Public schooling in America is in trouble because…
- The parents don’t care.
- The students come from broken families.
- There’s not enough money.
Be very careful if you even think of saying it’s the fault of the teachers or unions. It’s a very unpopular thing to say and teachers will come out of the woodwork to blame someone else.
But for those of you who think that the system, unions, and teachers are not a part of the problem, you might want to spend the next 40 minutes watching this video and then the next 40 hours trying to come up with a justification for your position.
Among other things, the video points out that more money will not solve the problem, that kids can succeed and get good educations even from bad neighborhoods and family situations, and that schools better serve the students when they’re forced to compete.
If you want to know why I don’t like unions, this is exhibit A. It’s also exhibit A for why a certain amount of money should be attached to every child in America and that money should follow them to what ever school their parents choose to send them to.
July 10th, 2006 at 4:37 pm
I’ve always thought we needed privatized education in a big, big way. maybe it’s because I went to private school, but whatever. What’s interesting is how successful (on the whole) public universities are at providing a good college education. I went to public university for both grad and undergrad and never felt shortchanged. Obviously public high schools are a failure - no real debate there. I haven’t thoguht about this much, so I’m not going to start throwing out answers -but here is a what I think is an interesting question - what makes public universities succeed where public high schools fail (and elemenatry)?
the first thing that jumps to mind (I know I said I wouldn’t throw out answers, apparently I lied) is:
-competetion
anyway, have at it. Personally, I don’t see a problem with people picking between Nike High or WalMart High. If they can get job done, then screw it, they got my vote. Of course, even as a libertarian I think the gov should pick up the tab on education - its a public good. But since when did paying for a service mean you had to provide it? That doesn’t mean I think they *shoudln’t provide it, just that they dont have to, and if they can’t, well, then they shouldn’t - but make them compete - with each other, with private schools, whatever.
We need some big change out there - our students compare very poorly to those of many countries, and it’s simply unnacceptable.
July 10th, 2006 at 8:02 pm
Interesting. I’m not convinced that it’s all necessarily solveable through the public vs. private schooling thing. That said, competition is well worth it, as is the freedom of choice for those attending school (eg. one of the best decisions of my life was when I decided to go to the particular high school I decided on. I firmly believe that had I not, I wouldn’t have been nearly as successful as I am now). Heck, if there wasn’t competition to reach standards (etc.) I highly doubt that the education system would be as good as it is today (where I went to school). That said, teaching to tests, and the problems you list above are and will continue to be huge problems, and given my lack of familiarity with the American school systems, I’m probably not the best person to comment.
July 10th, 2006 at 10:41 pm
I’ll try to keep this short.
Not all public schools are bad. Some are absolutely terrible. Some are really, really good. But from what I’ve been able to tell, the big difference maker is the district/city/county at large. By that I mean, generally, some school districts have almost all of their schools are good, and maybe one or two not so good, and some school districts have almost all of their schools terrible, and maybe one or two are ok.
I don’t think the public schools need “MORE” money. Most of these school districts are spending 6-7K per student, per year. The independent, Catholic high school I went to charges about 5K. Bear in mind a public school system “should” have economies of scale. The money just gets wasted, like most government spending.
I think it comes down to priorities. A school district can make the decision that it’s priority is to educate children. Or, it can choose another priority, like making vendors rich, giving contracts to relatives of school board members, allowing itself to be controlled by unions that have way too many teachers that only care about a paycheck, etc.
Most teachers are very good (I’m marrying a very good one). Some are not. In many areas, the qualifications for becoming a teacher are a joke. If you’re a teacher, you can’t be in it for the money… you have to really love what you are doing. Those are the best teachers.
There is no excuse for why schools and districts perform so poorly. They perform badly because the people who run them don’t care about education. They care about lining their own pockets.
If you want a school system to be successful, it takes the entire community. Test the teachers and put them in charge of educating the kids. Let the teachers with management skills be the principals. Hire businessmen and businesswomen to run the financial and management of the system (run the schools like schools, the system like a business).
And then, you will have a successful system. If the parents don’t care or the kid does not care, that should be an individual problem, not something that reflects on the system. Those kids who want to succeed should be given the tools to succeed. And far too often, due to corrupt politicians, the damn teacher unions/some teachers who don’t care, and a general lack of caring by the community at large, the money seems to find it’s way to other places instead.
Sorry this was so long!
July 10th, 2006 at 11:54 pm
Ah, the wonders of selective editing. Amazing how you can make an isolated incident seem like the rule, rather than the exception. Anyone who’s taught in a public school will understand. Those who have not taught cannot understand American public schools and never will.
