Daniel Malloy, the AJC’s reporter in Washington, D.C., sat down with former U.S. Education Secretary Margaret Spellings for an interview at an event in Washington today.  Here are her answers to a series of questions on major education issues:

DM: Cheating scandal call testing into question?

Spellings: I think obviously the vast majority of educators and education leaders take assessment seriously and the integrity seriously and don’t cheat. When it does happen it ought to be addressed and attended to vigorously. Obviously, we saw that exact same thing play out in Atlanta and what encourages me when I think about the Atlanta case study, the business community, as you know, was very engaged, got a little sideswiped by the scandal, a little aggrieved by their engagement that was rewarded with this sort of behavior. I think to their credit they’ve stayed engaged and active and continue to be and are moving forward to the benefit of kids. Often we take our eye off the ball with students and achievement and get ensnared – in that case – in criminal activity, when we really need to stay focused on the mission. So I think it’s a good news story that bad things can happen and the business community can stay engaged and do good things.

DM: Is there a way to keep standards without incentivizing cheating?

Spellings: Accountability and assessment is a way of life. We need to isolate and attend to and be very vigorous in the way we treat cheating and scandal as we do kind of generally. But to say that we’re not going to have assessment anymore, we’re going to go back to the days of not caring enough to find out would be a very, very wrong direction in my view.

DM: So you still see national standards as a part of the future?

Spellings: Standards, accountability, transparency, absolutely.  And when there are bad actors we ought to call them out, but we shouldn’t get rid of assessment.

DM: Does that fit in with your vision of more power at the local level?

Spellings: Absolutely. In the business community we want people who are capable of making it to the workplace. We are more concerned with the product and the outcome. The only way we’re going to know if we’re successful is if we have strong accountability. All the how-to that gets done at the local level, how teachers get paid, how they’re allocated, what the pension plan looks like, what the bus routes are, what the role of technology is and on and on. Those are all appropriate decisions for local policymakers. We in the business community — how are the kids doing, period.

–From Maureen Downey, for the AJC Get Schooled blog

To read the full interview in the AJC, click here.

May 8, 2012

Policymakers on both sides of the aisle are taking to the airwaves, urging a return to local control of education. Some have even suggested that No Child Left Behind (NCLB) ushered in a “one size fits all” approach to education with little or no flexibility.

In fact, states have had all the authority to set their own academic standards, design their own tests aligned to those standards and to intervene when schools have shown consistent inability to educate children accordingly.

To read the full article in The Hill, click here.

Hear speakers including former Secretary of Education, Margaret Spellings; Journalist, Author, and Political Analyst, Juan Williams; and Co-founder of Bellwether Education Partners, Andrew Rotherham discuss how business engagement in school boards helps drive education reform.

For more information and to register for the event, click here.

To read the full article in the New York Times, click here.

For more information on CFR and to view the transcript from this discussion, click here.

April 3, 2012

Over the course of my career – particularly on the campaign trail and serving at senior levels in the government – I’ve heard a lot about women in politics breaking through that proverbial glass ceiling. Today, I’d like to see more professional women break through the board room doors and serve in top executive ranks at much higher rates than we are currently seeing.

Are we making progress in closing the gender gap in business? The short answer is yes. Department of Education data for 2009, the most recent statistics available, show that 57 percent of bachelor’s degrees, 60 percent of master’s degrees and 52 percent of doctorate degrees were earned by female students. Women comprise half of the work force, and women are advancing to higher levels in business in greater numbers than ever before. Women’s salaries are largely keeping pace with – and in a few cases exceeding – those of their male peers.

To read the full article in the Houston Chronicle, click here.

For more information about the event, click here.

