Is the System Preparing Tomorrow's Workers?

By Margaret Spellings

It's back to school time, which gives us the opportunity to reflect on the state of our schools and think about priorities for the coming year. Business leaders are well accustomed to looking at bottom lines, and finally we are able to look at the bottom line of education. So how are students doing?

Recent student achievement results from the Nation's Report Card show that we are on the right track, especially in the early grades. Since the enactment of the bipartisan No Child Left Behind Act (NCLB) in 2002, which called for all students to be on grade level in reading and math by 2014, students are making progress in elementary and middle school. Improvement has been the greatest for African-American and Hispanic students and those students that are lowest achieving. 

It's no accident that we have had nine straight years of increasing scores for elementary school students. In the decades before this law and the state reforms that led to it, taxpayers spent hundreds of billions of dollars on education and hoped for the best. Since NCLB, we now expect results. The law requires annually assessing every student in grades three through eight in reading and math, disaggregating those results, and providing that information to educators and parents. And that is exactly where we are seeing results—in grades three through eight. 

But in our high schools, the Report Card tells a troubling story, especially in light of our need to compete in a global knowledge economy. Every business in America knows that without a skilled workforce, its business cannot grow and prosper. Sadly, scores for 17-year-olds in both reading and math are flat over the 30-year history of the test. We know that only half of African-American and Hispanic students graduate from high school on time. Policymakers have not yet had the courage to use the real accountability that is working in our elementary and middle schools in our high schools, the kind of approach that seems obvious in business.

The year ahead presents two opportunities to continue and accelerate the gains that our students have made and improve in areas where we are falling behind. First, the stimulus bill contains more than $100 billion for education aligned around four priorities: creating data systems that track individual student performance; developing college and career-ready curriculum standards and designing and implementing high-quality assessments; improving teacher effectiveness and placing our best teachers in our most challenging schools; and intervening effectively in chronically low-performing schools.

With this unprecedented level of federal funding, Congress and the administration have sent two messages to state and local officials: fill in budget gaps and reform education. There has been much talk about how to fulfill both priorities at once. While funding is important, it is not the real issue stifling reform. The real issue is that too many local leaders have been unwilling to engage in making hard decisions, and those that have taken on the fight have been defeated by well-funded stakeholders that prefer the status quo. This is where the business community can and must play an essential role.

The other opportunity lies in the upcoming reauthorization of NCLB. Though we have seen progress, we should not be satisfied. The achievement gap continues to plague our country. Because of the state and federal assessment data we now have, we've diagnosed the problem—approximately 5,000 schools have failed to meet their annual goals for five straight years, and 2,000 high schools produce more than half of all dropouts.

Now, we have to deal with those chronically low-performing schools—the ones that need more than just tinkering around the edges. We must not let up on an accountability approach that is showing results. That focus on accountability brought together an unlikely coalition of business and civil rights groups, including the U.S. Chamber of Commerce. The need for this alliance is more essential than ever as we continue fighting to provide better education for all our children. Their lives and our country depend on it.

The author is executive vice president of the National Chamber Foundation, the Chamber's public policy think tank, and president & CEO of Margaret Spellings and Company. Formerly, she was Secretary of Education.