Craig Barrett wants to blow up public education in Arizona

Posted by AzBlueMeanie:

David Safier and I posted yesterday about Craig Barrett, former CEO and chairman for Intel Corp., who will lead Gov. Jan Brewer's newly revamped Arizona Ready Education Council ("A-Wreck" as David so aptly put it).

Today Howard Fischer reports with this killer headline in the Tribune: Former Intel chief wants to blow up Arizona education as governor's new council chair – East Valley Tribune:

The former chief executive of Intel wants to essentially blow up everything in public education in Arizona, from how teachers are trained to how they are paid.

And Craig Barrett is getting a platform to do just that with his appointment Monday by Gov. Jan Brewer as chairman of the Arizona Ready Education Council.

* * *

He said the prime goal of the council will be to get Arizona to adopt core national standards and then, using those as benchmarks, make sure Arizona youngsters improve.

But Barrett, while acknowledging Arizona is "not terribly high" on funding per students compared to other states, rejected the idea that more money is at least part of the answer.

In fact, Barrett said he does not even believe that the state needs to pay teachers more to attract the best and the brightest into education. He says the key is paying each teacher not only according to his or her performance but according to the business practices of supply and demand.

* * *

Barrett, however, said he does understand the problem in his current role as president and chairman of the BASIS charter school chain.

Charter schools are privately operated public schools. They get close to the same amount of state funds as district-based schools but cannot charge tuition. But they are exempt from many regulations, not only the pay grades that exist in most district-based schools but also the mandate to hire only certified teachers.

Barrett said the model works, saying that about half of all schools in Arizona designated as high performers are charter schools even though they educate only about 12 percent of students in the public school system.

"And they operate at a lower budget than normal K-12 public schools," he said.

"I'd rather take that conversation (about teacher pay) and turn it around to, let's take the dollars that we have and pay teachers on the basis of performance and get content experts in the classroom," Barrett said. "And I think there's enough money to do all of that."

That, in turn, leads to Barrett's conclusion that while it takes some skills to know how to teach, the current process of educating teachers is not the answer.

"There's lots of ways to get that pedagogy besides that four years of classic, mind-numbing experience in a school of education," he said. Barrett said what's needed is someone who understands a subject and then gets a "boot camp" in teaching skills.

* * *

Aside from its broader mandate to improve education, the council assumes the duties for some previously announced goals including:

• Increasing the number of third-graders reading at or near grade level to 94 percent, from 73 percent.

• Boosting the high school graduation rate from 75 percent to 93 percent.

• Doubling the number of baccalaureate degrees issued at Arizona colleges and universities.

Andrew Morrill, president of the Arizona Education Association, said he has no problem with performance-based pay. Morrill said his organization has been supportive of a series of changes in both state law and even at local district levels, though he said there still needs to be some base pay. He also disputed Barrett's contention that the charter school model is, by definition, better.

"When you look at charter schools as the entire class, their performance distribution is about equal to traditional schools," Morrill said. "Taken as a group, they're neither outperforming nor underperforming traditional schools as a group."

Anyway, Morrill said, there is no evidence that charter schools could keep up their performance if they had to scale up "to meet the enormous diversity across Arizona's student population."

The Arizona Daily Star's creative headline department soft-pedaled the killer headline for this report with this vanilla headline: Overhaul teacher processes, exec says. Oy!

The Star did add:

AT A GLANCE

Aside from its broader mandate to improve education, the Arizona Ready Education Council assumes the duty of helping the state achieve some previously announced goals by 2020, including:

• Increasing the number of third-graders reading at or near grade level to 94 percent, from 73 percent.

• Boosting the high school graduation rate from 75 percent to 93 percent.

• Doubling the number of baccalaureate degrees issued at Arizona colleges and universities.

The council has no legal power but will report to the public, the governor and the Legislature on what progress Arizona is making in improving student achievement, and will lobby for changes and for accountability.