Politiques américaines en éducation
Posted by Québec de Droite in Charter School, Ministère de l'éducation, États-Unis on dimanche 26 septembre 2010
Des choix difficiles dans une période difficile.
· Au cours de ces dix dernières années, 1,5 milliards de personnes ont rejoint la main d’œuvre mondiale, en Inde, en Chine et dans l’ex-Union soviétique.
· Dans les 15 prochaines années, 40 millions d’emplois courraient le risque d’être délocalisés à l’étranger.
· Il y a l’autorisation donnée aux circonscriptions scolaires de sous-traiter à des sociétés privées l’administration de toutes leurs écoles
What Makes a School Great: A Call to Action for Public Schools
Three remarkable things are happening simultaneously.
· First, we can now track how well individual students.
· Second, it is possible to teach every kid, read, write and do math and science at respectable levels.
· The third, to evaluate teachers based in part on how much their students are learning.
Des choix difficiles dans une période difficile.
La Nouvelle Commission sur les Compétences de la population active en Amérique" (“The New Commission on the Skills of the American Workforce”), un panel composé d’anciens secrétaires d’état et de gouverneurs, de responsables de l’éducation au niveau des états et au niveau fédéral, de chefs d’entreprises et de responsables municipaux, a fait paraître un rapport en décembre 2006 intitulé : "Des choix difficiles dans une période difficile". Ce rapport indiquait que si "des améliorations n’étaient pas réalisées au niveau des écoles et des universités publiques d’ici 2021, de nombreux emplois partiraient dans les pays étrangers comme l’Inde ou la Chine, où les travailleurs ont davantage de formation et sont moins rémunérés que leurs homologues américains".
Au cours de ces dix dernières années, 1,5 milliards de personnes ont rejoint la main d’œuvre mondiale, en Inde, en Chine et dans l’ex-Union soviétique. Il y a actuellement deux fois plus de jeunes de professions libérales dans des pays à bas salaires que dans les pays où les salaires sont élevés, et qui reviendront beaucoup moins cher que les Américains dans les décennies à venir. Les projections indiquent que, dans les 15 prochaines années, 40 millions d’emplois courraient le risque d’être délocalisés à l’étranger, y compris des emplois qui nécessitent d’avoir fait des études post-secondaire.
L’impact sur l’économie et sur l’emploi ne sera pas le même pour tous les travailleurs. Un rapport rédigé par le "National Center on Education and the Economy" intitulé "L’Amérique et l’économie mondiale" prédit une "pénurie de travailleurs avec un "bac"+2 ou plus, et une surabondance de travailleurs avec un niveau d’études très bas". Le rapport conclut que les enfants dont les parents ont des diplômes universitaires ont beaucoup plus de chances de monter dans les tranches de revenus élevés, tandis que ceux dont les parents ont un diplôme de fin d’études secondaires, ou qui ont abandonné l’école avant, ont plus de chances de tomber dans la tranche des salaires les plus bas. Et le rapport ajoute : "La structure des classes en Amérique est très dynamique … Toutefois, on peut dire que la middle-class se partage en deux courants égaux et opposés : ceux qui ont des diplômes universitaires bénéficient de l’ascenseur social et ceux qui n’en ont pas se retrouvent dans une trajectoire descendante".
Les recommandations de la "Nouvelle Commission sur les compétences de la population active" concernant la réforme du système public d’éducation ont été décrites par son président comme étant "un appel à un remaniement complet du haut jusqu’en bas". Parmi ces recommandations, il y a l’autorisation donnée aux circonscriptions scolaires de sous-traiter à des sociétés privées l’administration de toutes leurs écoles, organisées dans l’esprit des "charters schools".
Elles seraient gérées comme une entreprise (les écoles bien gérées seraient récompensées et les administrateurs dont les élèves auraient de mauvais résultats seraient renvoyés). Les membres de la commission préconisent également que tous les élèves passent les examens nationaux à l’issue de la 2°, ce qui permettra de les séparer en deux groupes. Ceux qui ne "se sont pas mal débrouillés" pourraient être dirigés vers des institutions ("community colleges") qui assurent des formations courtes post-études secondaires ou vers un programme qui offre des passerelles pour poursuivre des études universitaires.
"Ils ont réussi, pourquoi pas vous ?"
Eli Broad, l’entrepreneur prospère, qui finance Green Dot et bien d’autres écoles privées, a écrit que s’ils ne procédaient pas à ces changements, ils courraient le risque de "créer un fossé encore plus profond entre la middle-class et les pauvres. Ce fossé menace notre démocratie, notre société et l’avenir économique de l’Amérique".
