Nikki Kelly has an article in the Journal Gazette contrasting some of Gov. Daniels education priorities with a recent poll on the public’s preferences for education.
Much as I like needling Gov. Daniels, I’m also skeptical of the value of polls on people’s policy preferences. People who are smart enough in their own areas of expertise don’t necessarily have the time or inclination to be informed on details of government policy.
But, for whatever it’s worth, people favor financing struggling schools more generously than those with rapid population growth. Gov. Daniels goes the opposite direction. Coincidentally, I’m sure, older schools with more challenging student populations tend to be in areas that are more likely to vote for the Democrats. Schools in high growth areas tend to have more children of affluent people who are more likely to vote for Gov. Daniels.
People think parental involvement is more important than changes like paying teachers more. Gov. Daniels says you can’t mandate parental involvement. He’s mostly right with that, but I’d say policies he favors that put downward pressure on wages contribute to the lack of parental involvement. It’s simply tougher for parents to be involved where you need two incomes to support the family instead of being able to have one parent at home.
The last item said that the public favors, by a 2-to-1 margin, supporting current schools rather than creating more charter schools. I tend to chalk up continued support for charter schools – in the face of evidence that, on the whole, they don’t perform notably better than traditional schools – to a love of union busting.
A poll doesn’t mean much, and all polls suffer from language bias, Expected Answer Syndrome, and the question of expertise vs. popular sentiment. (Nowhere more so than with education, where the popular notion that other people’s schools are failing runs counter to actual test results.)
But this pretty much reflects what the public has been saying about education for some time: it thinks Schools are failing, but its own school does a good job; it thinks its child’s teacher is caring, hard-working, and under-appreciated; it believes, sensibly, that education is a top priority, and that you don’t solve problems by slashing budgets.
Unfortunately, the argument was hijacked in 1956, and we may never recover. It was sad to see professional serial prevaricator Michelle Rhee on Colbert the other night, spewing her usual nonsense and outright lies (the much-bruited bullshit about the US “ranking 25th in the world”, which isn’t an accurate parse of the PISA tests even if they were somehow a measure of international competition) which Stephen, somehow, hadn’t bothered to prepare for.
A very learned interpretation of the public opinion not being represented well by mitch and an excellent response by DR. Netiher mitch nor his allies like Rhee offer a fact based argument that represents what the parents and voters want. They are just public shills for their corporate backers who want to get their hands on those education dollars and who want to kill off the teachers unions. Rmember, mitch and tony and the ed reformers are not against teachers, why they are for making it better for teachers by increasing pay for “quality” teachers and by getting rid of the bad teachers. And of course they want to get rid of that evil union, which, of course, is made up of teachers.
Indiana students in grade 4 and 8 outperformed all but 8 countries on TIMSS and TIMSS repeat in math and science. These were japan and other countries where education is highly selective and not all citizens are welcome to attend (special ed students are not included elsewhere, but are here). Our leadership forgets this and repeats the rhee crap on PISA which is not accurate.
While I am second to no one in my love of union busting, the support for charter schools in my area is completely among the denziens of the inner city, who are desperate to get their kids into a decent school.
If you lived in Gary, for example, how would you like to have to send your kid to this school? A school so bad that the cops are afraid to go there?
I took my kid to a chess competition yesterday, and the charter schools were very well represented. There were a couple from Hammond and one from Gary, and their kids did very well.
My kid was in a Lego League competition a couple of weeks ago, and the charter schools were also very well represented.
It seems to me that allowing people from the ‘hood access to a good education would be a liberal thing. I really can’t understand why a self described liberal would admit to putting unions before kids, especially when it doesn’t cost anybody anything to do so.
As someone who is involved with schools, and not particularly a big union guy, I have some issues with supporting charter schools at the same levels of funding as traditionalmpublic schools.
I know charter schools in Indianapolis do not provide the services they are required to by law, especially to kids with special needs and physical impairments. They also don’t have the same reporting requirements.
If we want to support charter schools make them play by the same rules. A traditional public school would be sued in to the stone age if they told a special needs kidnthat they don’t over services for them, but I know there are numerous charter schools who do just that.
There are so,e very practical solutions that aren’t tomone extreme or the other.
1 free public schools from the meaningless reports that dominate their time. Many schools have 1 or 2 people who collect data and file reports with the state and about 90%of those reports are never looked at again
2 either eliminate collective bargaining or at least refocus it on actual wage and wage related benefits. No more discussions about room temperature, the wallpaper in the faculty lunch room or the permissibility of flip-flops as teacher footwear. In doing this, trash experience based pay scales and seniority based job cuts and allow proper evaluations and the ability to remove teachers without a 2 year process. Did you know that simply having a certification on your license for a subject area guarantees that you can bump younger teachers even if you have NEVER actually taught that subject?
