The Commons

Education Secretary Arne Duncan was handed the proverbial golden ticket in President Obama’s stimulus package, and the good times for the education world should continue into the next decade if the President’s education priorities survive the 2010 budget process. Secretary Duncan has been given a huge – even by Washington standards – increase in the amount of money available to help improve education. The Secretary has tens of billions of dollars to dole out to schools and education reform non-profits over the next couple of years, and entitlements like the Pell grant program and supplemental spending for poor kids will also spike.

But if Secretary Duncan, his lieutenants, and education leaders across the country want to make a case that these spending levels are the new norm and should continue, they’ve got two huge challenges – first, they’ve got to deliver quality results. And second, they’ve got to convince the American people that they’ve delivered. Higher achievement, more and better early education options, and higher graduation rates from both high school and college are the new expectations. And, assuming that educators and their policy colleagues are successful on the ground, they’ve got to make these improvements tangible to the American people.

This is going to require a sea change in attitudes among the education world. American education institutions are notorious for resisting transparency. Lots of people in education are used to using the language of victimization to argue for more money – the “children are our future” argument, “if you don’t give us more money then you must not like children,” etc. etc. Secretary Duncan could help both educators and the American people if he required that public school districts, early education programs, and colleges and universities drop their traditional resistance to transparency and embrace open communication using real data. For K-12 systems, that means making academic progress by group, graduation rates, and income level readily available. For colleges and universities, that includes focusing on measuring the value that tuition money buys as well as being honest about how many students they are graduating.

There’s growing evidence that the successful reform efforts that have been in cultivation since the first Bush Administration are beginning to take hold, and, so far, the Obama Administration seems to be directing these new resources to support many of those efforts. But the second challenge – convincing the American public that it should continue to spend more on education – is going to require a much more targeted, disciplined strategy for communicating success than the education community usually musters. In every state, in every school district, in every school, there’s going to need to be a sea change in the way educators talk to their constituents. Educators are going to have to communicate a simple message – we’re using your money wisely, and here’s the proof of that. Test scores are improving. The achievement gap between minority and white kids is closing. Participation in AP and IB classes is climbing. More kids are graduating from high school, and more of them are going on to (and graduating from) college.

Huge exo-systems such as our own education system are geared to do exactly the opposite. There’s never been an imperative for spreading successful education practices and communicating that success to teh public – until now. The huge increases in federal spending on education put to bed the old standby that the federal government’s spending on education is too miniscule to really drive wholesale change. Even though, on a federal level, we still spend less per capital than most countries do, Secretary Duncan and his colleagues can no longer hide behind the “local control” argument.  The Feds now have lots of skin in the game.   They need to make sure that the folks who are on the receiving end of this enormous federal largesse are forced to talk to their constituents about what is working, what’s not, and the shared responsibilities to ensure success. If they do, democracy, school systems, colleges – and, most important, our kids – will benefit for years to come.

- Rodney Ferguson, Managing Director & Principal

Tags: Arne Duncan, education spending, higher education, nonprofit communications, nonprofit marketing, obama, stimulus, transparency