Public education is under a brutal attack in the United States. The right-wing campaign to undermine the school system started many years ago with the effort to place zealots on school boards. But right now in Wisconsin, Ohio, and many other states we see a full-scale attack on public service unions. This offensive targets teachers, who arguably have some of the most powerful unions in the country.
In February this year MoveOn delegates from the Clallam council met with Rep. Norm Dicks’s staff as part of the national MoveOn organization’s efforts to send a strong message to Congress about how progressives feel. One major area we left out of those discussions was the issue of education reform. It didn’t fit neatly into the theme of jobs and the economy, which is the topmost issue. But education is critical to both jobs and a robust economy.
Education is the final link in the standard of living chain. Our modern standard of living is based on the use of technology. That technology starts with research, but it can’t be effectively applied unless people understand it and can properly use it. In other words, education turns technical ideas into practical applications. It’s difficult to apply technology properly without good education.
Why is our public education system under attack? This is politically motivated. Reality has a “well-known liberal bias”. Any educational system dedicated to truth and developing well-rounded, independent individuals is a threat to the established order, which depends in part on ignorance to maintain political power. The last thing The Bandits want is a bunch of smart, creative, thinking individuals taking a close look at the existing system.
Also, as a practical matter, taking over and controlling school boards provides a lot of leverage to alter the political landscape. It develops budding (right-wing) politicians by training them how to get elected where the stakes are relatively low. And, to the degree that this influences what’s taught in the schools, it can have long-term impact on voters’ choices.
The school takeover strategy has already resulted in demands that schools teach lessons on right-wing heroes in American history classes. One cannot teach about Phyllis Schlafly without teaching about her reasons for opposing the ERA, so this promotes conservative political philosophy.
But, probably the more important reason for this attack on public education is to move kids out of the public schools to private ones, where it is easier to propagandize them. To this end, vilifying the public schools serves the political purpose of the right. I think this is why we are seeing such vitriolic attacks on teachers’ unions and teachers themselves. It certainly has nothing to do with improving the quality of the schools.
How do we know? We know because teaching is a “service business”. Based on research into quality improvement we know that the root cause of quality problems in a service business has only a one-in-ten chance of being caused by the people involved. Nine out of ten times the problem stems from the environment or the methods used.
While it’s easy, when problems occur, to jump to the conclusion that some person is to blame, quality improvement methodology suggests we should look at other factors first. If someone is ignoring the probabilities to go after one aspect of the problem, chances are there’s a hidden motivation. Yet the probabilities suggest that the root cause of quality problems in most schools is not the teachers.
And, it isn’t hard to see how these other factors would impact schools. Public schools operate in the “environment” of their local communities. If the community is supportive of good education and has the resources to back up that commitment, chances are very good that this will result in good schools there. But the last part of that assumption is telling. Not every community in our country is “above average” in the resources it can bring to bear.
Educational quality as an issue resurfaced for me as I tried to catch up on my back reading of The Nation magazine. In “Beyond Silver Bullets” (10 January 2011, pages 18-23), authors Pedro Noguera and Randi Weingarten take on some of the bad reform efforts that come out of the ongoing attack on teachers’ unions. Are teachers’ unions to blame for poor quality in the schools?
…there is no evidence that the presence of unions impedes academic success in American schools. Consider this: in states like Massachusetts and Minnesota, where public schools are heavily unionized, students earn the highest scores on the National Assessment of Educational Progress, the standardized exam known as the nation’s report card.... What’s more, in almost all the nations that outperform the United States in education, teachers are unionized and teaching is a respected profession.
What is to blame, at least in part, is the environment:
In many of the most disadvantaged schools, the non-academic needs of poor students—for health, housing and a variety of social supports—are often unmet. Invariably, when the basic needs of children are ignored, the task of educating them is much more challenging.
This is not the answer that the right wing wants to hear. What it suggests is that we should be working to address the disadvantages of the community, first. In fact, this is one of the things that national funding for schools is meant to address. It ensures that schools in the poorest neighborhoods can get access to at least some money from the federal government. This helps to level the playing field.
