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K–12 education is pivotal to the nation’s prosperity, economic strength, military readiness, social equity, and civic vitality. Think about domestic manufacturing and the shortage of educated U.S. workers, a predicament in building a continuum of giant factories in the U.S.—a concern expressed by iPhone.
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Decades ago, alarmed by persistently poor K–12 outcomes across all 50 states, Congress took bold action by creating the U.S. Department of Education (ED) and granting each new U.S. President the power to appoint a Secretary of Education to lead the charge for national K-12 improvement.
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However, doing no better than the 50 states, the ED effort, too, has been a massive national failure for decades.
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Tragically, the Secretary of Education and “Cousin Eddie” shared more than just similar names—ED and Eddie. Cluelessness was an art form for both, though Cousin Eddie was a character in National Lampoon’s Christmas Vacation.
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But why so many Cousin Eddies as Secretary of Education?
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Answer:
The Department of Education Organization Act failed to establish any system of external oversight to evaluate the Secretary’s leadership. The squandering of K–12 lives by the tens of millions became the ED national norm.
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Has there been wholesale lack of U.S. Dept of Education accountability? Yes.
Fatal issue #1: No doubt there have been incoming U.S. Presidents who mistakenly thought the Secretary of the U.S. Department of Education was a figurehead position to be bestowed as an “honor” on someone, or selected in a manner suggested by a bureaucrat. But the choice of Secretary is pivotal to the competitiveness of the United States. Only if ED is brilliantly led can it achieve what has never been achieved before: K-12 multipoint, hard-number metrics gains by the nation’s K-12 students.
Fatal issue #2: Congress did not codify a system of outside oversight requiring rigorous monitoring of the Secretary’s performance—and the teeth to escort a non-performing Secretary from the building.
Fast-forward to today: Half (or more) of all K-12 graduates in the U.S. are not able to read, write, and do math at minimum proficiency. Decades of multitrillion-dollar socioeconomic opportunity have been lost together with inexcusable harm to the nation’s human capital.
Have tens of millions of K-12 students been left at permanent (lifetime) risk? Yes.
U.S. power thrives on the strength of its magnificent human capital, and yet no one has figured out how to rescue the heavy percentage of young Americans abandoned in the K-12 pipeline.
Well before the U.S. Dept of Ed was created, the states could not fix the K-12 problem (decades were lost). Therefore Ed was created but it too failed to fix the problem (losing another four decades). Should the U.S. once more try the states? Or is there a solution that has been overlooked?
Specifically, have the 50 states succeeded where the Dept of ED has not? No.
That is, no state ever has in terms of K-12 hard-number, multipoint “jumps,” year after year, in such longitudinal assessments as international PISA and TIMSS tests; iconic national ASVAB, SAT and the ACT tests—and not even in NAEP, the assessment of K-12 student performance in reading, writing, and math.
Periodically, yes, there will be a state that prematurely celebrates a K-12 gain. Sadly, however, even if the celebrated gain survives the next assessment, the true test for the needs of the nation are K-12 gains that not only survive but become significantly larger from one assessment to the next.
The elephant in the room. As well-intended as an individual state’s education department may be in feeling that it is their leadership efforts that result in top K-12 rankings, consider this: Take another look, it’s states blessed with populations that most-value K-12 education that top national K-12 rankings.
Pros and cons of keeping the U.S. Department of Education
Con: Misuse and abuse of time and resources. Without an exceptional Secretary of Education bringing brilliant leadership direction, it appears that irresponsible misdirection within ED has for decades dramatically failed to ramp up K-12 student performance in reading, writing, and math as well as endless other hard-number metrics results. Distracting from the failure, the department engulfed itself in unrelated processing tasks—perhaps as a smoke screen to look busy.
Con: Cold chill. By imposing itself on the states, simply by threat of withholding federal funding, poorly-led ED administrations spread their failure by interfering with the states’ K-12 student performance efforts.
Pro: Weight of the federal government. Rather than micromanage or interfere with the states’ individual education systems, a federal agency such as the already-in place ED (subject to qualified leadership) could serve as a “central point”; after all, the right hand must know what the left hand is doing.