For Immediate Release

March 15, 2012

EDUCATION AND TECHNOLOGY ADVOCATES ANNOUNCE THE “LEADING EDUCATION BY ADVANCING DIGITAL” (LEAD) COMMISSION, ORGANIZED TO ADVANCE THE NATION’S TRANSITION TO DIGITAL LEARNING

Columbia University President Lee C. Bollinger; Co-Founder of TPG Capital James Coulter; Former Secretary of Education Margaret Spellings and Common Sense Media Founder and CEO James Steyer Named LEAD Commission Co-Chairs 

FCC Chairman Julius Genachowski and Department of Education Secretary

Arne Duncan Support and Will Provide Input on Effort to Advance Digital Learning

Washington, D.C. – Today, answering a challenge from the Federal Communications Commission and the U.S. Department of Education, experts on education and technology announced the Leading Education by Advancing Digital (LEAD) Commission. The Commission will develop a blueprint detailing the opportunity for using technology as a catalyst to transform and improve American education. The LEAD Commission will be Co-Chaired by Columbia University President Lee Bollinger; Co-Founder of TPG Capital James Coulter; former Secretary of Education Margaret Spellings; and Common Sense Media Founder and CEO James Steyer, with the support of the FCC and the Department of Education. The LEAD Commission will incorporate input from a cross-section of teachers, parents, local government officials, school officials, students and education technology industry leaders and expects to release its findings and a blueprint for action in late 2012.

FCC Chairman Julius Genachowski and U.S. Department of Education Secretary Arne Duncan announced their support for the organization and will provide input to the LEAD Commission’s efforts.

FCC Chairman Genachowski said, “I’m pleased these leaders are rising to the challenge Secretary Duncan and I set out to harness technology to help our students reach their full potential. I’m confident the LEAD Commission’s blueprint will chart a course to ensure that education technology will help prepare students to compete in the 21st century global economy.”

Education Secretary Duncan said recently, “It’s no exaggeration to say that technology is the new platform for learning. Technology isn’t an option that schools may or may not choose for their kids. Technological competency is a requirement for entry into the global economy – and the faster we embrace it – the more we maintain and secure our economic leadership in the 21st century.”

Building on the National Education Technology Plan released by the US Department of Education in November 2010 and the National Broadband Plan released by the FCC in March 2010, the Commission has several primary goals. For one, it will develop a fact base of current efforts, key trends, cost implications and obstacles to adoption of existing technologies. It will also examine how technology has been a catalyst for improvement in other sectors and what that implies for how technology and digital content could positively impact teaching and learning over time. Finally, the Commission will recommend the types of policies and funding vehicles that may be needed to ensure that school systems can successfully incorporate technology.

Columbia President Lee C. Bollinger said, “America’s colleges and universities have a very significant interest in ensuring that young people graduate from high school with the rigorous skills that prepare them to thrive in higher education and beyond. While the human interaction of student and teacher, critical thinking and classic texts remain essential parts of what we mean by an ‘education,’ we also know that new communications technologies can greatly enhance teaching, learning and research. We hope that our growing body of experience in the use of these transformational tools in higher education can provide useful insights for our nation’s schools.”

James Coulter, Co-Founder of TPG Capital said, “Extraordinary technological innovation in education is already happening at the grass roots level. Just as technology has influenced other knowledge and content industries, technology can affect how well we educate our children. Our goal with this commission is to help policy makers to more swiftly and effectively integrate digital learning into our national curriculum.”

Former Secretary of Education Margaret Spellings said, “Technology has transformed so much of our lives, but our schools are not yet leveraging technology to the fullest extent. In order to truly close the achievement gap and impact teaching and learning, we must better use technology to customize instruction, improve the use of student data and deliver content in new and interesting ways.”

James Steyer, Founder and CEO of Common Sense Media said, “It is no secret that our education system desperately needs fundamental reform. The great news is that technology provides us with an opportunity to leapfrog decades of simply maintaining the status quo and to truly revolutionize education in this country quickly, which is exactly what’s needed to remain economically competitive in today’s global economy. By bringing together stakeholders who want to get this right, we have an enormous opportunity to reshape education for the 21^st century in America.”

For more information on the LEAD Commission, visit www.leadcommission.org.