Ignorance, Stupidity and Cluelessness in Our Schools

Don said:

Bureaucracy makes for lousy schools, poor curricula, and some teachers that are missed as your later post illustrates. It's not the major cause of teacher shortages, however.

::snipped for brevity::

Had schools not been monopolized by the government, there would have been places for more top-notch, well-paid teachers in some schools, and fewer positions for drones who chose to go into teaching because the certificate's relatively easy to get.

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You forgot one other major component: in the forties, fifties, and sixties, bright women who wanted careers were steered into teaching or nursing to the exclusion of law, medicine, engineering, or other professions. Women who were good at math taught boys who went on to design rocket ships, they didn't get the chance to build them themselves. There were "help wanted: male" and "help wanted: female" lists in the papers. Even into the seventies, a lot of professions still were not open to the brightest girls, and high school guidance counselors strongly encouraged them to go into traditionally female jobs.
They don't do that now, and most of those smart girls are avoiding teaching like the plague. Meantime, those smart girls of the fifties and sixties are retiring, or have already done so. Those left teaching, at least in my county's schools, are (barring a few undeniable flashes of brilliance) pretty much the B Team.
Then you hamper those teachers with ridiculous rules and constraints, give them a fairly needy (and frequently without home training) bunch of kids, a school board more interested in scheduling the right holidays off than in whether the kids are learning science, and it's a recipe for disaster.

Jenan Mac said:

You forgot one other major component: in the forties, fifties, and sixties, bright women who wanted careers were steered into teaching or nursing to the exclusion of law, medicine, engineering, or other professions. Women who were good at math taught boys who went on to design rocket ships, they didn't get the chance to build them themselves. There were "help wanted: male" and "help wanted: female" lists in the papers. Even into the seventies, a lot of professions still were not open to the brightest girls, and high school guidance counselors strongly encouraged them to go into traditionally female jobs.
They don't do that now, and most of those smart girls are avoiding teaching like the plague. Meantime, those smart girls of the fifties and sixties are retiring, or have already done so. Those left teaching, at least in my county's schools, are (barring a few undeniable flashes of brilliance) pretty much the B Team.
Then you hamper those teachers with ridiculous rules and constraints, give them a fairly needy (and frequently without home training) bunch of kids, a school board more interested in scheduling the right holidays off than in whether the kids are learning science, and it's a recipe for disaster.

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Agreed. And it will only get worse. our education system is so far behind those of nations like Japan that there's almost on way to catch up. Especially considering that all the things you mentioned will never be reversed.

I'll site an example that I can attest ot personally. When I was in the third grade, we spent most of our time learning and very little time playing. A friend of mine has an 8 year old daughter in the third grade. Her class spends at LEAST one day a week (usually Fridays) just watching cartoons most of the day while the teacher sits and watches. These are THIRD GRADERS!

Part of the problem is the system itself. They're so desperate for teachers (since fewer educated people WANT to teach given the restrictive rules and lousy pay) that they'll pretty much hire any buffoon to teach a class. It's the blind leading the blind. I know a woman (wife of a guy I work with) who is a teacher and is planning on finding another job. she's a good teacher but she said she just can't do it anymore. She said if you so much as raise your voice to a kid, you can be fired. Would you want to teach under those conditions? I wouldn't. And she doesn't even teach full classes as she does ESL, so I can imagine what good teachers of 30-kid classes feel like. (Assuming there are any good ones left. She told me a few weeks ago that some of the teachers don't even draw up their own lesson plans, they download pre-made ones off of a website.)

The school boards are incompitent, as others have said. Our local school board cut funding for a second computer lab at the high school, but in the same year they alloted a ton of money to expand the field house on the friggin football field. At least they've got their priorities straight. (This would be less of a crock were our football team not one of the worst in the state. That's like bailing out AIG.)

Don said:

Bureaucracy makes for lousy schools, poor curricula, and some teachers that are missed as your later post illustrates. It's not the major cause of teacher shortages, however.

Then one day, the government took over most 1-12 education, severely limiting the pool of available teaching jobs to those that paid a salary that the school bureaucrats and the unions decided was fair.

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OK, I've got a lot to say about this post, because so much of it is so wrong.

Then one day, the government took over most 1-12 education, severely limiting the pool of available teaching jobs to those that paid a salary that the school bureaucrats and the unions decided was fair.

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In the U.S., public (i.e. government-run) education has always been the primary source of education since large numbers of children started attending schools. Always. Other than Catholic schools, private education has historically been available only to those from wealthy families, and scrupulously designed to exclude all but the elite students (usually meaning those with money, occasionally meaning those with exceptional academic talent).

Before the teachers' unions came along, salaries were lower, not higher.

Had schools not been monopolized by the government, there would have been places for more top-notch, well-paid teachers in some schools, and fewer positions for drones who chose to go into teaching because the certificate's relatively easy to get.

