“Every complex problem has a simple solution that’s wrong.” – Albert Einstein
On Kuro5hin there’s an op-ed about performance-based pay for teachers to solve the woes of the education system.
I have long been of the belief that anyone working in computing should have their understanding of computers informed by some other discipline. For me, that discipline was education, so when I was in college I took all the education courses I could. At the end of four years, I had fulfilled essentially all of the requirements for a teaching certificate except for the student teaching. All of that is to say, this is a topic that I’ve cared about, read about, and thought about for a very long time. I also come from a long line of teachers, so perhaps it’s in my blood to be personally involved in educational issues.
The public education system in this country is ill. It is the slave to so many different masters that it’s a miracle anyone learns anything at all. Many people have a pet theory as to the root cause of the problem, and thus how to fix it. I don’t; I think there are several root causes, all intermixed in a hopeless jumble. Let me throw out some data points to characterize how complex this is:
- If a teacher has six classes of 30 students each, each student has a homework assignment due each day, and the teacher takes a mere 1 minute to grade it, that’s 3 hours of work every evening for the teacher. You can imagine how easy it would be to overwork teachers to death – thus the rise of the NEA (the teachers’ union) and collective bargaining.
- On the flip side, in many states the NEA has become far too powerful. In California, hiring and layoffs are done on a strict seniority basis.
- Despite the fact that teachers’ salaries are getting better, in many upper-middle-class areas the teachers can’t afford to live in the neighborhood in which they work. The result is that teaching is often seen as a lowly profession – and ironically, children of affluent families are told to work hard in school so they don’t end up being teachers.
- Quality of results in education has been shown time and time again to correlate to two (related) factors: teacher:student ratio, and the extent to which the curriculum can be customized to the learner’s speed, style and interests.
- Of the universe of possible factors, the one that SAT scores correlate mostly highly to is mean family income.
- Curriculum is controlled at the state level. I suppose at one time that was a good thing, when the economies of different states were much more diverse, and when migration was limited. Today it makes little sense.
- Actually, the last statement is only true in theory. It turns out that the Texas State Board of Education, and in particular their textbook approval subcommittee, wields almost unchecked power as most of the other states simply adopt whatever they do. If you are writing a textbook, you do it based upon what you can get Texas to approve, otherwise no one will use it. If it worries you that curriculum is controlled by a state deep in the bible belt… well, you’re not alone.
- Walk into any public school, anywhere in the country, and as for the list of goals of the school. #1 on the list: “To create good citizens.”
- You don’t have a right to an education in this country. It’s not in the Constitution, it’s not in any law.
- You do actually have an obligation to attend public school, or an approved substitute (private or home), up until a certain age or completion level.
- What is a teacher supposed to do when a student can’t concentrate regularly falls asleep in class because he or she was working late to help pay the family bills, and/or didn’t get any breakfast because there isn’t any food? That’s certainly neither the teacher’s, nor the student’s, fault.
- The majority of funding for public schools comes from local property taxes. Meaning that the better the neighborhood, the better the school.
- The Americans with Disabilities Act requires all public schools to provide appropriate accommodations to students with disabilities. For small school districts or schools with limited budgets, this can be a significant drain on their funds. This is a true no-win scenario: choosing between the students who most need help, or helping the most students.
Public education is a Gordian knot of problems. Any simple solution will be wrong. It is a system in need of a drastic overhaul, if the U.S. is to remain competitive in the 21st century.
OK, let me play devil’s advocate, and take the other side. One of the leading thinkers of the Communist movement in Russia (apologies, I can’t remember which – I think it was Engels) said that the first goal of any society is to reproduce itself in the next generation, and its primary means for doing that is the schools. It follow that the U.S. schools are doing exactly what society wants them to do: create an exact duplicate of today’s society, economic stratification and all, in the next generation. Someone wrote in Kuro5hin’s comments area that a long time ago students regularly learned much more rigorous curricula than they do today. Perhaps, but that was a very tiny fraction of the students. Back in that time, a HUGE fraction of Americans were illiterate. The stratification in education was much greater than today. By some estimates, today 70% to 80% of the U.S. population is literate, and it continues to trend upwards, but there are no internal pressures upon the education system to change the status quo. The people who value education, and can pay for it, are getting it and ending up in positions of power. The people who can’t, don’t. That’s approximately how our society was 100 years ago, that’s how it is today, and all things being equal, that’s how it will be tomorrow. Reagan gutted the Education Department (actually, he tried to get rid of it altogether). Bush the Elder declared himself the “Education president” and then did nothing. Bush the Lesser signed the No Child Left Untested Act into law, because he doesn’t actually want to change the outcome, and calling for more testing is the perfect way to look like you’re doing something without actually doing anything. The next step if (God forbid) he gets another four years is to pass school voucher laws, which is basically just more free money to people who can already afford private education (if your parents are poor and/or illiterate, how are they going to pick a private school for you?).
Conclusion: the politicians are playing politics, and there will be no major overhaul of the education system in this country until the external pressures become too significant to ignore. If there’s going to be a change, it won’t be coming from Texas; it’ll be coming from Europe, China and India.
There have een a lot of good and bad books written on the topic of fixing Americna education. One of my favorites for understanding just how difficult this is from the inside-out is Horace's Compromise by Ted Sizer. sizer has written many follow-ons which have come out of his work on solving problems at the school level. Also: The Underachieving School by John Holt. Two in my "how can you be so thick-headed" category are Cultural Literacy by E.D. Hirsch, and The Closing of the American Mind by Allan Bloom.
I wish I had the simple fix. I don't. But I also know that no one else does, either.
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