Secretary of Education Rod Paige, his four predecessors and former North Carolina Governor Jim Hunt expressed optimism about the state of American education, but said teacher quality, moral learning and school accountability need improvement during Wednesday's Education Leadership Summit.
Held in Geneen Auditorium at the Fuqua School of Business, the forum, which was hosted in commemoration of the 150 years of teacher preparation at the University, featured substantive comments by former secretaries of education Lauro Cavazos, William Bennett, Lamar Alexander and Richard Riley.
Hunt, who now heads the Hunt Institute for Educational Leadership and Policy, moderated the three-hour summit, which featured perspectives from each panelist and a roundtable discussion involving the participants and the audience.
Perhaps the most important contributor to the summit was Paige, who spoke at length about his administration's agenda for education. Praising President George W. Bush's leadership in pushing through the No Child Left Behind Act, Paige repeated his administration's main education goals throughout the forum, including accountability of results, greater flexibility and firmer local control of schools, and expanded parental options for school choice.
"Every society has been pleased with educating some of the children,"
The former secretaries echoed Paige's remarks on the notion of giving all children an opportunity to learn, but Riley cautioned that accountability in education could not be truly achieved until clear standards are enacted in order to judge this accountability. "I believe in standards, but not standardization," the former South Carolina governor said, noting the importance of creative teaching in addition to the expansive testing regime put into place under the recently passed education legislation.
Meanwhile, Bennett, who heads the Empower America conservative think tank and also has served as director of the Office of National Drug Control Policy, stressed his belief that morality should play a role in the education of children despite opposition to morality-based teaching. He also underscored that teachers must serve as role models for their pupils. "If you want people to learn about morality, then you put them in the presence of people who embody morality," Bennett said.
Riley responded that educators should teach about religion, but should not preach religious values.
Another hot topic that was tackled in the forum was the role that the federal government should play in educating the country's youth. The panelists agreed that more federal dollars should be pumped into local schools, but disagreed about how this funding should be administered and how much the government should oversee local school systems. Departing from his fellow Republicans, Bennett and Cavazos, Alexander called for an even greater increase in the federal commitment to education, contradicting the platform that the Republican Party advocated during his tenure as education secretary, which called for an abolition of the Department of Education.
Alexander also called for far-reaching legislation to improve the quality and accessibility of America's kindergarten through 12th-grade schools, just as the G.I. Bill after World War II made American colleges and universities better and more accessible.
"Why not borrow the horse trade that created the best colleges in the world to create the best schools in the world?" he asked.
Despite his disappointment that some of the main problems that he faced in his term had yet to be solved, Cavazos was generally optimistic about the direction of America's education system. He said he was pleased that the public was paying close attention to educational issues.
"America wants only the very, very best and that is still the main goal," Cavazos said. "Maybe by the end of the decade, we'll be able to reach these goals."
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