Bill Daggett is one of the nation’s leading voices on education reform and improvement. When he speaks, educators, and policymakers tune in and listen. As the founder and president of the International Center for Leadership in Education, Dr. Daggett has combed all 50 states plus 29 countries abroad searching for evidence and examples of what works best in the classroom to advance student performance, and working with schools seeking to improve.
“We’re like a traffic cop” Dr. Daggett said. “We don’t create the best practices; we just find them, direct the schools to them, and facilitate implementing them.” Dr. Daggett has worked in education for 41 years and has authored eight books and 12 textbooks. But beyond his professional resume, he has a deeply personal stake in improving K-12 education because his own five grown children (ages 35-39) have given him 10 grandchildren, ages one, two, three, four, five, six, seven, eight, 10 and 14.
The staff at the N.C. Science, Mathematics, and Technology Education Center is eagerly anticipating his keynote speech at the N.C. Science Summit: Best Practices in STEM Education in Research Triangle Park on April 19-20. Dr. Daggett travels constantly for his job, visiting schools and giving talks across the nation, but we caught up with him in between trips to explore his views on STEM education in America today, what he thinks needs to change in the future to improve K-12 education — and why.
How would you describe your philosophy about the role of education in our society and STEM education in particular?
My belief is that our schools are not failing, they are actually getting better. If you look at the media rhetoric, nobody ever talks about it but we’ve actually been graduating a higher percentage of 18-year-olds every passing year for the past 10 years. And those kids have more tests to take than kids in the past. So we’ve got more requirements, and we’re graduating more kids. However, the world outside of school, pushed by technology and globalization, is changing faster than the schools. So my belief is that while schools are getting better, the kids are worse off because of that gap. And I think that gap is growing. The second part of my belief is that you can close that gap, but you are not going to do it by working harder. You’re going to close that gap by working differently. And so we have to find the best practices in the country and share them.
Looking at a snapshot of education in America today, what do you see going wrong? Is it the gap you just described?
What’s gone wrong is that schools have become all things to all people. Every good idea that anybody has, has gotten on to the plate. And we’re killing our classroom teachers with too many unsustained priorities. This year, they try one thing, next year, it’s a new priority, and then people begin to say “this too shall pass” and they lose their effectiveness. So we have to bring focus and sustainability along with the best practices.
You coined a phrase, “rigor and relevance,” that is now in use across the country. Can you expand on your ideas behind what this means as a goal for improving education?
What it really means is that all kids need academic rigor but they also need relevance. They need to know how to apply the knowledge. I’ve been in every state and 29 nations and as we looked at the schools that were really doing a lot better than other schools with similar socio-economic characteristics, what we saw is that they were teaching fundamentally differently. They were teaching things that were relevant to the kids, which also happened to be what was relevant in terms of the real world. We believe that relevance makes rigor possible for most kids. And it began to change the teaching practices in the schools that we were working with.
Are there certain grades that should be targeted for improving STEM education, because that’s when kids start to lose interest or become too intimidated by science and mathematics?
Well, first of all it’s important throughout K-12. But the really important years where we’re losing them is the transition between middle and high school. Ninth grade is the year we are losing kids. They’re physically and emotionally going through changes in their own bodies that they don’t necessarily understand. It’s a tough grade to teach, yet, it’s a grade where if you can get them interested in something, you can get them really interested in school. I think STEM education, which most people really see as an 11th and 12th grade initiative, I think it really needs to start heavily in middle school and up through ninth grade, to capture the kids’ natural interest. And then you develop a deeper level of skill in 11th and 12th grade.
What about specifically reaching and engaging female students in STEM education?
STEM occupation is as exciting for female students, if we know how to get back to what is relevant to those kids. That is why rigor and relevance are so important. Lots of young ladies are interested in things like environmental science; I have a grand-daughter who loves horses, and you could teach STEM education through the lens of veterinary science or environmental science. You just have to find out what is of interest to the kids. Females have as many interests as males that relate to STEM. But our problem is that we have traditionally taught it around things that men enjoy more than do young women – which goes back to the relevancy issue.
