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Why Schools Never Change
If you are perplexed as to why our schools, despite mountainous evidence of failure, go on unchanged, here’s a theory: if you look closely at high-level public officials – the people who determine education policy – you will recognize them as (overwhelmingly) the same collection of prigs and toadies you heartily hated in high school.
That is, the people who decide how your children are educated are those who liked the educational system when they were students and thrived under it. Your state senator was on the debate team, just as your state superintendent of public schools was treasurer of the student council. The college professor who educated your kids’ third-grade teacher sat in the front row and asked questions right up until the bell. The union official was a hall monitor. These people were having a good time in school. It suited their temperaments and they got positive ego strokes every day. Unsurprisingly, they think that, since it worked for them, there’s no reason it won’t work for everyone else.
That they have inflicted the same system on today’s kids works out well for those who are also well-suited to the school environment. For kids who are reasonably bright, highly motivated, and tolerant of being bossed around by low-level bureaucrats, school can be a pleasant place. It works for them. For kids who are not especially bright, not much interested in intellectual pursuits, or intolerant of persnickety assistant principals, it’s hell on earth. And there are a whole lot more kids in the second category than the first. If we are going to have an educational system that works for all kids, control must be wrested from the prigs and toadies.
Let me stop to explain what I mean by “works for all kids.” I don’t mean a system where every kid meets some arbitrary standard. I mean one where every kid has an opportunity to maximize his abilities. For one kid, that might mean passing a bunch of AP classes and getting accepted into a top college; for another, it might mean finishing high school with a high level of literacy before embarking on technical training; for yet another, it might mean obtaining basic literacy and numeracy and starting an apprenticeship at sixteen. Kids have different abilities and interests, so different outcomes are to be expected.
If our public officials can’t be counted on to design a system that works for everyone, who can? The answer: nobody. There are precisely the same number of people who know how design an educational system as know how to make a pencil from scratch. While no single person knows enough to build an educational system, millions of people cooperating in the market could figure it out. Give every parent a voucher or tax credit to spend on educating their kids, and you would see an explosion of innovation. Plenty of charlatans would try to get in on the action, to be sure, and a lot of impressive-sounding ideas would flop, but that’s the way markets work. But through trial and error, we’d soon have options that would suit pretty much any kind of kid. There would still be traditional schools for those who like that sort of thing but, for the rest, there would be a smorgasbord of options, many of which have yet to be imagined.
It’s time we face up to the facts that herding kids into a room against their will to try to teach them all the same thing at the same time is one of the dumbest ideas people have ever come up with, and that all kids — especially the children of the poor — will have a better chance at a good education when someone can get rich providing it.
Published in Culture, Education
A topic after my own heart.
Here’s some ideas on the origin of why our schooling is the way it is:
I agree.
I would tend to like a voucher system rather than a tax credit, because the our all volunteer tax system would be to vulnerable to fraud. With a voucher system the government can police the many fewer educational institutions for fraud easier.
The first thing that needs to happen though is to abolish the Federal Department of Education.
New Zealand abolished the educational bureaucracy, all of it. They turned schools over to teachers and parents allowed any kid in the country to go to any school they wanted and the money followed the kids. Some schools chose to specialize. Teachers and parents in the US know which teachers are good and which are bad. If funding depended on attracting students, they’d get rid of the bad ones if allowed to. Administrators add nothing, but there are some people who have created schools that work. We’re too big to follow New Zealand, but vouchers do the same thing. Choice works, it’s called an educational market. Why do we believe that the institution that educates for the most diverse, most rapidly changing economy on earth should be centralized, standardized, homogenized. And we can’t change it? Our side must not want to. New Zealand schools, by the way, went from the bottom of the modernized west to among the top, well above us. The implication in the excellent article is more than this, and is dead on. We have no idea what we’ll need in a few years, or what any one kid could use to meet his potential.
I homeschool and I hate it. I’m getting desperate for something better but there are no options. We don’t even have charter schools here because the teachers unions managed to poison the bill. I admit to feeling utterly hopeless on this issue.
Hate it because you don’t think your kids are thriving? Or hate it because the kids are thriving just fine, but it’s driving their parents to stab themselves in the eyes with chopsticks just to make the madness stop?
