News Journal: Focus on improving education system

Hard to believe where a minority of house members are taking the country.

A few years ago, I spent a couple of weeks traveling around Delaware asking professional educators what we could do to improve our K-12 schools. I learned a lot from a number of people, but what I was told by the principal of a middle school in suburban New Castle County really struck home and stayed with me.

He was a veteran –a man who had devoted his life to teaching and school administration and was in his last year before retirement. He told me that year after year, from the time school started in the fall until in ended in the spring; most of his time was spent on working on student problems that had nothing to do with what happened within the walls of the school. His greatest challenge, he said, was to do whatever he could to make sure the environment for his students outside of school didn’t completely shut out their chances to succeed in it.

Ever since that meeting, I have kept that challenge in mind when looking at proposals to improve our education system. What are we doing to make sure students are ready to learn when they show up at school?

Last year, when I was co-chair of Delaware’s Science Technology Engineering and Math Education Council, we spent a lot of time interviewing experts and looking for innovative ways to promote STEM education at all levels. I remember one brainstorming meeting where a non-teacher suggested, quite reasonably I thought, that guidance counselors in all of our schools be given a presentation on the importance of STEM. Much to her surprise and mine, the teachers on the council started laughing. Do you have any idea, they asked, how few counselors there are in our schools? Do you know how horrendously high the student to counselor ratio is? They all had stories to tell about counselors working long hours but still not having time to help students with college applications, let alone offering help with more difficult outside-school problems.

I have another memory about school counselors that made a lasting impression.

A few summers ago, my wife and I were hiking out West with a guide who spent the school year as a counselor at a school on an Indian reservation.

She told us every year there were a significant number of students who had all the symptoms of attention deficit hyperactivity disorder. Many mothers on the reservation were alcoholics; drinking during their pregnancies caused a physiological condition in their children that mimicked ADHD.

In too many schools in this country, these kids would have been considered having disciplinary problems and would probably end up out of school and on the streets. But our guide told a happier story. Because oil had been discovered on their land, the tribe was financially secure and able to afford to staff her school with competent counselors as well as a medical staff. The combination worked wonders, she said. Nearly all of the affected students had their problems resolved and succeeded in school.

What if these kids went to school in districts that had cut back on guidance counselors for budgetary reasons, the norm now in schools throughout the country? In fact, in some of our major cities, including Philadelphia, budget cuts have been so deep that counselors have essentially been eliminated this school year.

It is a disturbing trend. I am now aware of numerous studies that confirm what that veteran principal told me years ago. Schools can’t educate kids whose lives outside of school make learning difficult if not impossible. Nor can you combat things like bullying or truancy without spending the money on school professionals who are trained to deal with such things.

With all the cuts in school budgets, with all the painful and often painfully stupid cuts caused by the federal sequester, making a case for funding more guidance counselors might seem like a small thing. But I chose to write about it for precisely that reason.

It is just one of many examples of how we are being penny wise and pound foolish, sacrificing our future by not investing wisely today.

If you think this is just about altruism, think again. In a world becoming more connected and competitive every day, the only way the United States will prosper in the future is to make certain our children have the education to meet its challenges.

Ted Kaufman is a former U.S. Senator from Delaware.