Daniel Domenech: Stop blaming schools and start funding education fairly

  If you don’t have a student of your own attending a public school right now, chances are good that you’re not very impressed with the state of education in America. Fewer than one in five Americans who aren’t directly connected to a school rate the school system favorably.

  “You would think that with everything you hear out there that our parents would be beside themselves,” said Daniel Domenech, executive director of the American Association of School Administrators, who gave the keynote address at the opening session of the National Dropout Prevention Network conference on Monday morning.

  In fact, Domenech said, parents are widely content with their student’s schooling. Nearly four in five Americans who have a child in school would grade that school with an “A” or “B” for fulfilling student needs, he said. 

  “This bashing of public schools and the bashing of teachers and the bashing of educators has got to stop,” Domenech said.

  That doesn’t mean that public schools have no problems for which they must be accountable. And among the biggest problems, he said, is “what the American public school system tries to sweep under the rug… the dropout issue. That’s the problem that is the shame of the American education system.” 

  Domenech ticked off a set of cold facts that have become rote to many of the hundreds of educators in the audience. Dropouts are more likely to be poor, more likely to be incarcerated and more likely to be unhealthy later in life, he noted. 

  He asked, “why in the face of this overwhelming evidence — why is it that our country has not had the courage or the conviction to do what needs to be done to eliminate this problem?”

  The answer, he said, is that the problem is about more than schools. It is about more than students. It is about more than parents. It is about more than communities.

  It is about poverty. 

  Noting that school success almost perfectly correlates to poverty rates, as measured by the number of students receiving free or reduced-price meals at school, Domenech said “if we’re serious about dealing with the issue and dealing with the fact that resources are such an important component, then we have to change the way we fund education in America.” 

  He would like to see the federal government take a stronger role in providing funds for schools that do not have the resources available to schools from communities with stronger economies. 

  Right now, he said, “we’re not doing this systematically — we’re doing it one by one,” through Obama administration reform initiatives. “That’s not going to solve the problems we have.”

  What will? A re-imagining of what it means to be in school — and Domenech took aim at time-honored but arbitrary standards that dictate the number of years students must be in school. 

  “What’s the magic with kids who have to be out of school in 12 years?” he asked the conference assembly. “Our kids should be in school as long as they need to be.” 

For more information, visit www.aasa.org