Pro: Strategic synergy. Strategically operated, ED (if the central point) would be a synergy composed of itself, the 50 states, and the public (e.g., parents, teachers, students). Through the central point, any state would have the option to share its challenges and programs for all parties to consider. The general public, as one of those parties, and its wealth of ideas would have a venue to share new concepts or suggest adjustments to current efforts. ED, too, likewise a party, could access that information as well as its own to bring soaring gains to K-12 student performance in the U.S. In sum, silos have not worked; needed is synergy by design.
Pro: Blind data goldmine. A natural advantage of a federal agency—such as ED—serving as the central point is to receive K–12 student data from all 50 states, although ED and its leadership played this role stupidly. Here’s an example: In a meeting with HSe4Metrics, a top ED official suggested that ED’s per-student data could be anonymized (to keep it confidential) and used to enhance HSe4Metrics’ per-student data. Amazingly, ED was sitting on an untapped student-data goldmine to enhance K-12 student performance, but without the HSe4Metrics platform ED had little use for its own data! (However, as a mere shell of the vital federal agency it was meant to be, ED failed to conduct the due diligence necessary to collaborate with the HSe4Metrics platform.)
Going forward . . . ONLY TRUE INNOVATION WILL LEAD TO SOARING K-12 STUDENT PERFORMANCE.
U.S. K-12 competition is international.
Therefore, every high-performing K-12 school in the U.S. must perform significantly better than it is doing today.
Further, every low-performing K-12 school must quickly become a contender—a strategy to vastly expand the nation’s qualified human capital resource.
THE K-12 SOLUTION AT HAND IS HSE4METRICS. Ironically, as ED faces possible termination due to decades of embarrassing failure and misguided leadership, a free-access private sector innovation by HSe4Metrics (the object of this limited funding website) has the potential to transform national K-12 student performance. But as with any innovation, it must be tested—and to be tested it must be funded.
A federal agency such as the U.S. Dept of ED may be the perfect sponsor for the HSe4Metrics initiative. In turn, the HSe4Metrics project, for the first time, offers sweeping justification for ED to exist—at least long enough for the HSe4Metrics innovation to be tested. Conversely, the considerable cloud cost of the HSe4Metrics platform is likely far beyond the financial capability of a single state, and attempting to bring together multiple states to fund the HSe4Metrics project would add an order of ten in organizational difficulty—a cost that might overwhelm a state may justify federal involvement.
For instance, ED can snap its fingers, do its due diligence, and fund the free-access HSe4Metrics platform innovation.
Although any federal agency or consortium of states (that somehow organize) can justify the immense cost of the HSe4Metrics K-12 student performance innovation, only a federal agency has the ability to immediately do its due diligence and work with HSe4Metrics. With proper leadership, an ideal agency to do this is ED.
One of the nation’s top 100 law firms is in the process, pro bono, of converting HSe4Metrics to a 501(c)(3); however, the conversion may be irrelevant depending on HSe4Metrics’ relationship with a federal agency.
Although a giant publicly-traded corporation such as Proctor & Gamble could sponsor the HSe4Metrics platform, the enormous annual cost would be confined to P&G’s shareholders—rather than spreading the sponsorship cost across all of the nation’s taxpayers. For a P&G, 501(c)(3) status would be a factor.
In sum, put in place by the Department of Education Organization Act in October 1979, ED can at long last rise from self-inflicted failure to change the K-12 student competitiveness of the United States. How? It can do its due diligence and adopt the HSe4Metrics platform.
Fundraising date (to be announced) for hiring a presentation team
Power of the public.
Supported by the power of the public, HSe4Metrics will launch a limited fundraising campaign to cut through the isolation barriers a federal agency may use to discourage outside discourse. The campaign will seek “seed money” to hire a professional presentation team to meet with federal agencies as well as publicly traded corporations.
Rather than having HSe4Metrics cover the cost alone—in this case, the cost of hiring and funding a presentation team—the public will have the opportunity to participate with bite-sized donations.
The launch date will be announced.
Meanwhile, HSe4Metrics volunteers will contact potential presentation teams.
This website uses ED as the abbreviation for the U.S. Department of Education. While “DOE” is commonly used to refer to the Department of Education, and is fine within the context of this website, it is important to note that DOE officially (and more correctly) refers to the Department of Energy.