2016 Phyllis L. Kossoff Lecture

Dr. Susan H. Fuhrman is the tenth President of Teachers College, Columbia University, joining the College in August 2006. She is the founding Director and Chair of the Management Committee of the Consortium for Policy Research in Education (CPRE), and former President of the National Academy of Education (2009-2013). She previously served as Dean of the University of Pennsylvania's Graduate School of Education, as well as the school's George and Diane Weiss Professor of Education. Dr. Fuhrman received bachelor's and master's degrees in history from Northwestern University in Chicago, Illinois and a Ph.D. in political science and education from Teachers College, Columbia University.

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Christopher Edley, Jr. is the co-president and co-founder of the Opportunity Institute. He founded and continues to be Chair of Partners for Each and Every Child, now a project of the Opportunity Institute.  He co-chaired the congressionally chartered National Commission on Education Equity and Excellence (2011-13), appointed by Secretary Arne Duncan. Christopher is the Honorable William H. Orrick, Jr. Distinguished Professor of Law at UC Berkeley School of Law, after serving as dean from 2004 through 2013. Before Berkeley, he was a law professor at Harvard for 23 years, where Professor Gary Orfield and he co-founded the Harvard Civil Rights Project. He served in White House policy and budget positions under Presidents Jimmy Carter and Bill Clinton. Christopher has also held senior positions in five presidential campaigns, including senior policy adviser for Barack Obama (2008) and policy director for Michael Dukakis (1988).  He is a member of: the American Academy of Arts & Sciences; the National Academy of Public Administration; the Council on Foreign Relations; the Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation’s National Programs Advisory Panel; and the Advisory Board of the Hamilton Project, the Brookings Institution. He is a National Associate of the National Research Council, National Academies of Science, for which he currently chairs the committee on NAEP performance levels.

"Early this year, Hillary Clinton put out an official plan to support children, youth and adults with autism. It's really the first plan of its kind by any presidential candidate, a thorough and well-informed plan, that could have significant positive implications for all stakeholders in the autism community, as well as educators and researchers. I am amazed (disappointed, actually) by the lack of attention this proposal has received in the news. Nothing of substance has been said from the Trump campaign on the topic of autism (aside from some misinformation about the role of vaccines in autism). Autism is an issue of major concern affecting a growing number of Americans. The Clinton plan would be an enormous step forward in our society's efforts to support all those affected by autism."

"The next president must confront the fact that we are truly failing to educate adequately the least advantaged portions of our young.  Children become educated through all of their experiences, in the home and community as well as schools.  Instability, violent communities, lack of access to conversation that advances the importance of rich vocabulary and ideas, inadequate nutrition and health services, all impact on education.  We need an all-out effort to provide safe and enriched environments and services for all of our young in collaboration with major improvements in their schools."

"The next president needs to continue recent bipartisan efforts to reform federal financial aid, to make student loan debt more manageable, to make aid more accessible to the students that need it most, and to ensure that institutions are accountable for student outcomes. The federal government also needs to increase its investment in early childhood education, so that all children are on a path to success from day one."

Enough with the standardized test scores already!  Let’s ask the real experts—students and teachers—how to improve our schools.

For some reason we rarely ask students and teachers what they think of their schools, and by failing to do so we are missing critical information.  This isn’t hard to do.  When I served as Assistant Deputy Secretary for Safe & Drug-Free Schools during President Obama’s first term, we devised a grant program to do this called “Safe and Supportive Schools”.  We had a simple premise: students need to feel safe at school before they can learn, so let’s ask them how they feel and get the money to the schools that had the biggest challenges so they could institute programs to improve the climate for learning.  We gave grants to 11 states and—guess what?— It worked, asstates like Michigan found. Sadly, the House Republicans cut all funding for this effort in 2011, but at least I got the satisfaction of saying “I told you so.” 

Instead of asking students what they think, we just test the hell out of them with assessments that we all know are deeply flawed and then blame their teachers if they don’t do well.  How about, instead, we ask the students what they need and engage teachers as professional partners and use their hard-earned expertise to develop the programs that the students say they need?  Seems like a simple concept—to a former teacher like me.  But virtually no one at my level or above when I was in the Administration had ever actually been a classroom teacher (or, in many cases, had ever been out of DC during their professional lives), so that wisdom doesn’t penetrate to those who are making education policy.  And that’s why most education policy sucks in America.

So my advice, Madam/Mr. President, is to listen less to “policy experts” who’ve never been in a classroom and more to the people who are there every day.  Start listening to teachers and students. They’ll tell you what’s wrong and how to fix it.

Kevin Jennings (M.A. '94), Former Assistant Deputy Secretary for the Office of Safe and Drug-Free Schools