As the year draws to a close, newspapers, magazines and blogs are filled with best of andworst of lists that deal with everything imaginable. The Hoover Institution’s Koret Task Force got on the bandwagon early and posted Best and Worst in American Education, 2011 in November. All solid stuff. Can a reformer not be happy about the Parent Trigger being raked over the coals, yet surviving, or that many of Michelle Rhee’s reforms are still in place despite leaving her post as D.C. Schools Chancellor after a major push from the American Federation of Teachers? On the worst list, the Task Force includes the Atlanta teacher cheating scandal and the union-orchestrated overturn of Ohio’s recent anti-collective bargaining law.
Then lo and behold, we received a dispatch from Planet Ravitch on December 23rd. (Most people are not aware that shortly after astronomers ruled that Pluto was not a planet in 2006, a new planet would be identified. And it is inhabited!) The people who live on this celestial body (named after Diane Ravitch, a former reformer who turned into a champion of the failing status quo) are afflicted with a dyslexic-like condition: they have the entire education reform picture exactly backwards. The way to true reform is to hold their ideas up to a mirror with the resulting image revealing the best way to proceed.
Washington Post education “reporter” and blogger Valerie Strauss, whom Whitney Tilson rightfully refers to as Diane Ravitch’s mouthpiece, gave over her space last week to fellow Ravitchian Richard Kahlenberg. According to his bio, he is, among other things,
“…an authority on teachers’ unions, private school vouchers, charter schools, turnaround school efforts, and inequality in higher education.”
An authority on teachers unions? Maybe on Planet Ravitch, but he made a bad mistake when in Education Next he engaged especially wise earthling Jay Greene on unions and collective bargaining.
As you would expect, Kahlenberg gets everything backwards in his post. On his worst of list, he accused Terry Moe, author of Special Interest, a brilliant study of the teachers unions, of making “little sense.” (Kahlenberg apparently can’t tell the difference between a teacher and a teachers union.) Additionally, he is dismayed over the proliferation of charter schools because, according to his cherry picked data, most are mediocre. He fails to mention that charter schools have been the saving grace for many inner city kids who have escaped from the union dominated zip code schools they had been forced to attend. While proclaiming to have children’s best interests at heart, he is clearly more concerned that “some charter schools…save money by offering teachers no pensions whatsoever.”
On the plus side, Kahlenberg – surprise! – likes the teachers unions. For example, he writes,
“…the very positive role they can play on national policy was underlined in December, when the National Education Association announced an effort to establish 100 new peer assistance and review programs to better train and, if necessary, weed out ineffective teachers.”
The only problem is that peer assistance programs have been a flop wherever they have been tried. And NEA’s weeding process does not stand much of a chance of seeing the light of day because for it to work at all, it will have to be implemented by union locals. It’s hard to imagine local union bosses talking this one up to the rank and file.
Not surprisingly, Kahlenberg is a fan of collective bargaining, which may benefit mediocre and poor teachers but does very little for the good ones. Moreover, it has been damaging the education process (and therefore children) for about a half-century now. Collective bargaining agreements are nothing more than a top down, collectivist way to ensure that teachers have to do the least amount of work in idealized working conditions with no accountability for the most money. As Jay Greene states,
“Until the ability of teachers unions to engage in collective bargaining is restrained, we should expect unions to continue to use it to advance the interests of their adult members over those of children, their families, and taxpayers.”
In any event, the good news as we look toward 2012 is that for Kahlenberg, Strauss, Ravitch and their fellow aliens, their day has come and gone. We live in a time when change is happening. In July, due to major reform efforts in statehouses all over the country, the Wall Street Journal proclaimed 2011 The Year of School Choice. As Bob Bowdon, director of The Cartel so aptly put it,
“Large entrenched bureaucracies like public education have something in common with aircraft carriers: they never turn around quickly. What’s important is the direction they’re moving, and in this regard the education news is good. Of the 180 degree reversal that’s needed for public schools, we’ve only turned three or four degrees so far, but all the recent trends are taking us in a better direction. The turnaround has begun.”
(Larry Sand, a former classroom teacher, is the president of the non-profit California Teachers Empowerment Network – a non-partisan, non-political group dedicated to providing teachers with reliable and balanced information about professional affiliations and positions on educational issues. This story was first posted on UnionWatch.)
Painting the deck chairs after the Titanic hit the ice burg? I think so.