I thank John Stossel for perpetuating those lovely stereotypes of the teaching profession, the ones that have convinced so many that the vast majority of teachers are overpaid, work six-hour days for nine months a year, are accountable to no one and are puppets of union leaders. I worked for 3 back-breaking years as a public school teacher, racking up 80-hour work weeks on average. My reward at the end of the day? A wage that didn’t cover the cheapest (shared) apartment in my district and my other living expenses. In the highest-paying district in the state (NC). I had quite a bit of time off, and I needed every second to recover mentally, emotionally and physically from the stress of teaching. And I’m not an exception in any sense.
But the issue of “competition” raises an interesting question: how can American public schools compete for the best teachers? I’m not talking about public v. private schools. I’m talking about teaching v. every other job.
Every successful school and class has an amazing teacher creating that success. Teaching is a hard, thankless job, and it takes an amazing person to do it as well as it needs to be done. You have to be energetic enough to interact with large groups of children all day long and grade their papers with contructive comments all night long, every night for months and months. Good teachers must have intelligence, initiative, compassion, resourcefulness, leadership, and a billion other rare qualities.
These qualities make people highly employable. And when they choose where to work, they will choose an employer that offers them a decent wage. Benefits. Respect. Prestige.
Can our public schools offer this to the people we WANT to be teachers? And once they enter the system, what incentives to do they have to continue working in it? The honor of knowing that they deserve a lot more than they actually make? The pity of others?
If you want to improve public schools, you need to improve the quality of teachers. And better pay and more respect would go a long way toward attracting the people who are needed to make them better.
July 11th, 2006 at 12:23 am
Bobby: I a voucher system and real competition for money and students would go a long way toward solving most of the problems you mention. Also: I don’t think there are a whole lot of schools that are good. I think our standards are entirely too low. We should not be satisfied until our students are top 10 in the world, at least. We have no excuse for being anywhere else.
Jen: Throwing money at teachers is not the solution. Why not? Well, what happens if we just start paying teachers more? More teachers will flood the market. Great, now you have more to choose from, but the standards are still horribly low, so overall the quality is no better.
You talk about what it takes to make a good teacher, but didn’t mention that none of those things are required to become a teacher. The “education” major at every university with which I am familiar is a joke. Not to imply that all education majors are idiots — far from it — but any idiot can become one.
While it seems like a better solution, I don’t like the idea of just arbitrarily making the standards more difficult either.
But I think there’s a lot of merit to the idea that opening up our education system to competition and freeing it from the shackles of unionization is something that could not hurt.
If the industry has a problem hiring talented teachers, which they will have to keep their doors open, they will do whatever it takes, raising salaries, offering benefits, etc… they will get rid of the ineffective teachers to make room for the talented ones. Teachers will be incentivized to be effective (both by way of increased salary for the top teachers and through fear of losing their job).
Truth be told, I don’t think there are many problems with the American education system which would not find their solution by way of the influence of a real market.
July 11th, 2006 at 11:49 am
A few points, and some questions:
Point One: The requirements to become an education major and the requirements to become a teacher are two different things. Whether they should or should not be is a separate issue.
Anyone who doesn’t think there are standards for teachers should take the Praxis or another teacher certification test without studying sometime. Or try completing an alternative licensure program (for those who didn’t get degrees in education). NC teachers who don’t have degrees in education spend their first few years of teaching taking summer and evening classes to be eligible to continue teaching (out of pocket). There are yearly credit and grade requirements that must be met, and they’ve become more strict in recent years. New York teachers must complete a master’s degree in their first 5 years or they’re out. Every state has continuing education requirements. These facts indicate that there are standards in place. Whether they’re the best standards is another matter entirely.
Point Two: Teacher’s unions have varying levels of lobbying power in different states. In North Carolina, where I taught, the teacher union was a very ineffective lobbying group, and wielded almost no power over the state government. Teachers are very much at the mercy of the state legislature. Teachers joined the union only for the legal representation services — because teachers who are even mildly suspected of harming children can be fired and sued within days, or even hours. If my state was plagued by the “shackles of unionization,” it had no effect on me or any other teacher I met. The many defects in NC’s public education system need to be blamed on something other than teacher unions.
Please forgive me for knowing only about the situation in NC. I realize that my narrow sample of evidence weakens my argument. But I was too busy working as a teacher to research other states.
Point Three: Getting rid of ineffective teachers is not needed to “make room” for talented teachers. It’s needed for other reasons. There’s plenty of room for talented teachers. They don’t have problems finding jobs. The problem is that there aren’t enough of them to go around. Holding on to an ineffective teacher is the only choice that many principals have because they don’t have anyone better-qualified to replace them with. Where these wonderful new teachers supposed to come from, if your district isn’t served by Teach For America or another program that delivers them to you on a silver platter?
