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Teachers heard some crucial education advice MARK GUYDISH OPINION

Saturday October 18, 2008 | 08:48 AM

There was a lot more to Willard Daggett’s speech to local educators last week at the Wachovia Arena than I could hope to fit into the story that ran a week ago today. The man was alternately witty and erudite, scolding and scholarly. At times he treated the teachers like school students, routinely prodding them to answer questions in unison by asking something like “and what do we know about that, class?”

The president of the International Center for Leadership in Education tossed verbal bons mots like candy to trick-or-treaters, sometimes restating well-documented research (usually in a new or personal way), sometimes offering the unexpected. Daggett drew heavily from experience with his own children, noting his eldest was highly gifted, while another “loved to go to school, he just never went to any classes. He’s been to seven colleges in six years and never got a degree.”

Pointing out the obvious -- that knowledge is useless if students don’t learn to apply it in the real world, both in predictable and unpredictable situations -- he argued that Pennsylvania schools are not doing that job. “Our kids don’t know what to do when they don’t know what to do.”

One of the funniest moments came when he ran a short film of two people getting stuck on an escalator. Rather than just walking up they stood comically punching numbers on their cell phone and shouting for help. “How many of you know someone you work with who is like that?” he quipped. “Point to them.”

He also got some in the crowd going when, with a straight face, he said he was going to pick 25 people and send them to a room in the back where they would take high school tests. “And tomorrow we’ll release your results to the media.” When he asked if the majority of the crowd would prefer he test administrators, Dallas Superintendent Frank Galicki visibly cringed a bit.

I’m not sure if the crowd laughed or sighed in relief more when he said he was kidding.

Speaker: U.S. schools must adapt

While Daggett praised public schools in general as “good,” he added that “it’s hard to get from good to great,” simply because people become comfortable. “Good is the enemy of great.”

Though the Pennsylvania System of School Assessment tests are “good for what state tests can measure,” he said what they measure is “basic knowledge that is essential but not adequate.” The goal, he stressed throughout the talk, is to prepare kids for jobs that allow the country to compete effectively in the global economy. His statistics on this were staggering.

China has become the largest buyer of U.S. Treasury bonds and stocks. It is essentially loaning billions to the U.S. and Daggett recounted one conversation with a Chinese gentleman who warned “this is not a gift, this is a loan, and we fully intend to collect.”

He also noted that China exports more in one day now than it did in all of 1978, while the U.S. has become “a nation of shoppers. You don’t build a national economy on shopping. You build a national economy on value-added work, on manufacturing.”

When he asked the crowd how many used e-mail in the last 72 hours, nearly everyone raised a hand. Statistics show most adults use it very often, something only about 14 percent of teens say they do, preferring text messaging. “You are pretending to prepare your kids for a world you don’t even live in,” he told the teachers.

The broad-ranging talk may have been lightened with wit, but it bore a heavy message: American schools must change, or the entire country will be left in the dust like other great powers now fading into history.

About the Author

Mark Guydish covers education for the Times Leader. Reach him at (570) 970-7161 or mguydish@timesleader.com.

A West Hazleton native, I worked as a service technician repairing electronic mailing and shipping systems, a bike shop owner and an Emergency Medical Technician (among other jobs) before landing a reporter job at the Times Leader Hazleton Bureau in 1995. I started by covering primarily politics in Hazleton City and outlying municipalities, eventually became "social issues" team leader in the Wilkes-Barre office with the accent on education, and headed the Hazleton Bureau for a spell before returning to full-time reporting, my preferred position. I'm an avid cyclist and rode across the country in 1990, a trip of more than 5,000 miles from New Jersey to Seattle and down the coast to San Francisco. Years in the Boy Scouts made me a life long backpacker and camper, and I've yet to find a better way to enjoy the quiet lure of winter snow than cross country skiing.

Mark also writes a regular blog for timesleader.com.