Choose One

• Prospective Students
• Current Students
• Faculty & Staff
• Alumni
• Parents
• Community & Friends

• Peabody Journal of Education
  • PJE, Volume 84, Issue 3, 2009
  • PJE, Volume 84, Issue 2, 2009
  • PJE, Volume 84, Issue 1, 2009
  • PJE, Volume 83, Issue 4, 2008
  • PJE, Volume 83, Issue 3, 2008
  • PJE, Volume 82, Issue 4, 2007
  • Editorial Guidelines
  • Subscription Information

Peabody Journal of Education, Vol. 82, No. 4

Introduction to the Special Issue on the Single Best Idea for Improving K-12 Education

Jay P. Greene
Department of Education Reform, University of Arkansas

What happens when you ask some of the nation’s leading education researchers to describe their single best idea for improving K–12 education? The result is the collection of articles contained in this special issue of the Peabody Journal of Education.

The idea for this project began with the formation of a technical board of advisors for the newly created Department of Education Reform at the University of Arkansas. To make the first gathering of that board more interesting and productive, I asked its members to write and present a paper making the case for their single best idea for education reform. With a clutter of reform ideas being floated in policy circles, it might be useful to ask a group of experts to identify those that most deserve our attention.

Some board members asked that they be given specific assignments rather than having the topic left so open-ended. They were afraid that the single best idea would be obvious and everyone would write the same paper. I stuck with the original assignment; if everyone agreed on the same single best idea for school reform I thought we should know what that idea is.

We gathered for our conference in Kansas City in October 2006 with the generous support of the Ewing Marion Kauffman Foundation. And as you may have guessed, everyone didn’t propose the same “best” idea. Instead we heard a variety of provocative and specific proposals for how we could best improve K–12 education. The proposals did, however, cluster around a few common themes.

The papers from Eric Hanushek, Michael Podgursky, and Matthew Springer suggest that merit pay for educators is the most promising strategy for improving schools. Paying educators for contributing to growth in student learning would be an improvement over the current system that pays primarily based on advanced degrees and years of experience, which, unfortunately, are factors that contribute relatively little to student learning. Pay for performance could improve student learning by increasing the motivation of existing teachers and by drawing more highly qualified people to the teaching profession over time.

The papers from Rebecca Maynard, Irma Perez-Johnson, and John Witte focus on preschool as the key to improving K–12 education. The problem, they observe, is that the gap between rich and poor and minority and White students develops very early and is very hard to reverse. It’s better to nip the problem in the bud by offering high-quality, free preschool, especially to low-income students. They also point to long-term evidence on the benefits of quality preschool relative to its cost.

James Guthrie, Paul Peterson, and Patrick Wolf believe that the solution to K–12 ills can be found in expanded testing and improved data-systems. Heavy reliance on testing could improve the performance of educators as well as students. Educators would have better data for managing and calibrating their efforts, and students would be more focused on the goal of high achievement rather than satisfying the nonacademic goals set by their peers.

The last group of papers by Jay Greene, Carolyn Herrington, Stephen Nettles, Kenneth Wong, and Francis Shen look to the governance and structure of school systems. Offering vouchers for special education students, Greene suggests, would improve options for students with significant educational challenges while reducing school incentives to overdiagnose disabilities. Herrington and Nettles argue that the buck stops with the school principal. Improve the principal and we improve the schools. Wong and Shen would like the buck to stop with big city mayors, whose better political accountability would make school systems more accountable.

We never did settle on what was the single best idea (although I insisted that it was mine). But this set of practical proposals should provide policymakers and researchers with the kinds of ideas we need to be considering for making significant improvements in K–12 education.

Correspondence should be sent to Jay P. Greene, 201 Graduate Education Building, University of Arkansas, Fayetteville, AR 72701.

Return to Current Issue