“What Makes a School Great: A Call to Action for Public Schools”
Extrait de :“What Makes a School Great: A Call to Action for Public Schools”, Amanda Ripley, TIME Magazine, september 16, 2010
Waiting for "Superman" is a documentary that follows five kids and their parents as they try to escape their neighborhood public schools for higher-performing public charter schools. The movie serves up a lot of clarifying statistics about the problems facing education reform, explaining how it could be that the U.S. since 1971 has more than doubled the money it spends per pupil yet still trails most other rich nations in science and math scores. But the film succeeds because it also lays out the solutions, something no one could credibly attempt to do until very recently.
Today, several decades into America's long, tedious fight over how to upend the status quo in public education, three remarkable things are happening simultaneously.
First, thanks partly to the blunt instruments of No Child Left Behind, we can now track how well individual students are doing from year to year-and figure out which schools are working and which are not. Most Americans think testing is a spurious trend; a new TIME poll found that only 1 out of 5 people surveyed felt that testing has had a positive effect in schools. But as the tests get better, we are starting to be able to see in the dark. We can track what works-and what doesn't-in the classroom, something that had been for all of history a matter of conjecture and hearsay. And while the data isn't perfect, it's far better than any other yardstick we've ever had before.
Second, legions of public schools-some charters, some not-are succeeding while others flounder. These successful schools are altering fundamentals that were for so long untouchable, but insisting on great teachers, more class time and higher standards. We now know that it is possible to teach every kid, even poor kids with wretched home lives, to read, write and do math and science at respectable levels. In Harlem, low-income African-American students at these schools are performing on par with kids across New York City and the state. And the researchers studying their success have learned that what matters more than anything else in the school is the teacher, the one person in the building whose job has changed the least in the past half-century.
The third novelty is in Washington, where a Democratic President is standing up to his party's most dysfunctional long-term romantic interest, the teachers' unions. President Barack Obama and his Education Secretary, Arne Duncan, have dangled $4.35 billion in stimulus money in front of cash-strapped state legislatures to get them to rationalize their systems. Overnight, the White House has become the biggest benefactor in the education world, far surpassing the Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation. The competition, known as Race to the Top, is pushing school districts to raise academic standards, to evaluate teachers based in part on how much their students are learning, to train teachers more effectively-and to remove those who are not cut out for the job.
In the states' response, we are witnessing what may be the beginning of a commonsense revolution.
· Seven states have enacted laws to remove firewalls between student achievement and teacher evaluations.
· At least 12 states have passed laws requiring student-progress data to be used in making teacher-evaluation or tenure decisions, a notion that would have been unimaginable five years ago.
· And 35 states and the District of Columbia have agreed to adopt common standards for what kids should learn at every grade level.
Recently, officials from more than one European nation have contacted education reformers to learn how they could do something like Race to the Top in their own countries.
The pace of change is, relatively speaking, breathtaking. A couple of weeks ago, the Los Angeles Times released a searchable database of 6,000 teachers, ranked by their effectiveness on the basis of how much their students had improved on standardized tests during a year in their classrooms. The newspaper got access to the data through California's Public Records Act-and hired a seasoned education analyst to crunch the numbers. The charts reveal huge disparities among teachers in the same buildings, disparities that in many cases hold up over seven years of data.
The response started out predictably. The local teachers' union called for a boycott of the paper. But more than 1,100 teachers also answered the paper's invitation to see their data before it came out. And in a startling sign of the times, a Democratic Education Secretary offered his cautious support.
"Why, in education, are we scared to talk about what success looks like?"
Duncan asked in a speech. He acknowledged that a newspaper was not the ideal forum for teachers to get performance feedback, but he stressed a more important question:
Why did it take a newspaper to do what the school district should have done years ago?
"The fact that teachers did not have this information is ridiculous." Days later, the Los Angeles School Board endorsed using the data as part of teacher evaluations. Now the district must negotiate with the union to see if they can agree on a way to do so.
It's worth noting that these are early days. The vast majority of American kids have yet to be affected by any of these changes. But the drumbeat is hard to ignore. Instead of continuing to rely on tradition and interest group to see education policy, which is like using astrology to design a space program, we may be on the cusp of running schools-brace yourself-according to what actually works.
"Little by little, the curtain is being peeled back," says Charles Barone of Democrats for Education Reform.
