Reform and Transformation: Highlights From U.S. Education Secretary’s Recent Interview on National Public Radio

Will Reading First be revamped? Will there be greater flexibility within NCLB for students with special needs? Will there be additional funding to support teachers attaining “highly qualified” status? Answers to these questions have a direct impact on education companies’ plans for sales, marketing, product development, and more. Here, MDR summarizes a recent National Public Radio interview with U.S. Secretary of Education Margaret Spellings on the program Talk of the Nation. In addition to discussing the Department’s recently convened Commission on Higher Education (covered in the September 2006 edition of MDR’s MARKETreach), Secretary Spellings addressed a broad range of issues surrounding reform and transformation in the nation’s K-12 schools. 

Secretary Spellings noted that because of the detailed achievement data emerging from the reporting requirements of NCLB, many districts have begun to reallocate personnel, working to place the most effective, most senior, and highest-paid faculty members into school sites experiencing the greatest achievement challenges. For marketers, this may signal renewed opportunities to sell intervention and professional development resources to under-performing schools and districts.

When asked about the recent controversies surrounding the allocation of funds from the Reading First program, Secretary Spellings reinforced the program’s fundamental value and its positive impacts on reaching achievement over the past five years.

She noted that the Department has embraced the Inspector General’s recommendations regarding  the integrity of the processes involved in determining funding grants. Further, the Secretary noted that her office is reviewing all 50 states’ Reading First plans to make certain that states are implementing quality programs that comply with the requirement of a research basis and align with the recommendations of the National Reading Panel. For publishers, this is a clear signal that the need to support each product and solution with research will not change in the next two years.

Revisiting How America’s Schools Serve Students With Special Needs

During the radio interview, Spellings responded to a question about how No Child Left Behind is addressing the needs of students with special needs. Secretary Spellings noted that recent research indicates that approximately three percent (up from a previous estimate of one percent) of the nation’s students fall outside NCLB’s requirements due to their special needs. She also stated that, “…we ought to--with that additional two percent – allow them to take more time, use different instructional strategies, different assessment strategies, and be more sophisticated with approaches that we bring to bear with these young people.” Here, education marketers may have the opportunity to embed additional core and assessment content into existing products to help educators improve achievement levels for students with special needs.

During the hour-long interview, Secretary Spellings also briefly spoke about the upcoming reauthorization of NCLB, noting that in its next iteration the Department will begin to tackle personnel issues in the nation’s schools--digging deeper into the issues of teacher efficacy, achievement results, and the deployment of personnel to address specific needs within classrooms. For marketers and product developers, the signs here are clearly pointing to an increased emphasis on professional development, both in the content areas and in the areas of instructional strategies and methodologies.

A complete transcript of the interview is available for purchase at http://www.npr.org/transcripts/.