Monday's Open Question
James Poulos ·
Jun 7, 2010 at 11:31am
Today, we're not the only ones talking education. But sometimes, hot new ideas aren't really that new, or that hot. (My least favorite: end summer vacation!) So let's hear it:
What should we do -- or stop doing -- to make education better?
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Comments :
May '10
Re: Monday's Open Question
Honestly, computer games need to be better integrated. Starcraft, Warcraft, Red Alert, and so forth teach fundamental lessons about economics -- marginals, the utility function -- as well as eternal truths -- cooperation vs. competition, short-term vs. long-term, and basic strategy. You couple these with Medal of Honor, Civilization, Rome Total War, etc., and you're learning far more history than any Teach for America dweeb could possibly teach.
May '10
Re: Monday's Open Question
Kids need at least two things to thrive: love and security. Teachers' unions are a popular target. But I'm reminded of my experience teaching at a struggling school in Hampton, VA a few years ago. A teacher came in to tell me I needed to join a union, so I'd have a lawyer in the likely event a student took a swing at me. With a lawyer I could (supposedly) defend myself, instead of curling up into a ball hoping I didn't get my head smashed in. I broke up a few fights, but no child every struck me. They knew I loved them, and I strove to create a "drama-free" zone in my classroom. What I don't hear much about is the incompetence of school administrators. The principal of the school refused to expel or suspend chronic offenders in order not to lose school accreditation. Students who actually wanted to learn were intimidated by thugs who would get away with stuff. Students didn't feel cared for, because the adults who were supposed to protect them were more interested in the bullet points on their resumes, than the welfare of these kids.
May '10
Re: Monday's Open Question
So, let's not only fire bad teachers, let's fire bad administrators. Also, as the boomers retire, I'd like to see in-school mentoring programs that connect retirees and students. These kids just need to know their cherished, that someone cares. They need to feel that school is a safe zone and that rule-breaking and disruptive behavior will not be tolerated. If you want better teachers, demand better teaching standards. Most education courses taught at colleges are substandard. Licensure tests are unchallenging. The state of education in this country isn't an isolated problem. It is a reflection of society's failures. We can't force people into being better parents. But anyone can mentor a child. Until people become involved with schools in their communities, a lot of these teachers feel like they're just rearranging deck chairs on the Titanic. And a teacher with a bad attitude is toxic in a classroom. No wonder so many leave the profession.
Re: Monday's Open Question
I agree a thousand times over, Karen. I had the same experience in one school I worked in. In another, I had an incredibly supportive administration. It made a world of difference. The "trickle down" support, plus a useful feedback system, can work, in my experience. However, at least in New York City public schools, the unions make it almost impossible to get rid of incompetent administrators. It really is the "system" that's gone awry. The individuals are all pretty good and pretty motivated -- or, at least, they start out that way -- but no one feels supported, encouraged, noticed, or rewarded enough.
May '10
Re: Monday's Open Question
1) Decentralize control. Let communities and educators set the curricula and standards based on what the community (or even state) desires.
2) Thin down the administrators. There's a reason we're spending so much on education yet have so little money going to teachers and infrastructure. I can't for the life of me understand why a school needs three Vice Principals, a host of guidance counselors, and so on.
3) Give teachers some room to innovate in their own classrooms and rewards the ones whose innovations get better results.
4) Relax the credentialing required to become a teacher. Plenty of bright and willing people who would make wonderful teachers can not because they chose not to get a college degree. Let them take a few questions and give them a chance to demonstrate that they know the subject they want to teach. Let them work under observation for a little while then, assuming they can teach, cut them loose.
May '10
Re: Monday's Open Question
Abolish public education and replace it with private education
The beauty of private schools is that, within a free market environment, their survival, like all other firms, is contingent upon their performance in satisfying consumer demand, i.e., their ability to provide good education to their patrons. Those schools which offer the best education at the lowest costs will earn the most profits. Thus, in a free market, schools are encouraged by the profit motive to outperform each other in the production of educational services. This peaceful competition leads to better educational services and reduced prices for those services.
The problem with public schools qua government institutions is that their survival is not contingent upon their performance. Public schools have little incentive to offer better educational services, especially since their survival does not depend upon the quality of their services. The ability to survive via taxation ensures the continued existence of public schools, ergo the survival/performance relationship does not nearly apply as seriously to public schools. In fact, its often the case that poor performance in producing educational services is incentivized under public education, since failing public schools tend to receive the most funding from legislators because they're failing.
May '10
Re: Monday's Open Question
I've had occasion to meet many school administrators for my job over the past 12 years and what I hear most about is not difficult unions but rather difficult school boards. School boards are insane pockets of bizarre tribal and identity politics and the bigger the city, the more insane they are. (And by the way, they're insane on the right and the left depending on the geography.)
