WASHINGTON, D.C. – The push to rethink American higher education got a fresh airing Tuesday at a forum where speakers espoused new programs, policies and paradigms in an effort to defy the inertia of the status quo.
Ideas ranged from efforts to publicize more meaningful information about the total cost of college and job placement rates at particular institutions, to making teacher preparation programs more rigorous and compensating teachers in a manner more commensurate with elite professionals such as lawyers and doctors.
While much of the discussion at The Atlantic magazine’s forum titled “Jobs & Economy of the Future: Educating the Next Generation to Compete,” dealt with the need to reinvent colleges and universities, the conversation often focused on the need to change America’s education system at the K-12 level in order to get better results at the post-secondary level.
Perhaps one of the most scathing criticisms of the current state of public education finance came from U.S. Sen. Lamar Alexander, R-Tenn., former U.S. Education Secretary under George H. W. Bush, who said the nation would do better if it financed K-12 education the same way colleges and universities get funded.
In higher education, Alexander noted, the federal government gives grants to students and lets the students choose which college or university to attend with the public dollars.
However, in K-12, he said, government money is given directly to an institution irrespective of how good it is, and students are forced to attend those schools based on where they live.
“You can be assigned to a bad school in K-12,” Alexander told Judy Woodruff, senior correspondent and co-anchor at PBS NewsHour during the Headline Interview portion of the event. “And we shouldn’t permit that.”
