CHAUTAUQUA - Speaking about education reform is a hard thing to do without being gloomy, said Mark Roosevelt to a Chautauqua Institution audience.
Roosevelt, in his lecture Friday, managed however, to weave humor and truth together to make a compelling argument in the education reform issue. After hearing many of the speakers this week, he said he would try to not reiterate many of the points they had made.
"I feel like Elizabeth Taylor's seventh husband," he said. "I know exactly what to do, just not how to make it interesting."
The truth of the matter is not pretty, he said.
"My generation is the first generation to be worse off than our parents," he said.
He described the "it takes a village" argument, saying he believes this is true; therefore all the blame cannot be put on teachers, administrators or unions alone.
"We are all responsible for what is happening," he said. "We are not raising our children the way they need to be raised."
Roosevelt shared his experience in the Pittsburgh school system, and how as superintendent he was trying to change that system. Being in Pittsburgh, the school system must tackle many hardships such as economic disparity, he said.
"The things in our culture that can drive children down away from where they need to be are so powerful," he said.
In order to inspire the reform that is needed, the American public must know what is going on and become involved, he said.
"Most of America does not know how big this problem is," he said. "You can't solve a problem if you don't know it exists."
Roosevelt spoke about the achievement gap, and how we focus on this as the main issue. Roosevelt reiterated that this is a very important issue, but is part of a larger problem.
"If we remove the African-American and Latino children from the equation, our highest achieving children are still in the middle of the pack," he said. "And our African-American and Latino children are second to last in the world. It is very important to recognize we have achievement gaps in this country, but we can't let that obscure the fact that most children are not getting the education they need."
In order to change the educational system, we need to recognize academic achievement, and inspire national standards, he said.
"If you want to make change in the educational system, you have to think about 15,274 school board agendas," he said. "We need to work together if we are ever going to make this change. There is truth in a lot of people's views, but there is no simple truth, no simple answer."
Roosevelt said that there are many reasons to be optimistic, however. Some schools have started to become nuclei of innovation, there are signs on non-partisanship on the issue, and the history of our country shows that when we recognize a big problem we can do something about it.
"We need a Marshall Plan for public education in America," he said.