The Problem with Public Education By: TheMister (Tom Alden)
When you have thinkers from Jordan Peterson and Ben Shaprio on TheRight to Camilie Paglia and Jonathan Haidt on TheLeft agreeing that the American educational system has undergone a serious and damaging shift LEFT starting in about 2015… it’s important to pay attention. It’s undeniable that the philosophy in the University classroom will eventually find its way into K-12 classrooms… and those teachers will inevitably become administrators and district officials. It’s well past time that someone comes up with a way to address this problem effectively.
Hello, I’m TheMister… and I’m here to help.
Consider, for a moment, that the American Public Educational System is (basically) an industrial learning model, built on an agricultural calendar and overseen by a government bureaucracy and you’ll begin to understand why it’s such a mess.
What is an “Industrial Learning Model”??
All kids taught the same material in the same way with marginal “differentiation” and virtually NO “personalization”. The teaching targets the “average”… the middle of the bell curve… with a bias towards the lower performing students. The high achievers don’t get challenged for fear of losing the low achieving kids. In contrast, the low achieving kids tend to get more attention because the high achievers can usually take care of themselves. The way it tends to end up is: If the needs of the bottom 10% are met… the top 10% get an easy “A” because if the needs of the TOP 10% are met… the bottom 10%, struggle, fail and become disruptive. The squeaky wheel gets the grease because there simply aren’t the resources (mental or physical) for teachers to do otherwise.
Why an “Agricultural Calendar”??
Why do we have summers off? For the same reason that Centre County, Pennsylvania has made the first day of hunting season a day off of school, Osceola County, Florida cancels school on “Rodeo Day” and Athens, Georgia takes off the Friday before the Georgia/Florida game. Holding school on a day that nobody is going to be there is a waste of time and money… so why bother. Traditionally, the summer break was during harvest time. It was also a time that families would flee the cities because of the heat. In the modern era these past justifications don’t apply and the damage that a prolonged absence has on low-income kids makes it’s continuation problematic. So why continue the practice??
In a word? Bureaucracy.
How does a “Government Bureaucracy” cause problems??
How does a government bureaucracy NOT cause problems? When was the last time a bureaucracy could be called “effective” or “efficient”? Regardless of the justification for establishing a bureaucracy in the first place, the inevitable result of any bureaucratic system is it becomes top-heavy, bloated and self-justifying. If the bulk of bureaucratic power is at the local level it’s easier for the community to keep it under control. However, as the bureaucrats become less and less members of the community it becomes, naturally, less accountable. In fact, remote bureaucracies give local bureaucrats an easy excuse for policies that the local community disagrees with. “Hey, don’t blame me, it’s a State mandate.”
How the schools do actual harm.
If you think the school's primary concern is the best interests of your child or the welfare of your child, you are wrong. It's not that the school doesn't care; it's that the school can only care so much. If your child's interests conflict with the school's interests, your child will be sacrificed. The best interest of your child only matter if they coincide with the best interests of the school. For example, is it in the child's best interest to be in a classroom with peers that are more than one standard deviation above or below their academic achievement level?
If you have “A” students and “F” students in the same class the difference in ability level will prevent either one group or the other from being academically successful or maximizing their academic potential. If a third of the class is “high performing”, meaning: good readers, good writers, effective communicators, clear thinkers… and so on… while one third of the class is at the low end of the scale (Poor readers, poor writers, virtually incapable of following simple instructions) OR they refuse to put in even a minimal effort and prefer to cut-up and clown… guess who ends up being sacrificed?
That's right… the high performing students… but do you understand WHY?? It's not because the teachers don't care about the more capable kids. It's that they simply do not have the resources available to address the needs of both the high achievers and the low achievers at the same time in the same class and the more academically capable students can take care of themselves. At the end of the day they know they’ll be judged based on overall achievement of the class, so as long as they can keep the failure rate below 10% they’ll be fine. As a result they don’t challenge the top 10% because they have to spend so much time keeping the bottom 10% from failing.
Follow the Money
It's all about the funding, it's all about test scores, and it’s all about administrative bureaucrats holding their jobs and school districts keeping the families in the dark about the real failures of American public education. What about the teachers, what do they do, what CAN they do? They do the same thing… they look out for their own interests and they protect themselves, their jobs and just try to survive the best they can. The classroom teachers are the expendable assets in the educational system. As students fail, teachers take the blame because parents don't want to accept the blame and neither do the students. The students say that they're doing their best even when the teachers have evidence that they’re NOT… but nobody wants to see the evidence. Everyone asks the teacher what THEY can do… nobody tells the kid to work harder. In the end, teachers are held responsible for variables they can’t hope to control.
There are still good teachers
A lot of teachers try to do the best job that they can under the circumstances, they damage their health, spend money out of their own pockets, sacrifice time with their families… many of them are true heroes. However, over time, the conditions in the schools have continued to deteriorate. The job is getting harder, the responsibilities are mounting and there is growing pressure to do more with less every year. At the same time, the standard for what makes a “good job” is getting lower and lower. Many teachers are finding they simply cannot live under those conditions anymore and simply walk away while the parents who understand what the real situation is in American public schools (and who are able) are pulling their kids out in droves.
Big Government can’t solve a local problem
The increased centralization of education hasn’t helped. “Race to the Top”, “No Child Left Behind”, “The Elementary and Secondary Education Act”… efforts from the Federal Department of Education and national law-makers have failed over and over while efforts at returning power back to the states and families through a “voucher” system have been resisted by both politicians and teachers unions.
Even “Common-Core” started as a state initiative that was hijacked by the federal government. Many states were offered federal money to adopt Common Core and had federal funding pulled if they didn’t adopt the new learning standards.
According to groups like the American Principles Project the study of classical literature and presenting American history in its full context were replaced with the ideals of Social Justice informed by activist academic disciplines at the university level. Many students of “gender studies” became certified teachers and brought their ideological bias into the classroom with little to no push-back from administration that had become more bureaucrats than leaders.
Politicians and activists insist that all we need is “more funding” but those increased funds rarely find their way down to the classroom teachers, instead they’re used to promote and hire academic “coaches”, deans and administrators... in sort… it serves to grow the bureaucracy. Eventually they exist simply to continue to exist, their purpose become perpetuation.
How to solve the problem, and the problem with the solution
The problems we have with public education will never be fixed by the bureaucracy. A bureaucracy cannot reform itself… and they don’t voluntarily return power to the community. The only way for the American people to fix public education is to remove their children from public education.
The problem there is, as more people pull their kids out to home-school or move their kids into charter schools or private schools the bureaucracy will move to make such actions more costly or difficult. Regulations will be put into place to prevent parents from homeschooling and as demand for educational alternatives increase the cost will go up because the bureaucracy will make it difficult to open NEW schools or expand existing schools. Just take a look at how New York is fighting against charter schools that are outperforming the regular public schools. Look at the efforts of the Obama administration to close charter schools and the hate that Betsy Devos got for advocating school choice.
A voucher program has been advocated for decades, Milton Friedman talked about the need for it in the 70’s… but very little progress has been made because the bureaucracy will NOT, willingly, surrender power.
So now… we’ve examined how the American Public Educational System can be (accurately) classified as an industrial learning model, built on an agricultural calendar and overseen by a government bureaucracy… and the problems that are created by this arrangement.
NOW… what can we do about it??
Stay tuned
