I'm a former college president. If we're serious about fixing education, here's where I'd start.

In this series, professionals provide advice for the next U.S. president. What do you want POTUS focused on? Write your own #nextpresident post here.

Dear Future President: There are many issues that I could address in anticipation of your taking office but I will narrow my comments to four issues within the field of education, the last of which is how to improve the US Department of Education. That way, these topics will get the focus and attention they deserve. Note that most of the observations are at the level of policy, with some implementation suggestions. The reasons are obvious: unless there is a solid set of shared principles, it is near to impossible to divine workable solutions with stickiness across time and administrations. 

Know, too, that there are other issues that need addressing in our nation in the field of education and in a wide range of other arenas. I appreciate the difficulty of balancing priorities among these many issues. But, to my mind, education needs to be at the top of the list. Here’s why.

A Democracy (our democracy) depends on an educated population. As such, the importance of education is central to how we function as a society. We want and need citizens who vote, who engage within their communities on key issues, who care about the needs of others, who earn a living wage, who recognize the value of the freedoms within a democratic nation, who care about our Earth and who appreciate the role and responsibility of the United States within the larger global community of nations. 

With that key premise in mind, here are four key topics that I hope will garner your attention, your capacity and power to message to our nation and the world, and your willingness to dedicate the resources of the federal government in ways that will improve educational outcomes. One could call these four highlighted items the education “North Stars” – the guidelines that need to drive decisions, changes, funding, staffing, choices and attention. And, in a world of inevitable decision-fatigue, these four mantras are designed to be like mnemonic devices – easy to recall at all times. 

1. We Need to Educate “All Our Kids.”

As Robert Putman pointed out in his book, Our Kids, we tend to help our own kids and those who look like our kids. Instead of seeing a broader commitment to all kids – regardless of their race, ethnicity and socio-economic status – we limit (whether or not intentionally) our attention and our commitment. 

The result is that we have an ever-growing equity gap between the rich (and middle class) and the poor kids on virtually every conceivable measure – academic readiness, academic progression, college access, college graduation, employment, lifetime earnings, physical and mental health. Stated differently, the absence of paying attention to “all kids” and our willingness, to use Putnam’s other phrase, “bowl alone,” has a profound and lasting impact. 

As important as this notion of broad commitment to closing the equity gap is, we have few concrete and doable strategies to enable “all our kids” to succeed. We can now recognize and acknowledge the problem more frequently; we bemoan the achievement gaps. But we lack systemic and systematic ways to address these issues across the educational spectrum. And, pointing out a problem does not solve the problem. It may be a necessary condition precedent but it is not a cure. 

To address the troubling and impactful achievement gap, start with this: the students of the 21st century do not look like the students of the past century in America.

Many are low income. Many are first generation. Many are minorities. Many have not grown up in cultures that necessarily have similar school systems to ours, and some parents may not be comfortable visiting or engaging with schools based on their own negative school experiences, whether here in the US or abroad. Some parents are not accustomed to reading to their children or they cannot read or cannot afford books. Many of the parents of our kids are working one and two jobs and are not home as often as they would like to be and when they are home, they are tired and stressed. Shared meals and home cooked meals are rare. Many households have blended families or single parents. A goodly number of kids are raised by relatives or guardians. Some kids are homeless or move frequently or are in foster care, leading to education discontinuity. Drugs, alcohol and violence are present more than desired.

These are our students. Rather than bemoaning who they are, we need to develop institutions and approaches that can serve them well. Professors in college say, “I need the Admissions Office to bring us better students.” Elementary school teachers bemoan the lack of readiness of and academic rigor in some of their students. Stop right there: we need administrators and other faculty and teachers to say: these are our students. Find amazing ways to teach them. That’s our job. 

Next, we need to move away from a deficiency model in education. This model observes gaps in students and then seeks to fill them, sort of like filling an empty bottle with water. But the approach is flawed in many respects. We can fill the empty bottle all we want with remedial courses, with added programs, with more activities but the problem will not be solved. 

Instead, we need to change the institutions that serve these students. The students are not deficient in some pejorative sense. They do not need to be remediated (and there are reasons why traditional remediation and tracking do not work effectively). These students need institutions and those within them to understand where they come from, the place where they are starting, the experiences they have had or witnessed (that often traumatic). Institutions, then, need to change themselves (and the people who comprise the institution) rather than asking children to change themselves. 

2. Education Involves a Pipeline, Not Silos. 

Regrettably, we view each phase of education in isolation, and we educators all operate in way too much isolation. We have pre-school, we have K-5 or 6, we have Middle School and then High School. Then we have post-secondary education: certificate programs, 2 and 4-year colleges/universities and then post bachelor degree programs.