3 while not neccessarily a state issue, find some way to uncouple sports from schools. Won’t be popular but it will refoucs the intent of schools.
4 find some way to overcome the parental disconnect that cripples so many students ability to be successful.
Do some of these things and the overall system gets better.
Sorry about the typos in the last post, posting from my mobile.
Paddy, I could agree with every single one of your suggestions for public schools… and still support charter schools.
What I dislike about public schools is how one size fits all they are. Charter schools at least offer the possibility of a more student (or parents) focused… focus?
I also dislike the concept and history of public schools. They came in to existence at least in part to indoctrinate Catholics (and others) in the bland, Protestant, Progressive culture that intellectuals of the late 19th century thought was at risk. In more recent times, public schools have been infected with political correctness.
Buzz,
Everything has good and bad to it, but I would suggest that you seek out people in your local school and really talk to them. Come in positive, be constructive with criticism and they will listen. At a time when they feel attack from every angle they do have a tendency to shut down. It is simply human nature.
I realize this isn’t the current message, but 99% of teachers, administrators and school support staff are there because they want to do the right thing for kids.
buzz, it is nice that charters are well represented in these activities, but how are they doing in teaching students the basics and the material required by the state standards? I know some of these charter operations, and they are not as good as represented. I have been in many of the Gary schools. How did the Gary community let this happen to their public schools? Well, the white folk moved away and left the poor behind to rot. Simple as that. The parents who think their choice is between charters and public schools are not making the choice based on education but on small classes and secure schools. Why cannot the Gary community provide that for the public schools? Because community leaders do not care. The money is to be made funding the charters and trying to get vouchers for the private catholic schools. Charters are just a distraction to keep some minority parents happy and cause problems for schools while the gov and tony move to close them down and bust the teacher union.
Akla, again, I could agree with all your assertions and still support charter schools.
A typical liberal idea is that, “it’s the system, man!”. Sure, we could get to “the root cause” of why Gary schools are so bad. But I doubt that you could get widespread agreement as to what those “root causes” really are, and I don’t think that we could really do anything about them anyway.
Or we could acknowledge that, for example, the white flight train has left the station, those people are never coming back, the governance issues in Gary are never going to be solved by outsiders or even the minority of concerned citizens, and just go with charters because they are easier to implement. They give the few involved parents who actually care about their kids a way out.
As for the performance of charter schools on standardized tests, and sending my kids to Munster public schools (which are well funded, well run, and populated with well educated, competitive parents who care about their kids education, yet are still not making “adequate yearly progress”), I think that we all can agree that some of these rankings leave a little to be desired.
And really, charter school are more about catering to the wants of students and parents and less about doing well on standardized test scores. There’s nothing wrong with that, in fact in a free market that is exactly what schools would be doing.
Paddy, one disaffected parent has very little influence over what goes on in these large school districts, and has almost no ability to even direct what happens to their own kids.
Let me give you one example of what I’m talking about.
Up until last year, Munster schools posted the class lists on the front doors of the schools a couple days before school started. It was like a big festival, everybody coming down to the school to see what classes their kids were in, what classes their friends were in, etc. It was kind of cool, I thought.
Well, the nanny-state folks put a stop to that. Wouldn’t want a “sexual predator” or whatever to know the names of the kids in the school, or what classes they were in, or whatever. So Munster used its new online grading system to send out a message to parents telling them what class their kids were in.
But what was lost was knowing who else was in your kid’s class, what classes their friends were in, and just the festive atmosphere outside the school when the class lists were posted.
Now, what parent is going to risk the wrath of the nanny-ites to say that the risk of “sexual predators” getting your kid’s name off a posted class list is nil? I’m certainly not going to make that argument before a school board meeting, and I don’t think my doing so would influence them anyway.
Okay, this is a pretty trivial thing in the grand scheme of things, but the idea that teachers and administrators want to “do the right thing” (which I am sure is true) doesn’t change the fact that charter schools offer a lot more choice to students and parents. Large, centralized public schools are never going to be all things to all people. But a smorgasbord of charter schools might.
Actually, that is a perfect example of one disaffected parent being listened to.
Chances are it was one or maybe 2-3 parents who went to the principal and said something about the predator issue.
Paddy, you may be right, or it just may reflect our insane culture that is afraid of the “sexual predator” boogeyman. I’m not sure that it was done in response to parental feedback, but I don’t believe that it was. I think that it was in response to the abilities of our new software, and perhaps justified with the boogeyman argument.
Heck, anymore, it might be the result of the state deciding to make a new rule for schools to comply with. Of course they would also include 7 reports in order to make it official.