Point Four: I’m not advocating “throwing money at schools.” Whatever that phrase means to you. I’m pointing out that improving the quality of teaching is a necessary component of improving public schools. And drawing upon the “free market” principles you’re so fond of, I’m pointing out that the process of hiring and retaining teachers will require a dramatic increase in salaries. And you agreed with me. (”If the industry has a problem hiring talented teachers …”)
Question One: Pray tell, how is “do[ing] whatever it takes, raising salaries, offering benefits, etc,” — which you agree is necessary to recruit and retain talented teachers — possible if “[t]hrowing money at teachers is not the solution”? Run the math for me.
Question Two: Presuming that schools don’t already get rid of ineffective teachers, when they do finally, as you put it, “get rid of the ineffective teachers to make room for the talented ones,” who is supposed to take their place in areas where there is a teacher shortage? Substitutes? Parents? No one?
Question Three: How will “the influence of a real market” help improve low-performing schools in areas like the one where I taught?
Case Study: Northampton and Halifax Counties, NC.
There is one private school within 40 miles, and there isn’t enough money on the planet to induce its administration to participate in a voucher program. (It was created to separate the children of privileged parents from the others. Or to preserve segregation. Whichever explanation you prefer.) The private schools that are 40-70 miles out MIGHT be persuaded to participate in a voucher program, but they’re already struggling to maintain the small class sizes people choose them for. Thus, participation in a voucher program will only open a handful of spots for people escaping public schools. Those schools will have a little more funding and will be able to hire a few more teachers, but they won’t grow indefinitely. They won’t want to. They’ll turn people away, rather than continually expand.
Of course, that’s assuming that the amount of money attached to the kid covers the private school tuition, which it rarely does. Low-income parents can always cover the difference, right? And let’s go nuts and assume that the kids who actually get in to the private schools will be more successful in their new school, which is far from certain. And rare, according to many studies.
The students who can’t get into a private school might be able to compete for a spot in the ONE “better performing” district in the area (where a whopping 70% of the students are performing at grade level). It’s already overcrowded (26-28 kids per class). But you can pack another body or two into every class before you run afoul of state law. So that might help a few dozen kids. As is the case in the decent public schools that are within 70 miles. Again, we’ll pretend that the students actually succeed in their new schools.
I suppose the district could use the increased funding to expand its facilities and hire more teachers, but the funds attached to the new students won’t be nearly enough to cover the expense. And the area has an emergency teacher shortage and can’t induce qualified teachers to move to the area. So they’ll hire the least-crappy teachers available. Which will likely be the people laid off from the low-performing schools everyone’s trying to escape in the first place.
Pray tell, what happens to the rest of the children? The ones who didn’t “improve” their situation by moving to a new school. For every kid that gets to leave the schools, 50 will be left behind with no options. Take me through the precise process, in detail, through which their schools will improve as a result of competition.
July 11th, 2006 at 12:23 pm
That may be the longest comment ever, and I’m not going to respond to it in full because a) Many of these points are made quite well in the video and b) this is turning into a long-comment arms race. Blog it some where.
Here are brief answers to your questions:
Re point one: Indeed they are. Question for you: what section of the Praxis tests leadership? Initiative? Resourcefulness? My point was that the many skills you listed as “required” to be a good teacher aren’t a part of our requirements.
Re point two: Lobbying power with a government and collective bargaining power are two wholly different things. Try to get a school contract by any union — even the most ineffective of them — that eliminates tenure or allows school boards to fire incompetent teachers quickly and easily.
Re point three: Maybe not now, but it certainly would be as the system progressed if salaries went up as one would suppose they would.
Re point four/Q1: increasing salaries generally MAY help. But it might not. It might be that there are a glut of excellent teachers that just need to be motivated to be better than average. Simply giving a school more money to dole out is not going to fix the problem. Simply giving every teacher a 10% raise is not going to fix the problem. Letting the market work will.
Q2: If a school is run like a business in a market, schools will hire the most effective teachers they can. That doesn’t mean they’ll always be effective, though. It’s a process, and if there are no teachers to be had, then you have the best teachers you can get, however woefully incompetent some of them may be.
Q3: Briefly right now there is a lot of money being fed into public schools which cannot go anywhere else. If systems were voucherized, that would create TONS of new money that could be had by private entities that opened schools. Those kids who can’t afford private school are a perfect example. Whereas before they had $0 to spend on school, they all now have $7,000 a year. (Or whatever)
Second, private schools are not expensive because they cost so much more to run than public schools. They are expensive because a) there is very low supply, b) there is very high demand, and c) those who can actually afford to pay for schools twice (taxes and tuition) have the ability to pay a higher tuition. The 20/20 video shows a perfect example of schools that spend LESS per student than the national average and pay their teachers MORE than the national average.
It should come as no big surprise that a private entity can spend its money more effectively than our governments can.
The questions at the end of your case study suppose that some schools will never get better, will never go away, and no new schools will enter the market. Such is an unlikely course of events but even were it to happen in some isolated areas a) there would still be a net gain on the whole and b) the government could still step in and help in those limited situations where the market wasn’t working.
