“Tough Choices or Tough Times” education reform guidelines adopted by 3 states

The governors of Massachusetts, New Hampshire and Utah today announced their commitment to a modification of the United States public education system. The education reform framework is called “Tough Choices or Tough Times”(TCTT), which is “the most dramatic overhaul of education in at least 100 years.” The reform is also supported by the National Education Association, the largest teacher’s union in the nation with more than 3.2 million members.

The reform incorporates many features of the world’s most successful education systems. Massachusetts Secretary of Education, Paul Reville, said the reform will “transform our education system to make it truly competitive with the best education systems in the world.” Former U.S. Labor Secretary, Senator William Brock (R-Tenn.), said “forty years ago, the United States had the best educated workforce in the world. Now we are number ten and falling.” Brock said that currently, 70 percent of our 8th graders are not proficient in reading or math, and most will never catch up. He also said that the United States ranks 21st in high school graduates among the 30 industrialized nations, and approximately 1 million American students drop out of high school every year.

Mark Tucker, President of the National Center on Education and the Economy, outlined the issues the reform will address: revamping the high school-college transition; ending high school for most students after the tenth grade, when they would take rigorous state board exams (set to what they should be able to do to succeed in state, community, and technical colleges). Additional reforms would be: after passing the exams, enabling students to go directly to those state, community colleges and technical schools as freshmen; reallocating close to 13% of the funds now being spent on elementary and secondary education towards higher productivity uses; recruiting teachers from the top third of college graduates by paying them professional salaries and letting them run the schools; supplying “Pre-K” for all; and redesigning how schools are funded and managed.

The main differences between TCTT framework and the No Child Left Behind Act is the “Tough Choices or Tough Times agenda is to get 95% of American students ready for college without remediation by the time they leave high school,” as the TCTT report says. Lyonel B. Tracy, Commissioner of Education in New Hampshire, said the No Child Left behind act sets minimum standards, while the TCTT “follows the child through the next round.”