Consider the implications of the siloed approach we have. Educators do not work with each other across the educational pipeline. Each level of education complains about the level before it for the flaws they see in their respective students. Colleges say high schools did not prepare their students well. High Schools say Middle Schools gave them students who are not academically ready. Middle Schools complain about elementary schools and how they lack the needed rigor to prepare students and so on. 

Why aren’t the educators working together across the pipeline, not in rare and isolated incidents (that are, by the by, both noteworthy and positive)? Consider the benefits of college professors working with high school teachers on collegiate expectations. Consider college professors visiting elementary schools to see how young students are using technology to learn, showing how pedagogy is going to need to change as technologically savvy students progress through the educational pipeline. Consider students and teachers at one educational level helping students at a lower grade level on projects and initiatives. Picture some shared theme that could be adopted in a region across the entire educational pipeline – like air pollution or creativity.

We do not need literally to knock down silos. We need to ventilate them so we can have increased engagement through them. But, this requires some give-up of autonomy, a prized value in education. It also requires people of “different” levels to work together as equals. Sadly, we have an educational hierarchy where those who teach at the highest level (graduate schools) are rewarded and respected more than those who teach pre-school. But, if we don’t get early education right, we will have kids perennially trying to catch up.

We could provide better wages for those who teach the youngest students. We could showcase their important role. We could have shared faculty development across the educational pipeline. We could start a social movement that enables the messaging of the importance of early childhood education – positive social norming would be beneficial. We could adjust how accreditation teams are populated to add individuals from the school level ahead of or behind the institution being reviewed. We could have co-authored articles. 

One note: cross-ventilation across the educational pipeline has one major hurdle that has gone unmentioned here: silos exist within each educational sector. Sadly, within any given age grouping, the silos run vertically as well as horizontally. Working together across disciplines, respecting the work of others within an institution are important. And, these silos need to be addressed as well.

3. Education Happens in Many Places and Spaces of Which the Classroom is But One.

Unfortunately, for the most part, we view education today in a most limited of ways. We focus on what occurs in classrooms and then we provide standardized tests to measure learning. For this reason, we see education as occupying the space between pre-k – 20 in school buildings. 

But, much learning occurs outside and beyond the classroom, and “teachers” are not just those who have a teaching certificate. Parents, mentors, relatives, coaches, counselors, afterschool workers, employers, physicians and pharmacists among others are educators and they teach, whether or not they acknowledge this important role they play. And we need them all if we are to have an educated population.

Because “teaching” and “learning” are so integral to our society, we must foster and support learning in many places and spaces. We can create programs that enable teaching/learning, and we can support existing efforts. Here are two examples. 

First, we can enable pharmacists to help parents and the elderly understand the drugs they are using (for themselves or in the case of parents, for their children). And, they can work on long-term disease management. But, they need to be trained and then compensated for this effort through Medicaid and Medicare and other private insurance carriers. And, we need to help pharmacists with how to be the most effective educators. 

Second, we could help parents, particularly those who are low income and homeless, with ways to enhance the lives of their infants, both medically and psychosocially. Prenatal care matters too. We can facilitate their learning to make sure their kids are not behind before they event start official schooling. And, in helping the parents with their children, we are not only helping the children, we are benefiting the larger society too. We need quality programs that are not demeaning, that are fiscally supported, that have reward systems built in, that are deeply engaging, offered in multiple languages and at times that are convenient, including with childcare to enable parental attendance. And, these programs can’t be intimidating. 

To return to actual schools and colleges/universities, we need to respect that much learning is not “academic” and is not acquired through lectures and books (as important as books and reading are). Learning happens in hallways and playgrounds and on athletic teams and in clubs and through conversations among kids and between kids and adults. This learning is psychosocial in part but it is a key aspect of how one learns what we often call, erroneously and deprecatorily in my view, “soft” skills. Problem solving, creativity, ingenuity, engagement, teamwork, cooperation, openness and self-confidence, capacity to fail and recover: these are key skills for success within and outside of the school building. They often are as important as (some might say more important than) knowing percentages in math or American History. 

Consider initiatives like Strive Together where communities work together, as a collective, on student progression: employers, religious leaders of all faiths, teachers, parents, universities, community organizations. We are limited not by our capacity but by our reluctance to facilitate change and commit to change long term. Stated differently, not only must we do better, we can do better. 