July 11th, 2006 at 12:54 pm
Tangent.
To what extent is the educational system itself to blame? Not teachers or competition from other schools, but the basic K-12 everyone on essentially the same course system? My lab works with several education departments and researchers, both in the U.S. and Europe. The German model of education starts everyone in the same (essentially) elementary school, but students split off into vocational school, technical/business school and an academic school that leads to college education (see http://www.german-way.com/educ.html for an overview).
Part of where public universities succeed (at least relative to the rest of the public education system) is that students are able to self-select into the schools best suited for their interests. This is in line with Pete’s call for competition, and diversification of schools may be the eventual result of a free education market. I’ll stop here: any thoughts?
Confession: I only got about 10 minutes into the video before I had to leave for the office. I’ll finish the rest later.
July 11th, 2006 at 1:03 pm
Great points, Ryne… of course, if we’re going to permanently impact a child’s potential, we need to make sure that the elementary schools are top notch so that the kids who go to voc/tech schools are there because of their own actions/abilities and not those of their teachers/schools.
July 11th, 2006 at 1:23 pm
True, but we are already permanently impacting children’s potentials. Acording to the first 1/4 of the video, our elementary students are among the best in the world, while our high school students are decidedly mediocre. By middle school age there are already a number of students who are decidedly not bound for college. According to the link I posted, the vocation schools still have a strong base in academics. There isn’t necessarily a need to restrict schools to “academic” or “vocational”; areas can have as many and as many different types of schools as they can support. Schools can different types of interests (and may have to to stay competitive), maybe even looking like a university in many respects.
I would still have concerns about a voucher system in so much as specialized, religious or corporate schools could deviate too far from the accepted curriculum (”Hi, little Billy. Do you go to an ‘evo’ school or an ‘ID’ school?” “Neither, Mr. Smith. They don’t teach science at Future Best Buy Salesperson H.S.!”) State and national accreditation and achievement testing would still have to take place to assure the core requirements needed to maintain education as a public good and not a day-care credit until the kid is grown-up.
July 11th, 2006 at 1:42 pm
Just to illustrate my own experience - my high school did not have admissions tests, rejected no students, operated on about 60% of the dollars per student as local public high schools, only charged about 8K dollars per year, teachers were only paid about 25K/year and our class size was about 25-30 per class. We had 100% graduation rate. Over 90% of our students completed Regents degrees (an educational standard in NY that is considered fairly high). Our only problem was that we didn’t have much of a computer lab, and had no computer classes at all (this was back in the early 90s though).
July 11th, 2006 at 2:36 pm
either I remebered our school’s tuition incorrectly, or it has gone down since I attended (seems unlikely). It is currently 5200 per year. Here is a link to the school’s performace (we still have 100% graduatoin rate and are beating the hell out of most schools in an 8 county area, who use, on average, about 3000 more per student):
(/a href>http://www.cchstroy.org/academics/guidance/admissions/2005reportcard.htm
July 11th, 2006 at 4:37 pm
I don’t know if the Praxis up in North Carolina is the same Praxis as Louisiana, but the one in LA is a joke. I have a friend who is starting alternate certification. He had to take the Praxis and pass with a certain score before he was admitted to the program. This particular Praxis test was on teaching methods. He had NO educational teaching experience. He did not study. He easily passed. And this is the same test that people take after completing an education degree???
I agree with Jen that most current private schools won’t take vouchers (the snobby schools) or are limited in how much they can expand their school. But that’s not the point. New schools, or current schools taken over by an outside force (i.e. charter schools) would be the ones serving the voucher kids. The number of public schools descrease, the number of non-public schools decrease.
I don’t know if any of you are following what’s happening right now in Orleans Parish (New Orleans). Pre-Katrina, the system was one of the worst in the country. The management was so bad that the state forced the district to hire a professional turnaround company to manage their financial operations. Then Katrina hit. The state legislature stepped in and the state educational board took over control of all but 5 or 6 schools from the district (over 100 schools were taken over - it was based upon a score placed on each school - the ones with low scores were taken over, the district kept the best schools). Then, one of three things has happened to each school:
1) It’s staying closed for a while, due to reduced population.
2) It was turned into a charter school, to be run by an outside company, either for-profit or non-profit. Various non-profits were given each a school, such as universities, community organizations, etc.
3) It’s being run by the state board of education.
Each school (whether charter, state-run, or local-run) will get the same amount of cash per student to pay bills. All schools taken over had their union contracts terminated and teachers were required to re-apply to the school of their choosing.
A student can thus go to one of three schools: his neighborhood district-run school, any charter school, or any state-run school (up until capacity limits are reached).
This is at current a 5-year program.
So I guess we’ll get to see what happens now. Do schools run by one group perform better than other schools? Are parents more involved? Does crime decrease?