Thought I’d raise this up from the comments to the front page because it’s a worthy discussion. In the topic Masson’s Blog: House Action on Various Bills, Matt posed the following question:
Do you ever get the sense that all of these types of bills really do nothing long term? Shouldn’t every school system get the same per pupil funding and if pupils are still failing, shouldn’t we get new administrators or teachers? The lack of accountibility in the school system is quite scary.
My response:
Well, my primary perspective is that of a husband to a teacher. But, it seems that most teachers really just want to teach. Often they find themselves wading in a sea of red tape trying to get anything done (think Office Space when the main character gets hassled by 5 different supervisors for failing to use the new cover sheet on the TPS report.)
Then you have the problem of having few real remedies to get the bad apples out of their classrooms. But, no legislator is eager to pass legislation that comes down hard on indifferent parents. Of course, a lot of parents aren’t indifferent, they just have to work eleventy million hours to pay for gas and electricity. (You can’t afford a Wal-mart lifestyle on just a Wal-mart salary.)
Then you have what I call the student subsidy issue. Currently, as a society, we’ve mostly decided that even hard to educate children should get a basic education. But, we tend to fund schools on a per pupil basis. The problem is that students are not widgets and some students are a lot more difficult to educate. In fact, their very presence in the classroom makes the rest of the class more difficult to educate. Our current system doesn’t account for that very well, and a voucher system that doesn’t take this fact into consideration will make things even worse. You can pretty much bet that the families on the ball enough to take advantage of vouchers won’t be the ones with problem children. So, the easily educated students –who are the ones subsidizing the difficult students — pack up and move to a better school. The better schools get better and the worse schools get worse, and it won’t have much at all to do with the teaching. Seems to me, if we’re going to throw the hard to educate children to the wolves, we might as well be explicit about it. Let the public schools kick them out, then I’ll bet you those public schools improve without the need for vouchers.
Finally, I get the feeling that teachers need a better way to apply pressure to school administrators. My experience with school administrators is that they tend not to be very responsive to teachers or to educational needs. They tend to be good at placating noisy parents and tinkering with what an old boss called “the indicia of productivity.” In other words, they can improve test scores and statistics without doing much to improve the actual education. (They are also more apt to hassle a teacher about the new cover sheet for the TPS report than to enquire about little Jimmy’s difficulty with fractions.)
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