Here is an idea: Engineers for America. Five weeks of training and you too can design and build bridges. So what if the other engineers had years of education and practice? Experience is SO yesterday!
I mean, really, why shouldn’t young people have a chance? End LIFO in engineering! Embrace youth and enthusiasm. And good luck when you drive over a bridge!
We have had animated discussions on this blog about whether the market model works for public education, whether parents should be smart shoppers, when business practices make sense (and don’t).
I just read an interesting piece on salon.com that covers some of the same grounds but offers some useful insights about why the market model does not work for public education.
The New York City Department of Education decided a few years ago that Jamaica High School, with its grand building and long history, deserved to die. Its test scores were too low. There was no point in trying to figure out why or to offer help. And so the DOE announced that Jamaica was a failing school. Parents began to withdraw their children or to select other high schools. Enrollment fell. Many faculty, remembering better times, held on. The city was determined to close the school and replace it with small high schools and charters. It is very desirable space in the borough of Queens.
A state report was recently released that documents how a school is swiftly put to death. First, declare it to be a failing schools. Then take away the programs that attract and develop good students. In time, no one will be left who cares about what once was the school, because the school that everyone once knew is dead, even if a few classes remain.
With the heart cut out of the school, it is comforting to learn from the state report that the school continues to “use data to drive and improve instructional outcomes.”
This is the key section in the state report:
· The following findings are based on information ascertained from various stakeholders including parents, teachers, students, administrators as well as school and district documents:
o No honors or advance placement classes are offered to students o The school no longer offers calculus, chemistry or physics
o Only three electives are offered to students: Law, Accounting and
Latin American Literature. Prior to the implementation of the phase out model, elective courses offered to students were: African American Literature, Film, Geography, Forensics, Sociology, Psychology, Computer classes (Word, Excel, visual basic, PowerPoint) and Creative Writing
o Offtrack classes, which were offered to students not meeting Regents requirements, are no longer available
o Students are not able to complete specialty programs: Business, Computer Science, Engineering and Finance Institutes, or Art Institutes
o Students are not offered SAT prep courses
o Two teachers, who are not certified in special education, are
teaching students with disabilities.
· The school uses data to drive and improve instructional outcomes.
A comment by Long Island principal Carol Burris, who has written for this blog:
MY AP worked there. They started bringing over the counter registration kids into the schools, including those recently released from incarceration and still wearing restraining leg chains on their ankles.
An educator in Oregon sent the following message:
To get a waiver from NCLB the state of Oregon promised that 100% of students
will graduate from high school and 80% will complete college. I’m not sure
if this is madness or deliberate deception because the date set for reaching
these goals is 2025. By then,the governor and legislators will be long
gone, and/or the education pendulum will have swung in some other weird direction.
This is not quite right. The goals are:
100% will get a high school diploma.
And to quote one of the commenters on this post, who quotes the state’s waiver request (p. 24):
“Eighty percent must continue their education beyond high school with half of those earning associate’s degrees or professional/technical certificates, and half achieving a bachelor’s degree or higher. This goal, commonly referred to and as the 40/40/20 Goal, gives Oregon the most ambitious high school and college completion targets of any state in the country.”
A reader adds this astute observation:
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A reader explains precisely how four straight years of budget cuts have hurt his school and limited the education of its students.
As regular readers of this blog know, I do not usually print the names of commenters because teachers typically worry about reprisals, and in most cases, I don’t know the name of the person who posted the comment. But this writer signed his comment, so I’m posting his name.
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Whenever I hear a corporate reformer complaining about teachers, I will think of Laura Recco of Cleveland. And it won’t be because of her students’ test scores. It will be because she was a brave and selfless woman who gave her life to save her children.
A reader responded to a post about Michigan with the following comment.
I perked up because I was reminded of something I heard on CNN recently. Fareed Zakaria was interviewing Steven Rattner about hedge funds, equity investors, and outsourcing. Zakaria asked why so many capital investors end up sending jobs overseas, and Rattner answered very concisely. He said, and I paraphrase, “in a global economy, capital always seeks to lower costs. In a competitive marketplace, if you can’t cut costs, you go out of business. The name of the game is who can cut costs the most.”
