The Real Axis of Evil

I was very glad to hear Obama talk about education, and especially about how our kids need education across a range of subject areas, and how we need to get away from teaching to tests.

This is all very good. I like it. But...

We got into No Child Left Behind in the first place because our public school system, broadly speaking, sucked. It was failing our kids. The fact is, it is an embarrassment. We should all be ashamed.

I am a strong believer in public education. I am a strong supporter of public school teachers. I was a public school teacher for five years. But our system of public instruction is broken beyond the ability of its traditional overseers being able to fix it. I think it is beyond reform.

There is an Stalin-esque alliance, an axis of evil, an unholy trinity that holds our public school system in a death grip. This alliance is made up of the state departments of pubic instruction, the university departments of education, and the various teacher's unions or associations.

There are good and well meaning people in each of these groups who care about our children, but the system as a system is guaranteed to look after its own interests and not that of our children or our families (or our teachers).

Throw in the federal government as in "No Child Left Behind," with it's earmarks and scoring systems, plus ladder climbing superintendents whose upward mobility depends on good scores and it all just gets worse.

Until this triumvirate is broken I see no hope for real or lasting or effective change. It will just be window dressing, moving the furniture around, sloganeering.

What OUGHT and what NEEDS to happen is that responsibility for education needs to pushed down as much as possible to the local level, even as we keep per pupil funding as even as we can. Education is simply one of those things in life that works best locally. It is, oddly, one of those things where, until local communities have to step up, they won't, and when they have to, or until they are no longer made irrelevant, they will step up.

We have to change the certification rules for teachers. Teacher certification classes mean little compared to a lot of other things that make for good teachers, like decent IQ's, knowledge of material, general knowledge, work ethic, love of students, etc. All those extra education-course requirements, along with the woefully low pay, just keep good teachers out of teaching. Students majoring in education typically have the lowest SAT scores of all the students on a college campus. Great, huh?

Smart teachers unshackled by teaching to the test (and freed from having to take a million teachers' classes at night just to be able to make a little more money) will have the time, energy, and creative freedom to plan great classes. When I taught high school physics, chemistry, and physical science I was given a course title, a lab closet filled with thirty year old junk, a chem lab with enough HCL, H2SO4, HNO3 and other stuff to eat a hole to the center of the earth, and enough sticks of Sodium to blow the water out of lake Murray. I had to pick text books, plan scope-and-sequence, order lab material, write my own tests (for which I gave partial credit on most questions since it was so much math based - so, no machine scoring for me), clean up those closets, you name it. Hard work, huge amounts of time, most nights up late preparing or grading (I think I made $13,000 my first year - oh, but I had all summer to holiday in Spain, right John?), but we had some fun and compelling classes.

We need to break up the school districts. I am not convinced these consolidated monster districts actually save us money but even if they do it's not worth it. It makes the system seem like the Queen Mary navigating the Haw River. It's just too big, too slow, too cumbersome, too "one size fits all." Break it up. Smash it. Give more leeway to the local principles. Give more freedom to the local teachers.

All the new construction in the world won't make up for poor teachers. Give me good teachers in ratty buildings over mediocre teachers in new buildings any day. With good teachers magic happens.

And Republicans, just be quiet already about merit pay. It doesn't work. There are no objective criteria that won't end up meaning more conferences, more classes, more time "in the system" under the sway of the unholy trinity. The only way to discern real merit is subjectively, and that will never fly, unless we follow a military model and promote those we know by observation worthy of promotion. I don't think that will work.

As I have said before, it is one of the hardest things in the world to be a good teacher. If you have not done it I don't think you have any idea how demanding it is. It's a 15 hour a day job. It's exhausting. And it's rewarding. But it pretty much becomes your life. I'm afraid it's also way too easy to be a bad teacher. If we raise academic entry requirements (as in, you know, med school) and raise pay substantially, teacher quality will take care of itself, and we'll just have to let the bad teachers retire out of the system.

I realize that my ideas won't in reality be passed either. But Obama is dreaming if he thinks that just casting off NCLB is going to bring in some golden era of education. It will just bring us back to the same mediocre place we were in before. That's a place I don't want to be. American public education will still suck.

Oh, and one more thing...speaking of special interests...we tend to think of such interests as corporate, Madison avenue, greedy old men in suits...but the aforementioned educational triumvirate is a triple play of special interests and lobbying. Just cross them, you'll see.