4. Department of Education: Where Less is More

Some of the presidential candidates wanted to dismantle the US Department of Education. I beg to differ. The Department can help improve educational opportunity and success in our nation. The problem is that, sadly, some of the efforts of the Department have been misguided or flawed. And, there are issues that have not gotten the attention they deserve. So, our priorities are “off” but improvements are possible. We can only do some many things well. Better to do some things well rather than many things superficially.

Start with this realization. There are many Departments within the federal government that deal with education but there is a serious inability of the Departments to work together so there are shared goals, shared best practices, shared efforts. Why do we need to both reinvent the wheel and keep solutions isolated? Two examples: The Department of Defense runs an entire school system for military children (DoDEA). Why is the Department of Education not integrally involved? And, the Department of the Interior runs the entire Native American school system, with the Department of Education only minimally involved? Does this make sense? Simple answer: No.

The Department of Education needs to change the way it handles the approval of accreditors. Sadly, the Department of Education has seen its role as deeply limited; they approve accreditors but are not responsible for their quality and they are explicit about this. The gatekeeper’s gate is too open. 

The result of this bifurcation is unfortunate: institutions that do not serve students well are accredited. And, then, when the institutions fail and students are damaged, we turn to the accreditor and ask why they did not see the problem. Might we also ask why the Department of Education did not see the problems with the accreditor and demand better? Ask how many accrediting agencies has the US Department of Education actually turned down over the last few decades? 

The Department in essence runs a huge bank – the Federal Student Aid program. Yet, there is a strange disconnect between the Department of Education and Federal Student Aid. The personnel with FSA are not political appointees and it is unclear to whom they truly report. Next, the goals of FSA do not necessarily match those of the Department and who finally determines FSA policy is unclear. Look at the current issues with student debt collection. The debt collection is outsourced and the debt collectors are violating debt collection laws. About that there is no question. But, those debt collectors continue to collect and in some instances, there contracts are renewed. Seriously?

The Department has choices as to how it spends it time, talent and money. Why spend time developing a college/university rating (ranking) system with all the attendant costs? There are many embedded flaws in the ratings because, in part, they are based on flawed data collection, including IPEDS. Without getting into the weeds here, why not just have the Department improve its data collection and then release the data so that researchers outside government can use it for free? In other words, the government had a large misplaced expenditure of time, money and talent.

The Department has rightly focused on low-income student success across the educational pipeline and has improved grant opportunities like Pell. It has tried to improve low performing schools, with mixed results. But, sadly, it has missed opportunities (in addition to the two referenced above—collaboration among agencies and accreditation) because, in part, of limited bandwidth and flawed priorities.

Here are four ways the Department could spend its time, energy, talent and money and make a sizable difference in education across our nation: (1) develop strategies to insure states remain committed to education with carrots and sticks because, at the end of the day, it is the states that hold the power across the pre-K – 12 educational system; (2) focus on new financial instruments that can help students and their family succeed in higher education, many of which are now being taken up in the private sector (for better or worse); (3) take steps to make the schools now run by the Federal government (DoDEA and Indian) paradigms of excellence and innovation and prototypes that others can look to for best practices and success, with Department of Education involvement in showcasing exceptional outcomes; and (4) simplify, simplify and simplify and then simplify again. We have way too many regulations that take time away from educating students and they are not coordinated within the Department, within the federal government and with accreditors. Enough with the paperwork; we need fewer but better information gathering efforts. Students will benefit from the reallocation of resources and time. 

Ms/Mr. President: education matters. Truly. Our Democracy (with a capital D) depends on it. I hope this letter proves helpful, and please reach out if I can be of further assistance.  I believe in the power of the possible. 

Karen Gross is writing a book on student success to be published by Columbia TCP. She is also the author of a new children's book, Lady Lucy's Quest, on sale now.

More posts on this topic:

• “This Isn’t Crying Wolf: Machines Will Take White-Collar Jobs During the Next Administration”— Martin Ford, author of "Rise of the Robots: Technology and the Threat of a Jobless Future"
• “The Next Big Industry That No One Knows About (Not Even the Future President)” — Suzy Welch, business journalist, television commentator
• “Technology — Not Taxes — Can Solve America's Higher Ed Crisis” — Anant Agarwal, CEO at edX, Professor at MIT
• “I Don't Believe in Federal Miracles, But Here's What the Next POTUS Can Do” —Bruce Katz, inaugural centennial scholar at The Brookings Institution
• “Like Any New Boss, the Next President Will Need to Build a Great Team — and Trust” — Joel Peterson, Chairman, JetBlue Airways
• “America's Healthcare System Needs This from the Next President” — Deepak Chopra, Founder, Chopra Foundation