How do we fix education?

[RobinFinderson]

Things were going south with public education before the economic downturn, but now the wheels are coming off the wagon all over the country. If your kids are in a public school, chances are that they will be poorly prepared for college, and will lack skills to seriously compete in an international labor market. Our failing education system represents a much greater threat to the nation's security than terrorism and global warming.

So how do we fix this mess? We need some comprehensive reform, and fast.

[RobinFinderson]

Vouchers:

Conservatives tend to see vouchers as a solution to failing schools. I like school choice, and I don't think that students should be prisoners in failing schools just because their parents are too poor to move to a better neighborhood, so on the face of it, vouchers aren't such a bad idea.

But here is the problem with vouchers. Failing schools will experience student drain. Those students will bus out to 'successful' schools in other neighborhoods, which would need to be required by law to accept them if the voucher program is to be taken seriously. Those schools will then need to fill up their parking lots with double-wides to accommodate the influx of students. The poor students will bring their poor people problems with them, and the successful schools will struggle with the same problems that make poor schools fail. The result will be the failure of schools in good neighborhoods. Believe it. It is already happening.

Elite private schools that get to cherry-pick the best students and the best teachers are immune to these problems because vouchers do not cover the cost of tuition, so these schools don't have to worry about the problems that come with poor people. Wealthy people see the vouchers as a tuition break to these private schools, and they don't give a crap about the public schools that will be ruined by the voucher program. If we are going to go with vouchers and school choice, I think that it would be critical to ensure that NO vouchers be spent at private schools that require additional tuition above the face value of the voucher.

[Jacob]

I figured this out during my long drive back from Vegas at 2 am.

1. Eliminate the Department of Education.
2. If not 1, then secede from the Union (this is preferred as it's benefits go far beyond education).
3. Eliminate most administrative and janatorial costs (kids can clean).
4. Stop paying for breakfast and athletics.
5. Stop building world class facilities for kids to attend school in.
6. Use savings to hire more teachers and get teacher student ratio down.
7. Reduce time spent with teacher by using independent/internet study.
8. Use extra teacher time and savings to further reduce student/teacher ratio and give students more individual or small group tutoring by teacher.
9. Stop sending so many people to college.

[RobinFinderson]

Teacher accountability:

I am as fed up as anyone with bad teachers. There are plenty of them with job security provided by unions and bad administrators (who find it easier to transfer them around rather than do the paperwork necessary to terminate them). The politics of bad teachers means that they disproportionately settle into the worst schools, the very places where they will do the most damage.

We have tons of teachers who barely know their subjects. We have tons of teachers who are bad teachers. I'm all for teacher accountability, but how do we do it professionally? The administration that is supposed to be ferreting out bad teachers is unwilling to do the work necessary to get rid of them, and 'value added' models of teacher evaluation (those models that measure teacher success by student outcomes) are not very precise instruments when it comes to good teachers in bad schools, nor do they measure teacher success outside of those content areas that are deeply tested (English, math, science).

I want to hold teachers accountable, but I fear that we lack administrators who are capable of doing the job right. To really evaluate a teacher's performance would require classroom observation and lesson plan evaluation, but that kind of evaluation would be incredibly expensive.

[Sleeping in EQ]

Merit-based pay for administrators.

[RobinFinderson]

Merit-based pay for administrators.

That would require a new and expensive level of bureaucracy, which I think is unlikely to happen.

My own fix would be to have teachers take on more admin work, do it for teacher pay (currently significantly less than admin work), and cut back their class load to make up the difference. At least this way if the Admin work was going to continue to go undone, it would be undone at teacher salary level as opposed to admin salary level, and the teachers could use the extra time to improve their classroom product.

[BigFatMeanie]

Random thoughts on the subject:

- Why does public funding of education always equate to public operation of education? Why can't education be publicly funded but privately operated?

- It's an article of faith that more money = better results. There is, however, much data that eviscerates this idea. Exhibit A: The Washington DC public school system.

- As much as it pains statists to admit it, parental involvement and home life have a bigger impact on education outcomes than any other factor. Education begins and ends in the home. Failing educations are largely a result of failing families. Until you fix failing families you will not fix failing education.

[PaloAltoCougar]

I would eliminate tenure. The 60 Minutes bit on education last Sunday, and the very good documentary Waiting for Superman, have further strengthened this opinion.

[happyone]

Teacher accountability:

I am as fed up as anyone with bad teachers. There are plenty of them with job security provided by unions and bad administrators (who find it easier to transfer them around rather than do the paperwork necessary to terminate them). The politics of bad teachers means that they disproportionately settle into the worst schools, the very places where they will do the most damage....

A real world example of this. As I've said before, my Dad was a principal of the Spec Ed school in Davis County. In 25 yrs, He tried to fire one teacher for cause. He spent 2 years building the case. In the end she threatened the school district with a discrimination law suit. His story is that the school district came to him with an offer to settle the law suit, but they would pursue it if that is what he wanted. By that time he just wanted to get rid of her so, the district let her resign with no comments on her record. Dad said she ended up in the LA School district. After that experience, he opinion was it wasn't worth the effort to fire a teacher.