What most administrators hunger for is a few reasonable businesspeople on the school board who understand how to make decisions and tough choices and balance resources to act as their bosses and help them with important stuff. But no self-respecting normal person would ever want to join a school board and have to contend with all the crazy people.And given how crazy school boards are, they tend to fire or drive away superintendents every two years -- which doesn't help either.
I saw Rob's post about getting some super-rich dudes to fund schools. But what about some of those people getting on the school board... sort of a Teach for America for Baby Boomers?
May '10
Re: Monday's Open Question
The key to improving public school education is knowledgeable, passionate parents who get actively involved at the school and district level.
Our small school district had virtually no advanced classes at all in grades K-8 prior to 2005. Many educators were convinced that advanced classes were elitist and would deprive lower level students of needed role models. Despite this long-entrenched educational culture, we were able to quickly build a powerful grassroots movement in support of meeting the needs of ALL students, including high ability students who walked into the classroom already having mastered most of the grade-level curriculum.
There was no district $ available to fund a new program, so we worked in alliance with the school district to develop an inexpensive program to serve our 1000 square mile county.
We now have advanced classes in every grade K-8 district-wide, and recently raised startup funds from the community to bring the rigorous International Baccalaureate Diploma Programme to our district. As of April 2010 we're the most rural community in Florida to offer this program, and we did it in spite of the ever-worsening economy.
Upbeat, well-prepared, determined parents can move even entrenched educational mountains...they can't fire us and they can't make us go away!
May '10
Re: Monday's Open Question
I can't tell you what the ideal system is for teacher compensation, but I know that seniority pay is a terrible system, and that if you want more ambitious, motivated people to get into teaching, and work to improve their performance across many years, some kind of merit pay is necessary.
I'm skeptical of tying it all to test scores -- performance on standardized tests and learning are different things -- so I'd tentatively favor giving lots of control to principals to run their own schools. There are enough public schools that a teacher treated unfairly by a single principal could easily get another job a few miles away at another school. Also, Karen, you wrote, "The principal of the school refused to expel or suspend chronic offenders in order not to lose school accreditation." Isn't the problem there the accreditation criteria more than the principal?
May '10
Re: Monday's Open Question
Walmart.
May '10
Re: Monday's Open Question
Vouchers. Let the parents decide where their children go to school.
No reform plan will work TODAY for a parent whose child is in a failing school TODAY.
No child's education should be sacrificed on the altar of somebody's reform project, or theory, or job protection.
May '10
Re: Monday's Open Question
Nick, Scott, and Michael; put those three ideas together...and stand back.
May '10
Re: Monday's Open Question
This Stanley Fish column is an interesting overview of a few different arguments about the direction education should take. The first idea reviewed comes from a home schooling proponent, and makes me hopeful that the insights of that community will inform future debates about public schools.
Re: Monday's Open Question
I know it's Tuesday, but I can't help thinking about James's question. Maybe we focus too much on teachers and students and dollars and cents. These arguments may illustrate that financial inputs don't guarantee educational outputs. They may shed light on the nefarious practices of teacher's unions. But reforming the institutions only takes you so far. Diane Ravitch's new book, The Death and Life of the Great American School System, is required reading. Ravitch is hard on the educational establishment. But she also says the evidence shows that school choice and charter schools are no panacea.
In his must read review of Ravitch, E.D. Hirsch suggests the problem is a child-centric view of education that neglects the importance of curriculum. It's not enough to establish standards. We need to specify what kids should learn, and how, and when. And this insight may make conservatives uncomfortable, since it could involve centralized authorities making decisions with which not everyone agrees.
Finally, it's extremely difficult to teach kids who live in turbulent home environments. Teachers and governments can only do so much. The hope for the at-risk children of divorce and negligent parenting is moral and cultural renewal--easier said than done!
Re: Monday's Open Question
Trace Urdan: School boards are insane pockets of bizarre tribal and identity politics and the bigger the city, the more insane they are. (And by the way, they're insane on the right and the left depending on the geography.)
What most administrators hunger for is a few reasonable businesspeople on the school board who understand how to make decisions and tough choices and balance resources to act as their bosses and help them with important stuff. But no self-respecting normal person would ever want to join a school board and have to contend with all the crazy people. And given how crazy school boards are, they tend to fire or drive away superintendents every two years -- which doesn't help either.
A huge point. I'm all for decentralization and local control. But there's just no escape from the massively un-romantic truth about local politics and local administration. It's like a Stephen King novel -- you think the plot is driven by some horrible problem from outside everyday reality...but look closer, and you see the real horror is the tangled thicket of all-too-human personalities, relationships, desires, weakness, and power. Alas, not even expert federal administrators can change that. We're stuck with freedom.
Re: Monday's Open Question
And another thing -- don't miss RiShawn Biddle's special report on rust belt dropout factories. It's up today at AmSpec.
May '10
Re: Monday's Open Question
And if anyone is as nerdy as me you can follow RiShawn on Twitter at @dropoutnation