My sympathies are with you. I would like to homeschool when the time comes, but I’m also secretly terrified!
I’d like to add one caveat to your theory. School districts are tied to real estate and real estate value. So even those people who don’t use the school system they want that system in tact to get a return on their real estate investment. This is what I don’t get about the left there are always loop holes for their egalitarian utopian policies. The wealthy still get a better education because it’s tied into their home value.
If the education system was completely dismantled in the US. What would that do to home values?
I think there would be many more educational institutions. Evaluating them might be a job for local school boards.
I’d hate to restrict it to just schools though. School isn’t for everyone and there are so many other ways to learn.
I think it would affect home prices, but it should all even out. People could choose where to live based on proximity to work and whether they just like the neighborhood. Good for cities, bad for suburbs.
There are many options, a lot of which are free. Here are some of the things we’ve done with our kids (who never went to school). A lot of these options require very little teaching from the parent, other than being available to answer questions when the kids get stumped.
– independent study: kids can teach themselves an awful lot once they learn to read well.
– tutoring: a few hours of tutoring is easily more effective than a whole week in a classroom)
– online classes
– podcasts: a lot of history podcasts are very engaging, addictive even
-interactive video courses
– You Tube videos: There are fantastic teachers putting great videos up on everything under the sun
– co-op classes where we joined with a few other families to hire a teacher to meet with the kids for a couple of hours per week for lecture and lab (very much like college courses); this worked well for high school science and foreign languages.
– unschooling: when the kids were elementary age, we did nothing formal (except a little math); just kept a bunch of books around on various topics.
MFR,
I hate it because even tho my kids seem to be OK, I’m not and I need a break. State sponsored babysitting, problematic tho it is, sounds really nice when the baby is crying, the 3yr wet again and you’re trying to answer your older kid’s many questions over the din.
Ron,
My kids are all under 8, few of those options would not be parent intensive. I am part of a homeschool co-op type thing, so I do have 1 day per week off.
I have to disagree with your first paragraph. It implies that those running our government education system were the smart ones who were near the top of the class. Students entering education schools as a group have nearly the lowest SAT scores of any college major. There are many very smart teachers. My sister is one and she was at the top of her class, but generally they weren’t the straight A students.
That said, I do agree they want to keep it going because it worked for them. They had a good time in school, and don’t see any reason to change it.
What do we do for those taken by the charlatans or are the guinea pigs for the New Coke of education? Do we just say “sorry your kid’s a turnip because you chose unwisely” or do we have some way to guarantee a minimum outcome? The only real benefit to our current system is that it fails everyone equally. We lose that one basic good with an innovative free-for-all because those systems will fail some spectacularly.
We don’t know what will count as a turnip, or whether turnips have more fun or will make lots of money in the coming turnip economy.
My preferred policy tool in this area remains the abolition of compulsory education. With that goes the need for the state to define what counts as an education, and so the obvious backdoor ways of re-creating the existing, failed, system are removed. (“You can go to any institution you like, as long as it follows Common Core, hires teachers who have been brainwashed at the usual credentialling mills, and complies with these diversity initiatives.”)
I’m sympathetic to this until I envision inner cities. Then I try to imagine it getting even worse there and can’t.
I’ll argue that we’re not too big to follow New Zealand. We’re a federation of 50 states, each of which has its own school system, so we’re really talking about states (or counties, or cities) doing this, not the Federal Government.
I’ll have to read more, but New Zealand’s approach might work well, and it sure sounds tantalizing.
This is exciting to read. Wow.
In Massachusetts, one town finally decided to tell the state that it would not take any more of its money in exchange for total freedom from the state department of education. The same results occurred as in New Zealand: the kids in the town scored at the top of every test they were given.
Freedom works. Especially in education.
I agree with you completely.
I came away from volunteering in public schools with the ardent wish to plead the case against compulsory education to the Supreme Court. It is unlawful detainment.
The schools are doing way more harm than good in just about every way I can think of.