What does this mean in an education marketplace? The school that can lower its costs the most wins. How do you lower costs? You increase class size and/or hire the least experienced, low-cost teachers.
So, the “winner” is the school with the largest class sizes and the least experienced teachers.
But these are not the factors associated with quality education. This would not describe the education at our nation’s elite schools, like Sidwell Friends, where the Obama daughters are enrolled, or at Exeter or Groton or Deerfield Academy, where so many of the corporate reformers send their children.
| Snyder’s proposal to improve education by maximizing parental choice implicitly rests on the Adam-Smith-”invisible-hand” doctrine — that is, in a free market, the sellers who offer the best product will survive while the sellers who offer inferior products will fail.However, the invisible hand only works when the market works. As commenters have noted in responses to recent posts in Diane’s blog, there are major market failures in the school-choice marketplace, particularly in the low-SES/inner-city areas.Most buyers (parents) have little/no accurate information regarding the quality of competing schools and no practical way of obtaining accurate information.Similarly, many/most buyers (parents) do not know what mix of educational services would best serve their particular children’s education needs — i.e., strict vs. relaxed discipline, whole-language vs. phonics reading instruction, 1 well-paid experienced teacher or 2 poorly-paid inexperienced teachers/class; lots of computerized instruction vs. minimal computerized instruction.For even the most concerned, well-educated parents, the school choice decision would be largely a crapshoot and would probably be driven by factors unrelated to school quality — i.e., neighborhood rumors, where the children’s friends are going, ease of transportation.And, in low-SES areas (the only areas where we’re seriously concerned that school quality is too low), many of the parents will be relatively unconcerned with the school choice decision and virtually none of the parents will be well-educated. So, the school choice decisions of most parents in these areas will be entirely a crapshoot with the result that, in these areas, there is no reason to believe that Adam Smith’s invisible hand will operate — that is, there is no reason to believe that the schools chosen by the parents will be the schools that offer the best product.
For these reasons, under Snyder’s proposal, there is a strong incentive for a school to minimize operating costs and little incentive for a school to improve instructional quality, particularly in low-SES areas. We’ll see an explosion of low-cost, low-quality for-profit schools serving the low-SES areas providing an inferior educational product while making a high profit margin. |
This is a rhetorical question. After many years studying education, I will tell you my view: Superintendents should be educators.
Superintendents should be experienced educators who understand teaching and learning, curriculum and special education. There is much more, of course, but the starting point is to understand education and students.
We are always looking wistfully to other nations and asking what they do that we don’t do.
They put their schools in the hands of educators, not businessmen or retired military or lawyers.
So what brought on this rant? Tampa is about to pick a new school superintendent and one of my friends in Florida sent this article.
One of the candidates is a faithful cog in the Bush family machine. The other is an educator. Can you guess which is which?
Joy Resmovits of the Huffington Post is quickly becoming established as among the very best education journalists in the nation.
She is thoughtful, clear, and gathers the facts judiciously.
In this article, she shows the immense damage done to children by budget cuts.
Budget cuts invariably mean laying off teachers, since teachers’ salaries are a big expense item.
Every time teachers are laid off, class sizes increase.
When class sizes increase, the remaining teachers have less time to help children who have difficulty learning, and less time for individual teaching.
The children who need help the most will suffer the most.
As states and cities “save” money by cutting the budget of schools and increasing class size, they guarantee far larger costs in the future as students arrive in the next grade in need of remediation and suffer the consequences of the cuts imposed now.
If our country doesn’t meet these issues with courage and intelligence, we will pay the bill for decades to come.
Cutting the budget for schools is the wrong way to deal with austerity.
It is time for “revenue enhancement,” the euphemism for taxes, levied on those who can best afford to pay them.