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The work I had to do to get a teaching credential was a great deal more rigorous and time consuming than the work I had to do to get my M.S. in electrical engineering and my M.B.A. Between the coursework and the student teaching (which involved the same kind of lesson planning a full-time teacher has to do), I had no free time for a year.

As for these "well-paid" jobs, where is the money going to come from? I really don't think the public is going to pony up extra money to subsidize a system of private education with no influence over the curriculum and standards. And if the public is, the public is a really stupid public. And remember, most families can't afford to spend what it would take to send their kids to a private school on their own. Furthermore, under your theory, private schools should be able to pay much higher salaries than public schools. But they don't.

As for the administrative issues, if you build an organization that's not responsible for making a profit, but rather responsible for propagating its own existance, you get a bureaucracy. Bureaucracies attract bureaucrats.

The only thing odd about the current educational system is why so few people really understand why it's gone so horribly wrong.

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Really? I'll tell you this. Hewlett-Packard, one of my former employers, and one of the world's most famous and successful companies, is every bit as bureaucratic in its operations as any of the school districts I've worked for. More so, actually, and they have much higher administration-to-employee ratio than the school districts I've worked for. The schools are not over-administrated compared to private sector organizations.

clintl said:

OK, I've got a lot to say about this post, because so much of it is so wrong.

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Perhaps according to the NEA and FedGov. There's no agenda there, though, is there?

clintl said:

In the U.S., public (i.e. government-run) education has always been the primary source of education since large numbers of children started attending schools. Always. Other than Catholic schools, private education has historically been available only to those from wealthy families, and scrupulously designed to exclude all but the elite students (usually meaning those with money, occasionally meaning those with exceptional academic talent).

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Yes, and what a great job public education has done of dumbing down the citizenry. From Wikipedia:

The school system remained largely private and unorganized until the 1840s. In fact, the first national census conducted in 1840 indicated that near-universal (about 97%) literacy among the white population had been achieved. The same data tables demonstrate that of the 1.8 millions girls between five and fifteen (and 1.88 million boys of the same age) about 55% attended the primary schools and academies.

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From America the Illiterate

There are over 42 million American adults, 20 percent of whom hold high school diplomas, who cannot read, as well as the 50 million who read at a fourth- or fifth-grade level. Nearly a third of the nation’s population is illiterate or barely literate. And their numbers are growing by an estimated 2 million a year. But even those who are supposedly literate retreat in huge numbers into this image-based existence. A third of high school graduates, along with 42 percent of college graduates, never read a book after they finish school. Eighty percent of the families in the United States last year did not buy a book.

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Wow, we've certainly gotten a great benefit from public education.

clintl said:

Before the teachers' unions came along, salaries were lower, not higher.

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Cite? Everything is up today, due to the destruction of the dollar. Let's compare apples to apples by using CPI-averaged salaries and comparing them at various periods to doctors and lawyers, which was the issue I was addressing. I'd be particularly interested in the relative salaries of teachers, lawyers and doctors on the frontier in the 1800's.

clintl said:

The work I had to do to get a teaching credential was a great deal more rigorous and time consuming than the work I had to do to get my M.S. in electrical engineering and my M.B.A. Between the coursework and the student teaching (which involved the same kind of lesson planning a full-time teacher has to do), I had no free time for a year.

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Yes, but the work is much less than that for a doctor or a lawyer, as we were discussing those particular professions.

clintl said:

As for these "well-paid" jobs, where is the money going to come from? I really don't think the public is going to pony up extra money to subsidize a system of private education with no influence over the curriculum and standards. And if the public is, the public is a really stupid public. And remember, most families can't afford to spend what it would take to send their kids to a private school on their own. Furthermore, under your theory, private schools should be able to pay much higher salaries than public schools. But they don't.

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From The Real Cost of Public Schools

In yesterday’s Washington Post I pointed out that DC public schools are spending about $24,600 per pupil this school year – roughly $10,000 more than the average for area private schools. There wasn’t room to explain those estimates in the Post, so I provide the details here.

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Private schools today are much more cost effective than the public school system. Private schools in DC, for example, cost about 60% of the public schools, as the article above shows. If those funds weren't already diverted by the government, people could indeed afford to send their schools to the less-expensive private schools, and those private schools could afford to raise their rates somewhat to pay for higher salaries.

clintl said:

Really? I'll tell you this. Hewlett-Packard, one of my former employers, and one of the world's most famous and successful companies, is every bit as bureaucratic in its operations as any of the school districts I've worked for. More so, actually, and they have much higher administration-to-employee ratio than the school districts I've worked for. The schools are not over-administrated compared to private sector organizations.