I taught in the public schools for more than 40 years. They did change. They went from a pretty effective educational system in the 1970s to a worse and worse system in which relativism replaced concrete goals, and social justice replaced real education. The change was year to year, and every year saw a further decline in the test scores. There was, of course, the reintroduction of failed ideas as one generation of teachers was replaced by another. Since many of the teachers I knew did not read history or anything else, they mindlessly jumped on the bandwagon of rediscovered failure and proclaimed it as equivalent to the Second Coming. It, naturally, failed and was replaced the next year with another recycled idea. Change, as a consequence, was perpetual.
The current goals in education are not excellence, but an end to disproportionality. This will be accomplished by dragging everyone up or down to the lowest common denominator. This being their goal, I would say that they are well on their way to full achievement.
I don’t think you can simultaneously have a welfare state and a state that doesn’t demand mandatory levels of education. My guess is that, under your model, inner-city illiteracy would be even higher than it already is, as people would assume their uneducated kids could live off government largess in perpetuity.
Once we pulled our son from public school–in a supposedly excellent district–his performance improved rapidly. A few things that I noticed:
Late add: my sister teaches at a Title I school, think low-income, at-risk. Apparently, the administrative overhead of DoE oversight is crushing. My son’s teachers and administrators complained about this regularly. No wonder the sense of vocation disappears quickly.
I would happily get rid of the welfare state.
I don’t agree that things can get worse in the inner cities.
I don’t agree that (a sufficient number of) parents (or others) in the inner cities don’t want a better life for their children; I do think practices and institutions will arise to enable all children, no matter how deprived, to be the best they can and want to be.
I see no evidence of a system of mandated levels of education: I see a system of mandated attendance at state institutions, and employment for politically-connected groups.
I agree with the OP that we don’t – and can’t – know what “education” means for each individual. Making any sort of centralised judgement leads to the one-size-fits-none engine of despair we have now.
I’ve spent a lot of time living in low-income parts of town. My observations do not line up with yours. There’s a not-so-insignificant portion of the American populace that are unimaginably lazy, entitled, and dumb. Their selfishness is unmatched and their children’s needs are of no concern to them.
1. We homeschooled and the person best loved by our children was their teacher.
2. They did about three hours a day, and then were read to, by the person who loved them the best.
3. They made trips to museums and such, in the company of the person who loved them the best.
4. If there was success, it was celebrated by the person/s who loved them the best.
5. If there was failure, it was mitigated by the person/s who loved them the best.
For middle and high school the state we resided in mandated one hour a day in class in order to join the extracurricular activities. One was sports minded and won letters in sports. One was a budding singer and won letters in chorale.
The pathologies so evident in the middle and high school did not travel home.
Our kids had friends in the neighborhood and played city league sports, hence “socialization” (that b.s. handout from the public school teachers) did not apply to our kids.
Our kids were also comfortable talking to adults, were well-mannered, and were interested in the world around them.
6. If the money were awarded to the parents who then could decide on where it was spent on their children’s education, the public schools which were serious about educating children would succeed, and those that weren’t would disappear. (Imagine prayer in public schools being the province of teachers and administrators!)
I used to teach middle school math in a very nasty part of town (highest percentage of students with at least one parent in prison in all of CA). If you were reasonable and showed that you cared, every parent that I had to call was supportive (in word if not in deed). My takeaway was that every parent cares about their kid and wants them to do well.
With a small handful of exceptions for gang-related families, whenever I called home to say that a child was not getting their work done, messing around in class, etc, the parents said they would talk to their child and were basically supportive of my efforts.
One of the biggest groups of people that bring the system down, other than teachers’ unions of course, is the special education department. They should be called the ‘enabling department’. These days, many kids have ‘disabilities’ such as ADHD and get ‘Individual Education Plans’ that forces teachers teachers to make ‘accommodations’ for them. For every class of about 30 high school students I have, I get 5-10 of these documents, and they all say the same thing: such-and-so gets extra time on tests, preferential seating, shortened assignments, can take tests in another classroom. It is disgusting. Most of these kids don’t even have a legitimate disability. Parents have no shame in telling their child that they have a ‘disability’ and need special accommodations. What an awful message to send! Plus, kids with real disabilities get short-changed.
If you want a great example of why intellectual leftism is bad, look at your local school’s special education department.