As long as our so called public education system is held captive by a top down political system, it will continue to sink. The forces are aligned to assure the largest possible system, spending the maximum amount of taxpayer funds, and producing the minimum possible result. This gives cause to grow still more, spend still more, and to produce an even poorer result. This is what it does, thus it is its purpose. The last thing our public education system does is produce competent, educated, productive individuals. Even then it is largely by accident.
The system cannot be fixed. It must be replaced from the bottom up and the top down. Sell it to the highest bidder and get the government out of the business of public education! We would eventually get at least ten times the education at one tenth the cost. Likely more.
Compare the computer industry with the post office over the past 60 years. Back then a computation cost billions of times more than it does today. The computer industry has produce almost more real wealth and increased productivity in that time than mankind had produced up to 1900. Sixty years ago, a postage stamp was a few cents. Today it costs over ten times as much and the post office is still bankrupt. Care to guess why? Hint: the post office had top down political control with protection from market forces and the computer industry was largely left alone to suffer the consequences of market forces.
As a teacher who spent 29 years in private industry before becoming a public school teacher, I believe that we need to see reform starting from the top administrators down. It is not just a personnel problem. It is a systemic problem. Each fall at the start of the school year, the district administrators come out with 4 to 5 new programs that the teachers are supposed to implement. without adequate training, but just to begin the educational fads of the new school year. LAUSD has spent millions implementing new curriculums, new and multiple testing programs, and new bright ideas. And that is even before these get to the classroom teachers. Teachers are told that size of class doesn’t matter. The teacher is just supposed to try harder and harder.
I am rated as one of the 100 most effective elementary school teachers out of 16,000 teachers rated.
But I am now very demoralized. I have talked to other teachers from all over the district–young and experienced. They are demoralized also. We are asked to do impossible things without adequate resource because the resources are customarily used up at the top of the administrative level, not at the school site, but at the local district and LAUSD district who are trying to meet federal guiidelines in inappropriate, “creative”, and futile ways. I worry about my country. What will it be like in 20 years if the educational system continues as it is.
The parents in our district don’t have the resources to help their children even get their homework finished and brought to school.
You have my sympathy and understanding.
I was a high school science teacher in the early 1960. It was just before the advent of federal aid to education. I loved the process of teaching but hated the administration. The superintendent of schools was a strong advocate of the NEA, unions for teachers, and federal aid to eduction. I told the superintendent that what he was advocating would be the end of any possibility of offering an actual education. He said I was wrong. We did not see eye to eye to say the least.
I left the teaching profession, worked on getting a graduate degree, and became a successful biomedical engineer, a software engineer, and then an inventor with numerous patents. I avoided having to watch from the inside the ultimate collapse of public education.
Eventually I learned that no matter how good you are nor how dedicated you are to your work, you cannot do any better than the system you are embedded in will permit. Since the purpose of the educational system is to continue and to consume ever more resources, those inside of it are bound by it and cannot actually deliver what they set out to deliver: an education.
Lionel, I appreciate your insightful comments coming thoughtfully from someone who
has actually been in the classroom. You are correct in what you say.
This is nothing new. The life of a bureaucrat is spent pushing themselves up a ladder of incompetence.
This is done by creating more, closely held, incompetent bureaucrats in charge of do nothing sub groups in administrative positions. The total government is operated in this method.
The problem is not just ‘Government Education’. The problem is the first word in the heading, GOVERNMENT!!
There is no profit motive in any government endeavor. All government employees have one thing in common and that is to become more important and in charge of more people so they can push themselves to a higher pay grade. This is their lifelong endeavor, and this is why the Government should never, ever be in charge of producing anything, especially supposedly Educated Citizens of Our Country.
If you really want to fix our school system it can be done in easy steps.
1. Stop all government influence into the system.
2. Implement a pay system that rewards competence of teachers based on outcome.
3. Get rid of the NEA and the Teachers Unions.
4. Give the teachers the authority to control their classrooms.
5. Implement a policy of zero tolerance toward unruly student activity.
6. Implement a policy of wearing Uniforms for all students.
7 Implement a policy of gender separation from grade 1-12.
Now we will have students who will come to school to study without any distractions or cliques.
Al, I agree with your list–especially #4, but all of them. They are so practical that I’m certain the bureaucrats will never let them get off the ground.
This is how you “dumb down” the kids today. you have to make them stooges for the future. How else is the “Democrat/Liberal/Socialsts/Communist” going to continue to prosper and be supported.
I’d really like to know how many people reading this have been in a classroom since they graduated from high school. Also how many of them have ever been in charge of personally teaching and managing a classroom of students as well as managing 7 to 10 different curriculums.