States, to have an equitable means of funding our schools, while at the same time leveling up the funding of the system as a whole, so that relatively well-to-do districts will not have the incentive to defeat the system that they would have if the existing funds were simply redistributed.”
“Funding is always a challenge,” said Tracy, but he said he hopes the new presidential administration and Congress “may see something worthy and make it a part with significant education legislation with funding.”
“President-elect Barack Obama placed a great deal of importance on education, especially early-childhood education,” he said.
He also said that New Hampshire’s education leaders felt preparing the Granite State’s students for a future interconnected with the world was too important “to wait and join until we had all the [funding] details. However, we are moving very cautiously and selectively.”
A copy of the executive summary of “Tough Choices or Tough Times: The Report of the New Commission on the Skills of the American Workforce” can be downloaded at Skills Commission
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Apparently no one has informed Mr. Tracy and his guru Marc Tucker that this is NOT Nazi Germany or the USSR. American voters do not necessarily want their 3 and 4-year olds snatched from home to attend ‘mandatory’ government pre-kindergartens, or think that students should be trained (as opposed to taught skills) to abide by international law over constitutional law, and that further centralization of education away from absolute local control is the “NH Way” or even the “American Way”.
Also the big lie about globalism that is being repeated by the gullible who want to sell/buy into these programs is that more education will keep Americans “competitive in the global economy”. The fact is that graduates with master’s degrees in engineering and computer science or even doctorates in economics and biology, are seeing their incomes drop or remain flat. This is due to the fact that workers in other countries will WORK FOR LESS regardless of the superiority of skills of the American worker. That means that the notion that education will shield us and make us globally competitive against low-cost countries like India and China, is a blatant falsehood.
You can read more about Marc Tucker here: Marc Tucker and here: Marc Tucker’s Plan for Education
Lyonel Tracy’s 2008 Political Contributions – to Democrats Kelly Ayotte and Hillary Clinton.
Also we would like to remind the Governor about Public Law:
Public Law 96-88, Title I, Section 101, no. 3 states: “Parents have the primary responsibility for the education of their children and states, localities, and private interests have the primary responsibility for supporting that parental role; . . .”
In 1970, Congress placed an amendment in the General Education Provision Act to specifically include, again, a “Prohibition Against Federal Control of Education.” This prohibits the federal government from exercising: direction, supervision, or control over the curriculum, program of instruction, administration or personnel of any educational institution, school, or school system, or over the selection of library resources, textbooks, or other printed or published instructional materials by any educational institution or school system . . .
Public Law 92-318, Section 432 expressly forbids the federal government establishing or developing curriculum, much less nationalizing it. The US-DOE has in fact developed a national curriculum embodied within School to Work and Goals 2000. There is a definite element of federal and state coercion with regard to “voluntary” LOCAL LEVEL participation in these programs. The state mandated NHEIAP (NH assessment program exclusively state-controlled at a tune of over $1 million dollars annually) is the main component of the coercive state/federal strategies.