Not that economics is the only reason we spend money on education at the national level. Education is also important for national defense. The country cannot afford troops that can’t read, write or figure. Yet, we’ve actually seen calls to end the Department of Education. It’s not clear whether these people are uneducated or just unpatriotic!
I’d like to suggest that the way to improve the quality of education is to concentrate on what we know works.
- Emphasize the New Three Rs: Research, Reason and Results.
- Develop community-based evaluation of schools.
- Bring all elementary education back into the public school systems.
- Make adequate funding of schools the responsibility of the federal government.
- Treat teachers as professionals, deserving of the respect afforded other professionals.
We need to stop looking at education as the process of instilling facts into brains, and start looking at it as the process of helping the individual develop their ability to use their brains to understand and improve the world. To do that, I suggest a new “Three Rs”. The New Three Rs moves the emphasis away from fact memorization to the active process of productively engaging in the world. To get proper results humans research the facts, then use reasoning, conscience and perspective on those facts. The New Three Rs create “alive” education, not fact memorization and regurgitation, as we often see in dead education.
Evaluation of schools should be community-based, not nationally driven. You cannot properly judge a school system in isolation from its community. If a school is radically underperforming, the first intervention should be to learn how the community holds its schools and address that environmental issue. Teacher performance cannot be accurately assessed unless the community’s relationship with its schools is healthy. After that, we should look into teaching methodology and make sure that the school is using the appropriate methodology backed up by adequate funding. Only after these measures have been taken is it productive to look at teacher performance—where the other 10% of problems might occur.
And here I should mention that in terms of raising the quality of schools we have much better places to spend our money than on trying to optimize the kinds of teachers we have. Firing bad teachers or trying to manipulate them through performance pay would be a very unproductive way to improve quality, even if teacher quality were the main issue. We draw our teachers from a large pool of trainees and we have hundreds of thousands of teachers working in the school system. To raise quality even 1% requires a vast expenditure. That expenditure would be properly addressed to teacher training (in the colleges), not to merit pay, if we wanted to be effective. But even there, we would need to work diligently to raise the quality of the people in that population in order to have any noticeable change.
The sad truth is that we could fire the lousiest 10,000 teachers in the country with little effect on overall quality of education because the absolute number of teachers is so large. And, we would then draw their replacements from the same pool of trainees, so that over time this would have no effect at all. Any improvement we made would rapidly evaporate the moment we stopped expending the effort. To sustain any improvement by improving the “teacher stock” in our schools we would need to keep the effort up indefinitely.
Contrast that with changing a community’s attitude about its schools, which might be done with essentially no money at all. Or, contrast it with changing teaching methods (and the facilities/equipment we provide), which would likely create a permanent improvement with a one-time expenditure. Obviously, just in terms of effectiveness, concentrating on the quality of teachers is our least effective means of achieving quality in education. We only hear so much about it because it serves the political agenda of certain well-funded interest groups.
This is where we need to dig in politically, as well. Concepts such as charter schools and school vouchers were created, I think, as an adjunct to attacking the public schools. The implicit message behind setting up a charter school or giving school vouchers is that public school teachers aren’t good enough. We should remember that part of the right-wing motivation for attacking teachers is to attack unions. The right wing attacks public unions because it helps undermine unionism in general and also because teachers’ unions are some of the strongest unions in the country.
On top of which, spending money on vouchers and schools outside the regular public system serves to defund public schools, making it harder for them to perform well, and leading to a downward cycle. So, we need to end vouchers and other expenditures that are outside the public school system.
Uniformity and consistency in funding is also important to the system as a whole. We should think about this in terms of ensuring that whatever is considered a minimum standard for a rich community should also be the minimum standard for the poorest community. We should use this standard to set a minimum funding level for the Department of Education as a broad matter of public policy.
And, finally, we need to restore respect for educators, especially classroom teachers. We can do that by reminding people that we require above-average education to be an educator. And we should remind people of the benefits these professionals bring to the community.
I went to public schools for my entire elementary and high school experience, first through twelfth grade. In that time I encountered many excellent professionals and got a first-rate education, which served me well in college and throughout my life. I would like to think that this is the birthright of every American citizen.
—Rich Wingerter
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