Professor: Key education skills lacking

• By CHARLES LUSSIER
• Advocate staff writer
• Published: Apr 11, 2008 - Page: 6B - UPDATED: 12:05 a.m.

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The federal No Child Left Behind Act has had “disastrous” effects on public education that won’t be fully apparent for years, a Harvard University professor told a Baton Rouge audience Thursday.

“We are way, way over-invested in testing and regulatory schemes, and way, way under-invested in knowledge and skills,” Richard Elmore told a small audience gathered in the ballroom at the Holiday Inn Select Hotel.

Elmore, a professor of educational leadership, was in town as part of series of speeches on education sponsored by the Academic Distinction Fund, or ADF, a public-education fund best known for distributing teaching grants.

No Child Left Behind has led to mandatory standardized testing nationwide in grades three to eight, but good education systems use a variety of measures to judge how they are doing, Elmore said.

“If you have a single measure and you put a lot of pressure on it, there’s a lot of distortion,” Elmore said.

He said schools need to invest much more heavily in improving the knowledge base of teachers so they can do their jobs better.

Other industrialized countries made the same mistake early on with their education-improvement plans, but quickly saw the shortcomings, and refocused on greater human investment, the professor said.

Elmore said he’s not an opponent of school accountability; he said the days of no school accountability are over, as they should be. Elmore said he wants a better accountability system.

“I tell colleagues, ‘You can have a good version, or its evil twin; you don’t get to have nothing,’ ” he said.

Elmore said he spends at least a day a week in a school, observing teachers and offering feedback. He described schools as “the land of nice,” where teachers rarely reflect on how they or their peers are doing.

“People find it difficult to analyze their practice and talk about what they see,” he said.

Elmore spends a lot of time in middle and high schools, and said he’s not happy with much of what he sees compared with elementary schools. Too often, secondary schools fail to make lessons relevant or interesting, or to introduce complex thinking skills.

He noted that on international tests, U.S. students lose significant ground, first between fourth and eighth grade and then again between eighth and 10th grade. In fact, some skills that children have in fifth grade are no longer in their grasp by eighth grade, he said.