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Holding up a mega-corporation as an example of an over-bureaucratized nightmare won't get any disagreement from me, but again, that's apples and oranges. A mega-corp of 150,000 employees is certainly going to have a larger administrative overhead percentage than a school district of a few hundred or even a few thousand employees.

All I have is antecdotal evidence from my sister, whose career was spent as a principal in public schools, and whose granddaughter is now attending private school. Her stance is that public education is greatly over-administered compared to the private schools she's dealt with.

One thing to note-- private schools do not have to take any special needs students. They may, but they can turn away the deaf, blind, those with emotional disorders, or other things that require extra money. They can even turn away kids who get in trouble or fall behind-- they don't have to help them. Public schools do still have to spend money, time, and manpower on special needs kids of all flavors, at least until the kids are 16.

But I do agree that the administration in public schools has some serious issues with unnecessary layers that cost a disproportionate amount. Though, my bias comes from working in a small program where the boss doesn't make much more than the rest of us. It's also a program where all of us there are aware of the financial issues we face and don't ignore them-- the district that we're part of has had some serious budgeting problems with everyone getting raises even as the funding per student is near-stagnated and other costs are soaring.

Something to be aware of, though, is that the public does not always get the whole story. For example, in Michigan, for years and years, the state paid for the state troopers to inspect the buses. A few years back, the state said the schools would pay for it-- but the state did NOT give them the money that had been used to pay for it. So the schools got a brand new expense, but no brand new money to pay for it. This in a time when enrollment has also been dropping (as people are fleeing Michigan in search of jobs.)

Right. Private schools don't have to take special needs students. They don't have to take EL students and the extra costs and burdens that come along with them. They can cherry pick their admittances. When family socioeconomic factors are taken into account, the public schools are doing just as well at educating kids as the private schools.

clintl said:

Right. Private schools don't have to take special needs students. They don't have to take EL students and the extra costs and burdens that come along with them. They can cherry pick their admittances. When family socioeconomic factors are taken into account, the public schools are doing just as well at educating kids as the private schools.

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I don't have as much time as i'd like to jump into this argument, but this is a key point that I don't think Don (and others) have factored into 'private schools will solve everything' model.

There is no apples to apples comparison to private schools and public schools because of the cherry picking by private schools.

But I think the private school model will not work for one simple reason. The magnitude of what is required.

There are some things that a 'for profit' model is not a good fit and public education is one of them.

The infrastructure requirements for teaching all Americans (5 - 18yr olds) is beyond the private sector. Then throw in those kids who really don't want to learn or who are not very 'smart' for lack of a better word.

You will inadvertantly create a system which will shun kids with lower aptitudes because 'private schools' DO NOT HAVE TO ACCEPT STUDENTS!!!!

Scores are low. Sorry, go somewhere else. Behavior problems? Sorry, go somewhere else.


Another factor worth considering when comparing statistics is the nature and extent of knowledge over the past century.

The amount of knowledge that kids have to learn now is orders of magnitude higher than they were back in the 1800s, so those statistics are not really applicable IMO.

I think it is a mistake to point at literacy rates in America and then blame it on public education. A failure in one area doesn't necessarily mean it is due to a failure in another area. Just because I have a stomach ache doesn't necessarily mean it is due to what I ate. Conversely, that failure doesn't necessarily mean that private schools are a solution.

Now, how could you prove me wrong?

Make it an apples to apples comparison. Draw from the same pool of students as does public education. Ensure that the public schools have the same resouces (computers, books, student vs teacher ratio, etc) as does the private school.

Then do your comparison. If the kids at the private school fair better, then your argument has some teeth.

But I would be doubtful. I believe the results would be the same.

Because the reason, the real root cause for why private schools do better than public school are:

1) Resources
2) Cherry picking of students
3) Student Teacher ratio.

There is nothing mystical or magical about why private schools do better than public schools. Make it a level playing field, and you'd get the same results.

Mel...

cethklein said:

Yet last year in Florida, a judge gave a pedophile (on his SECOND conviction) probation for raping a little boy.

I'm sorry, but our legal system is a crock. If people start taking the law into their own hands, I'm going to prop my feet up and watch. I can't blame them one damn bit.

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That would make for a great novel, actually. Thanks for the idea.

And, just so you know, here in NJ, private school teachers DO NOT have to be certified as teachers. They can have experience in their subject matter, but don't have to have a teaching cert.

And they also make jack. Not to knock private school teachers, I know a few who are really innovative, and that's the area where there're ALLOWED to shine. Along with having small classes and not having to teach to a test, they've got it made. I loved the environment more than anything when I interviewed at a local private school last year. I would have loved to teach there.

Their starting salary was about what my husband makes at his public works job. Seriously, paying educators the same as a job where only a HS diploma and a stong back is required?

So, while I know people all WANT private education, I'd be looking into the credentials of the teachers before I sent my child to one.