How would you compare STEM education in the U.S. to the international stage and how it is being taught in other countries? And how does that connect to the pace of globalization that you mentioned earlier?
First, all nations don’t use the phrase “STEM,” that is sort of an American invention. But consistent with science and technology engineering and mathematics, many more advances are going on in the Asian nations than are in the U.S., but we are doing better than the European nations. So, we’re kind of in the middle of the pack, internationally. Making progress, but not as much as our Asian counterparts. And part of this is that the Asian culture is so aggressively trying to compete in the global economy that they are uniquely committed to the areas of math and science. They have a longer school day. They have a longer school year. They have a culture that says, “We desperately want to do better in the future than in the past.” And America doesn’t quite have all that yet.
If we were to break out a crystal ball, where do you see education in America heading? Where do you see us five or 10 years from now?
I think we’re going to begin to see some transitions. I think we’ll have to begin to recognize that we’re going to have to teach differently than we have in the past. It can’t be a teacher in front of a class room sharing information. Today’s kids are wired differently; they are actively engaged in technology. They are native to a technological world that we, as adults, are immigrants to. And we’re going to need to become much more technologically engaged in our schools in the future. And secondly, I think that as our economy struggles and global competition increases, people are questioning the purpose and utility of an education. They are realizing that they need to go on to college not to do general studies, but to get a skill. And therefore, this concept of relevance is going to become much more important.
How would you describe the pros and cons of No Child Left Behind?
The great thing about No Child Left Behind is that it has heightened everybody’s understanding that continuous improvement in our schools is essential. We have to do better, every passing year. The down side to it is that when you address both excellence and equity, you will never get 100 percent of kids to proficiency, and the law doesn’t seem to recognize this. For example, I have a daughter who has severe mental retardation, autism, and epilepsy. There is no way that Audrey is ever going to pass a state test. Yet, if you look at the law, it will require by the year 2015, for every child to be proficient. So there are some unrealistic provisions that need to be tweaked, but the philosophy behind it is absolutely appropriate and correct.
In terms of potential solutions, do you see political or cultural solutions as more important to improving education in our public schools?
We need three things, in this order: first, a cultural shift to recognize that we have to do some things differently in order to compete globally. We have the shortest school day and shortest school year in the industrialized world. How are you going to compete with that? Globalization is real, and we are going to have to compete. So that’s a cultural issue that will create the will to change the system. Secondly, we need to have focused and sustained professional development for teachers. Third, we need some policy changes. What I find is that we are trying to drive change through policy, without providing the technical support to the teachers, and without creating the culture and the community to embrace it. And so the term I like to use is “top-down support, for bottom-up reform.” And we haven’t had this in our country, we’ve just had top-down direction.
Many people work in education, but fewer work specifically in improving education. Have there been any specific people or events that inspired you to pursue this path as a career?
What has inspired me most are my own children, I have five kids, and also the students I dealt with. What became apparent to me was that the schools had done a really nice job with the top one-third of the students, but they weren’t doing as good of a job in getting the remainder of the students to be all that they were capable of being. Because most of us taught in the way that we had been taught. And the purpose of school, for most teachers, appeared to simply be getting kids ready for the next grade, the next level of education, and the next test. And it was apparent to me that the purpose of school was really much deeper than that. The purpose of school was to get ready for the world beyond school.
Why did you found the International Center for Leadership in Education in 1991? Was there a particular motivating event or reason?
I had been a senior state official for the education department in New York, heading up curriculum and testing and I’d made some pretty sweeping changes in our curriculum and testing program. And based upon that I was being asked to speak not only around the country but also internationally. But I couldn’t because I was a state official, and I had a full time state job. And so I decided that I would really like to have a broader impact than just the state of New York, and I started the International Center, and it just took off like a shot.
