Abdul posted a question for discussion: “when schools fail, whose fault is it?” My comment in response was, as usual, mostly glib and only partially informed. Which, of course, makes it perfect for a blog post.
It’s a cascading failure.
There is a chicken & egg dynamic, but let’s say it starts with a chaotic, unstructured home life.
There isn’t a parent to stay home with the child either because both parents are working, unwed mother, divorce or some combination thereof. Often, I suspect, the time the parent is able to spend with the child lacks disciplinary and educational value because of lack of time, lack of energy, lack of inclination, or some combination thereof.
This leads to kids arriving at school unruly and uneducated. Throw in a smattering of kids who maybe don’t understand English too well in the first place for good measure. The more of these kids you have, the smaller the class sizes need to be for teachers to deal with them. But resources tend to be lowest in areas where these problems are the worst. And, these areas are probably where you need the most talented teachers, but the most talented teachers are likely to go where the pay is better and the work is easier.
Layer the whole thing with stubborn teachers unions who are dug in to resist ideological union busting (and therefore, not very responsive to legitimate needs for change); bureaucratic stagnation and maybe even a little corruption at the administrative level; tax payers with unrealistic expectations; and lawmakers who like to make education a political football, and you have something really special.
First, I think the most compelling evidence for the failure of public education is the facility with which its products can be convinced that public education is failing on the basis of little or no concrete evidence (and that generally suspect, like test scores, or manipulated for partisan reasons, like cost per student).
Take the commenter ahead of you:
Since increased funding has never improved test scores, we know money isn’t the issue
Three contentions–no, declarations–zero facts. And, gee whiz, leading to the conclusion that we don’t need to spend the money (in “poor” districts) to implement our demands for improvement, or to provide equal opportunity in the classroom. Just bust teachers’ unions. Since that’s what we “can” do.
My wife rescues library books her school is decommissioning. Last spring she found one stamped “Harry E. Wood High School”, which she wasn’t familiar with. All I remembered was that it was an IPS school, vocational training, I thought, which was among the first ones closed when IPS started downsizing in the 70s. While she was researching it she found newspaper articles from the mid-50s which put the IPS graduation rate at 48-49%.
I can’t speak for the methodology, and, yes, it was a different era, but do the increased technical requirements of the job market make people more inherently smart, or more inherently stupid, fifty years later? Were the benefits of a high-school diploma, or a college education, any less in those days? The one thing I can say for certain about it is that at the time no one was screaming that unless test scores and graduation rates improved we should take all the experienced teachers out and shoot them.
So I’d rephrase the question: show me how we can know a school is “failing”; show me the standards we ought to adapt; show me the evidence that the best teachers work in the wealthiest districts; show me an example or two of a teachers’ union resisting legitimate demands for change. In return I’ll give you five examples of agenda-driven yo-yoing “reforms” damaging the real work of public education.
Doug, careful there!
Whatever you do, you shouldn’t blame a government-run entity with significant monopoly power or a labor-market cartel…
How do we know a school is failing? Really? How do we know a school is excelling? People who argue that nothing can be done until something can be “proven” are assured in one thing: nothing will get done.
What standards ought we to adopt? Again… people like this don’t really care. For every suggestion, there is going to be a political bias attached to it. Pro-voucher people are called anti-union or pro taxpayer supported religious instruction nuts. Union teachers (education innovators of the century to be sure) are going to be labeled protectionist and secular humanistic ideologues. As long as nothing truly innovative gets done, everyone’s happy with the status quo. Meanwhile… some kids are rebelling against the status quo to the point of violence. Something’s got to give.
Here’s a suggestion: One thing… repeal the compulsory attendance laws in every state. Hell… just try a few counties in each state. See what happens. I suspect that the MINORITY of parents you describe above, will still hold education in contempt, still not discipline their children, will still not care if their children are illiterate, and will only consider “schooling” for their children if it is free (to them) and not too much hassle. These parents will continue to send their young criminals to the government schools. These schools will get worse until they resemble prisons more than they already do.
The 98% of the rest of the good and decent parents will find a way to make sure their children will get an education. They will drift to the better schools, and find a way to pay for them. Costs will go down as more customers flood the market. Public schools will close as they lose more and more “customers” that were once mandatory attendees. Private, non-profit and for profit schools of all types will begin popping up. Property taxes will HAVE to come down because the schools won’t be using up as much money as they once were. (LOL! Yeah… I know. Not going to happen, but I can dream, yes?)
And all those “excellent” teachers? They will either find a private school of some sort to work for or maybe even start their own small neighborhood schools.
If the government wanted to still stay in the business of schooling (gotta admit, it’s a 400 BILLION dollar business!!) then they can open up Welfare Schools. Something like a cross between an out patient orphanage and a boarding school. I would be more willing as a taxpayer to support something like that, than the bloated, inefficient, corrupt, institutions they call schools today. Heck, we’re doing much of the parenting and raising in our gov. schools now anyway. Three meals and after school activities… all we need now are cots.
Public schools as we know them will ONLY work well and be excellent when the people who use them, PAY FOR THEM. Plain and simple. It’s not “reform” it’s economics and the difference between the Capitalistic and Socialistic methods. Where am I wrong?