"It's going to create a lot of discomfort and some upheaval. But you can't keep a lid on it.", Caught in the Matrix
By now, we're all exhausted by the cycles of crisis and stasis. It's part of what makes education reform so grueling: education policy is made at the local level, so the opinions of parents, community leaders and the rest of the public matter enormously, but the public has lost faith in the exercise. The TIME poll suggests that Americans have gotten more pessimistic about schools than they were just four years ago. Of those surveyed, 65% said our schools are not preparing kids well for the challenges ahead.
"This is the hardest movie we've made, by a factor of 10," he says. But there was one thing that education reformers had that environmentalists did not: an alternate universe where things worked the way they should. Chilcott and Guggenheim visited the KIPP LA Prep school in Los Angeles, where eighth graders are outperforming their peers across the city and the state in all subjects, despite the fact that 95% of them are poor.."
Charter schools operate outside the constraints of regular public schools. They get public money, but in most cases, their teachers are not unionized. This freedom has allowed a minority of them to shine, building flexible, demanding programs that defy expectations.
At these schools, the principals can hire their own staff. Teachers work longer days (and years) and often give out their cell-phone numbers should parents or students need to reach them after hours. If teachers consistently fail to help their students learn in ways that can be measured, they are asked to find another job.
At almost every other school in the country, such flexibility and professionalism are inconceivable because of teachers' union-negotiated contracts, long-standing education-culture norms or, in some cases, state law.
Sometimes on purpose and sometimes by accident, teachers' unions have a long history of working against the interests of children in the name of job security for adults.
And Democrats in particular have a history of facilitating this obstructionism in exchange for campaign donations and votes.
Meanwhile, most schoolteachers work in isolation: they can get tenure after an average of just three years on the job, which means they likely have a job for life, but they very rarely get meaningful evaluations or effective training to improve.
Guggenheim, a Democrat and member of the directors' union, agonized over his portrayal of the teachers' unions in the film. But eventually, he decided he would have to acknowledge these truths. "We have to change," he says.
"The unions can't protect bad teachers. They have to start helping good teachers."
That was the old-school union line. And in the next breath, she conceded that parents have a right to know if their children's teachers were rated as satisfactory by their supervisors, provided the evaluations are more holistic than test-score data alone. This was the union of the future.
An Army of Regular Americans
One of Weingarten's most valid criticisms of the film is that Guggenheim did not update it to reflect the progress that has been made since he finished shooting. In the spring, she, other union officials and Rhee finally agreed to a groundbreaking new contract for all D.C. teachers. They are set to earn large raises and can make even more money, depending on their effectiveness. D.C. teachers are evaluated according to a comprehensive rubric that includes five classroom observation and data about how much their students' scores have improved compared with those of other kids performing at similar levels. Teachers rated as ineffective will be let go. In July, Rhee dismissed 127 teachers-and placed 737 on notice that they must improve or face removal next year.
In August, the Obama Administration announced the winners of its Race to the Top competition -a list that now included 12 states, from New York to Hawaii, plus D.C.
Suite »»» La Course au sommet" ("Race to the Top")
Cahier spécial
La problématique de nos écoles publiques, la solution selon nos voisins américains.
1. Qu’est ce qui ne fonctionne pas avec les écoles publics ?,
deux textes à lire en premier.
2. Éducation : Quand les milliardaires s’en mêlent
3. Comment fait-on pour améliorer les écoles publiques?, vidéo
4. Aider les enseignants à s’améliorer
5. La situation : l’effet Widget, un échec national pour reconnaître et agir sur l’efficacité de l’enseignant, graphique, vidéo.
6. Le projet MET, travaillé avec les enseignants pour développer des mesures justes et fiables pour un enseignement efficace, graphique, vidéo.
a) Historique des Charters Schools
b) Elles remplacent la "bureaucratie" de l’Éducation
c) KIPP
d) Vidéo, 4 vidéos, particulièrement intéressant celle de Bill Gates.
8. Politiques américaines en éducation
a) Des choix difficiles dans une période difficile.
b) What Makes a School Great: A Call to Action for Public Schools
9. La Course au sommet" ("Race to the Top")
La Course au sommet" ("Race to the Top"), concurrence entre les États pour des réformes majeures en éducation, vidéo Obama
10. Le secteur privé a un réseau scolaire qui se porte bien
11. Conclusion : l’amélioration de l’éducation publique au Québec
a) États-Unis
1) Systèmes éducatifs américains déficients
3) Imputabilité
b) Le Québec
1) Le statut
3) Et si le Saint-Esprit apparaissait …
6) Pour accélérer le processus
c) La solution
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