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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
Big Education (to coin a phrase) doesn’t change for the same reason GM (i.e Big Auto) never changed. They just don’t believe the criticisms. They think that the people who are complaining about them are just making insincere or intentionally incorrect arguments out of personal malice. They believe comparisons showing greater successes in S. Korea or Japan or wherever, are just plain, biased against them and made in bad faith. So naturally, they needn’t pay any heed. Any data showing their models are flawed are just made-up by their enemies to undermine them so they aggressively stand pat.
They, after all, are the experts. They’ve been educated, don’tcha know, about the most modern up-to-date educational theories and “best practices.” Who are we to criticize their methods? We after all are either malicious liars out to get them or have no idea whatever about which we speak.
The proverbial “immovable object” has got nothing on bureaucratic blindness and intransigence.
There was an excellent op-ed this week in the WSJ written by a math teacher at Harlem’s Success Academy. The charter school is literally right upstairs from a regular public school, and though the student bodies are virtually demographically identical, the results achieved are stellar versus dismal.
Guess which school is dismal.
In the real world, leaders would look at disparate results such as these and say, “Let’s do what they’re doing!”
That New York’s mayor and public school leaders do not take this approach is indefensible and almost criminal.
Understood. That is what terrifies me about the prospect of homeschooling – that my sanity will prove to be no match for the insanity of my own offspring :-)
If you want an eye-opening assessment of our schools (especially the middle/high schools) ask for an honest opinion from a teacher with genuine intellectual and cultural interest in their subject. There are a few in every school. A teacher with a master’s in their subject, not a masters plus thirty in education tied to a salary bump.
Taking a structural view is wise. Yet is it really the treasurer-cum-state-official or hall-monitor-cum-labor-leader who creates our school culture?
Teachers really define the quality of education. American teachers on the whole, with plenty of godsend exceptions, enter college with lower high school g.p.a.’s, score lower on standardized exams and college entrance tests and pursue easier (essentially nonflunkable) college degrees.
Yet these below-average students choose to spend their lives in school. Why? Not because of driving academic and cultural talent and passion. Probably because they enjoy all the non-academic and non-intellectual enthusiasms that many adolescents enjoy. They enjoy the school spirit and gossipy adolescent atmosphere. The whole PC bossypants social agenda is precisely what they enjoy about school. The Full Dewey.
Oh, and the fulltime pay for 160 annual workdays followed by 30 years of fulltime pension after those 30 years of 3/4 time work ain’t bad either.
Apologies to the substantial minority of intellectually serious and committed teachers, but I think this problem is with us until resolved by SMOD.
Are these kids also on Ritalin?
Understood. Fortunately kids that young don’t need much, if any, formal education. You can pretty much just let them play as long as they aren’t spending too much time in front of screens.
The people running things at the state level – governors, legislators, etc. probably did pretty well in school. Unfortunately intelligence doesn’t equate to wisdom.
Same as with any other product or service: if it turns out to be lousy you take your business somewhere else.
I doubt it ever worked very well for the kids on the left half of the ability curve. In earlier decades kids could drop out and go get jobs. Now they are expected to sit there and suffer.
Mandating education and mandating school attendance are two entirely different things. Inner city kids would probably benefit more than anyone from an educational free market.
Most parents love their kids. It’s too bad so many entrust their well-being to the state.
The sorry state of special ed is perhaps the best argument for free market education. There is no reason the market wouldn’t provide superior solutions for students with special needs.
I spent eight years teaching in the public schools and found most teachers to be committed and competent, some exceptionally so. Most controlled their classes and spent their time on task. Their (and my) students, however, weren’t learning much, for reasons wholly unrelated to the quality of the teachers. They were stuck in a lousy model that doesn’t and can’t work for the majority of students. Again, herding a bunch of kids into a room to teach them the same thing at the same time in the same way is just a stupid idea. It creates obstacles to learning that even the best teaching can’t overcome.
In all fairness, since I ultimately take the SMOD position, I shouldn’t take issue with another’s pessimism.
Yet I nod to Emerson’s hobgoblin and say: Are you kidding?
All the best non-ideological research — meaning all of Erik Hanushek’s research — shows beyond any doubt that great teachers can create great educational spaces for young people. Those spaces can expand to create great schools. Perhaps even great districts or small systems.
Beyond that, it’s SMOD sadly, at least right now in America.
But do you honestly think that a teacher who graduated from high school with a 2.7 gpa, an 18 on the composite ACT, and pursued a four-year BA/MA degree in social science education at Randi Weingarten Normal School is going to create an inspiring history or economics classroom however much school spirit and concern for shaping the new generation of leaders he or she may possess?
Now, a top-notch high school student with a 30 on the ACT and master’s in history or economics , and a passion for his or her subject, at least has a chance.
Most of my great teachers cared far more for their subject than their students. I found that inspiring.
Gifted teachers can certainly create great experiences and accomplish wonderful things. But a system that requires giftedness–where simple competence and diligence won’t do–is bound to fail. We can no more expect every teacher to be a Marva Collins or Jaime Escalante than we can expect every engineer to be an Edison or every sales rep to be Zig Ziglar. In schools simple competence and diligence are the best we can hope for in most cases, and, as you rightly point out, often not even that. Better to let those gifted teachers set up shop in the marketplace.
It is definitely the unions that are a huge problem, that and the educational bureaucracy in general. Also school is such a cultural thing in our society, we want our kids to experience the whole school thing because that’s what we experienced and don’t know any better. It is so out of the mindset for many Americans for alternatives to education because it is ingrained in our culture, we structure our whole lives around it especially once you have children. Kindergarten at 5 years old and your locked into that schedule until they graduate high school then they go to college. When I say to people that we should dismantle the entire educational system in this country and go to a more market based system , also teenagers should have jobs and learn a vocation and if they feel that they need more education in order to expand their knowledge of that vocation then they should go to college but it’s not always necessarily ,that blows their mind they think I’m nuts and can’t imagine any other system that could educate their kids
I don’t disagree.
How old are your kids? If they are between 11 and 13 they could do a live online great books program which accounts for 75% of schooling and it is very low cost.
This is as clear and reasonable an argument for vouchers that I have seen. What people need to understand is that this would empower parents.