A reader in the U.K. points out that education issues in the U.S. and U.K. have evolved differently. I am not sure that other readers in the U.K. would agree. There, as here, we have debates about how to educate, what to teach, and who should be in charge. When I visited London a few years ago, I toured “city academies,” which are schools that the government “gives” to wealthy businessmen who are willing to put up about $2 million dollars to build a facility; those I saw were oriented toward vo-tech studies. That seemed to me a clear movement towards privatization.
I don’t know which country is leading and which is following, or whether neither is the right term.
The battles in the U.S. over curriculum content and pedagogy have taken a back seat to the battles over the future of public education and the survival of teaching as a profession.
I hope that other readers in the U.K. weigh in.
| As a teacher in England, I follow your blog (and read your books) with a fascination about both the similarities and differences between our education systems. Ideologically the US and England often go through similar fads and exchange thinkers all the time. The current UK government has flirted (I think that’s the best word) with the ideas of the American school reform movement. Most recently Michelle Rhee was over here promoting her own legend and being praised by ministers. However, there are differences as well as similarities.Schools are governed at different levels in our countries. In England (I am glossing over what happens in the other nations of the UK) education is controlled by the UK government, with administrative powers delegated to Local Education Authorities (now just “Local Authorities”) which are the locally elected councils covering cities, London boroughs and counties. These never had as much power as American states (teachers pay and conditions and qualifications were decided nationally) and in many ways may be more comparable to school boards in the US, but were often seen as powerful and unaccountable particularly prior to the 1980s due to the lack of autonomy in individual schools. Power has shifted significantly over the years, with the 1980s seeing an increase in both centralisation (with the setting of the national curriculum and new tests and exams and creation of OFSTED, the national schools inspectorate) and decentralised to schools (with schools being given more responsibility to run their own finances).A lot of political debate since then has centred over where power should lie. The underlying agenda of that article is about the power of local authorities and also the perception of central government (particularly under the Tories) as supporting traditional education and local government as supporting progressive education. The New Statesman magazine (along with the Guardian newspaper) is the voice of the middle-class left in England and for that reason will assume both that local authorities are good and that traditional education is bad. None of this necessarily maps onto reality, nor onto comparisons with the US. The two new(er) types of school that the article opposes are Academies, which are former local authority schools given more power and autonomy, and Free Schools which are new schools set up by parents. While comparisons can be made with Charter Schools and the US situation the following differences are probably key:
1) The English National Curriculum and testing system are already in place. Far from being part of a movement for standardised tests, Academies and free schools are given more freedom from the National Curriculum. 2) The closing of “bad schools” is not yet on the agenda. This may be because demographics mean new schools can be introduced to cope with a rising school population without closing old schools. It might also reflect the fact that there are not, as yet, very many free schools. 3) The traditional vs. progressive faultlines are more clearly on display in the debate here. That is why the charter schools mentioned are KIPP (who are quite traditional on discipline) rather than, say, the online charter schools you have been describing recently. Although some of the free schools can easily be described as “progressive” this is not something the media says much about, and the last thing the New Statesman would admit to. 4) Despite a lot of controversy over exam standards here, our exams have not become mutiple-choice, short answer messes like the American ones and only one of our three main exam boards is private. The government has shown a preference for essay questions, and more challenging exams. 5) Our teaching unions are terrible. They oppose everything but stop nothing and are barely able to work together. The government finds them a useful scapegoat but they really count for nothing. 6) The government has held off on privatisation. A lot of the debate is not about what they are doing to involve private companies, but what they might do in the future. There is definitely the potential for a US style reform movement lobbying for privatisation and union-busting. There is Teach First, an English equivalent of Teach For America, a lot of similar rhetoric and moves towards unqualified teachers. There are academy sponsors who resemble charter schools chains. But on the whole we are not there yet. I recognise more of the English debate in your older books like “Left Back”, than in “The Death and Life of the Great American School System”. Curriculum content is more controversial than anything else. To give examples, the most heated debates in English education recently have been over whether to teach phonics and whether exams have got easier and what to do about that. |
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