[RobinFinderson]

Random thoughts on the subject:

- Why does public funding of education always equate to public operation of education? Why can't education be publicly funded but privately operated?

If you were alive during the 90's you may remember the public debacle over the Pentagon spending $500 on a hammer. The equivalent of the $500 hammer is all over Iraq in the form of private contractors doing many of the same jobs as soldiers for FOUR TO FIVE TIMES the pay (a fact that harms soldier morale in an arena where more than half of the boots on the ground belong to contractors). While the idea of increasing competition for public contracts seems good on paper, because competition should drive down prices, the reality is that these public/private Frankenstein's monsters tend to LIMIT competition to only those contractors who have purchased access to the politicians in charge of doling out the contracts. The result is that costs go up, and a good part of that inflated price is the cost of paying of pols for continued access so the contractors can continue to get contracts.

- It's an article of faith that more money = better results. There is, however, much data that eviscerates this idea. Exhibit A: The Washington DC public school system.

You have probably now read a couple of my rants against the admins who don't do any real work (at Faith's school, one Admin recently described his duties as 'walking the halls with security and chaperon sporting events and dances.' Holy eff!). There are not watchers watching the watchers, and public education admins are full of waste with no system to get rid of it.

To the extent that increasing funding goes to admin, I can understand why it doesn't result in improvement. But the studies that you are talking about tend to measure the difference between 25 and 30 pupils in a class. What people fail to understand is that we are WAY beyond that. We are now talking about 45 pupils per class, with teachers expected to teach more classes. We are also talking about the wholesale elimination of art and sports in public education. Two days ago the ENTIRE arts faculty at Faith's school was pinkslipped. There will be no more marching band, no industrial arts, no more yearbook, no more choir, and no more art classes for kids at Faith's school. The wheels are coming off the wagon.

- As much as it pains statists to admit it, parental involvement and home life have a bigger impact on education outcomes than any other factor. Education begins and ends in the home. Failing educations are largely a result of failing families. Until you fix failing families you will not fix failing education.

Champions of public education will be the first to point out these problems, since they also help explain why public schools in poor neighborhoods do poorly... most of the blame shouldn't be directed at the schools or teachers. The problem, of course, is that the education at these poor schools is also inferior, so that good students with good families are turning out terrible results because the schools in the poorest neighborhoods fail to give them a good education. For example, as a result of the budget cuts, several MATH classes at Faith's school have been taught be substitutes for all of the current school year. This means that the math teachers are not necessarily good at math, and there is no continuity in the students' curriculum. As a fan of math, I have long seen the subject as one of the best keys to students improving their situation in life, yet even good students at Faith's school are not getting a good math education. The wheels have fallen off the wagon!

[RobinFinderson]

I would eliminate tenure. The 60 Minutes bit on education last Sunday, and the very good documentary Waiting for Superman, have further strengthened this opinion.

This would be totally fine with me, if the cut in job security comes with a significant increase in pay.

[wuapinmon]

STEM cannot blossom without the rich humus of the arts.

[PaloAltoCougar]

This would be totally fine with me, if the cut in job security comes with a significant increase in pay.

Agreed. I think most teachers are underpaid, and that a small minority (certainly less than 20%, and probably single digits) are incompetent, with an exceptionally large and negative effect on the the overall quality of education at their schools.

The charter school featured on 60 Minutes has no tenure, but teachers are paid $125,000 a year, high even by NYC standards. They have to work a lot harder, and do a lot of the admin work that was once performed by a bloated staff (freeing up more money for the teachers), but every teacher interviewed, including two who were terminated, spoke very highly of that approach.

[Green Monstah]

There are no easy fixes, but I think we have to take a "Tiger Mom" approach. Let the kids who are excelling, excel. Let the kids who are failing, fail. Don't slow down everyone in the name of self-esteem.

In elementary school, we had three classes per grade. Each was assigned a letter (A were the smart kids, B average, C below average). This was tough for the Cs or the Bs who wanted to be As, but we learned a ton in the A class. Around 5th grade they did away with the system, and I got pretty bored with school.

I don't know that there is an easy answer to this, but I do feel like we hold certain kids back because we're stuck in a win-lose paradigm (I hate it when I quote Covey).

[RobinFinderson]

Agreed. I think most teachers are underpaid, and that a small minority (certainly less than 20%, and probably single digits) are incompetent, with an exceptionally large and negative effect on the the overall quality of education at their schools.

The charter school featured on 60 Minutes has no tenure, but teachers are paid $125,000 a year, high even by NYC standards. They have to work a lot harder, and do a lot of the admin work that was once performed by a bloated staff (freeing up more money for the teachers), but every teacher interviewed, including two who were terminated, spoke very highly of that approach.

I'll have to watch the piece to have a full opinion, but I like the sound of it. I wonder how the cost of education compares to the regular public schools. Here in LA the Gates Foundation has helped fund some incredible looking schools (world class architecture in poor neighborhoods, which I think is a good thing) that produce mediocre outcomes. They are only marginally better than their pure public counterparts, but they operate at much higher costs. These schools would not be operable without piles of free private capital. Is it the same with the school featured in the 60 Minutes?