On Tue, 18 Nov 2008 11:47:44 -0500, "Ed Huntress" wrote:


"Wes" wrote in message
...
"Ed Huntress" wrote:
...

I don't know where you get your information about NEA, Wes, but I think
you're pointing a finger in the wrong direction. The problem with the NEA is
that they resist management of teachers that would improve their
performance, and weed out the bad ones. They had good reason years ago to
establish tenure systems and those reasons even exist in some places
today -- patronage employment and firings for teachers and arbitrary firings
based on political views -- but there are better ways to control the
problem. If you've been following events in Washington, DC, you'll see a
whole new approach to getting the unions out of the tenure business and it
has wide public support.


OK, so the NEA is a union with all that entails. Their goal is not
the education of the nation's youth, their goal is to get as good a deal
as possible for their members while being perceived as working
towards the education of our youth.

Most of the structural problems with public education, though, are the
result of the vast and mishandled bureaucracy of education. The fact that
it's a bureaucracy is not actually the problem; the problem is that it's a
bad one. And part of the reason it's a bad one is our antiquated and
counterproductive system of local school boards. They and other interest
groups have layered the bureaucracy in education like a piece of filo
pastry.

The fact that it is a bureaucracy is unavoidable. The bigger and
older a bureaucracy is, the more difficult it is to keep it aligned with
its external mission. The ways that I know to keep a bureaucracy in
check are keep it small, have competition between bureaucracies
(like businesses in a free market), and keep it new, i.e., occasionally
toss the existing moribund bureaucracy occasionally and replace it with a new
bureaucracy.

In California, I think a big part of the problem is the lack of local
school boards. Taking control away from parents, at least some of whom
care about their kids educations, and giving it to faceless bureaucrats
who care about feathering their own nests, just isn't a recipe for
good education.

Note that AFAIK, only the private school chains, like Challenger and
One World Montessori have anything that resembles the centrally developed
curricula developed by states like California and Texas. It seems to me
that those curricula really tie the hands of the school boards, teachers,
and administrators. For example, a school district can't really do something
like adopt the Singapore Mathematics curriculum. I don't see how things
would be made better by increasing the scope and reach of the state
education bureaucracies.

One small example is the centralized approval and purchasing of text books.
Since California, Texas and Florida are the main states that do this and
those three states buy huge quantities, ~25% of the total, of textbooks,
a handful of Californians, Texans, and Floridians essentially determine
the contents of all textbooks used in primary and secondary education
in the US.

Those three handfuls of people become the target of every pressure group that
thinks that a good strategy for achieving their goals is indoctrinating
our youth. Creationists (http://chesterfieldscience.blogspot.com), the
Council on Islamic Education (http://www.jewishjournal.com/world/a...nia_20051028/),
Barack Obama (http://realdebatewisconsin.blogspot....ook-with.html),
and many others try to slant the textbooks to achieve their agendas.

From their point of view, this is much more efficient that persuading 10,000
local school boards.

I think that the California textbook selection process described by
Richard Feynman has changed. He was the only member that actually read
the textbooks and evaluated them for accuracy.

I don't think there is any way to guarrantee integrity in the process but
I think teachers and small, local, school boards would be more likely to
choose textbooks that made it easy for them to teach the material and the
decision making process would not be quite so vulnerable to propogandising.
Especially if they were somehow accountable for improving their students'
knowledge. The only people in the situation that have an interest in getting
the youth educated are the parents.

Why should an even larger and even more powerful bureaucracy work better than
what we've got now?

Here's a short interview from the VOA on textbooks. The interviewee claims that
"hut" is on the forbidden words list. http://www.voanews.com/specialenglis...-05-07-3-1.cfm
A group that seems to be trying to improve things http://www.historytextbooks.org/publish.htm

You can argue this one till the cows come home but there's a bottom line
that cuts right to the point: All of the school systems in other countries
that are beating our pants off in performance and cost are NATIONAL systems
of PUBLIC schools. They don't have local school boards, with their petty
political interests and academic incompetence. And with a couple of
exceptions, they don't have vouchers.


They also don't pay their teachers in US dollars, have the cultural diversity
of the US, have the geographic scope of the US, or have the NEA. It's tenuous
at best to attribute differences that we're all agreeing have a large cultural
component to one factor.

This gets complicated but there are a couple of other things that should be
pointed out in regard to vouchers and similar ideas. First, the private
school system in the US is mostly religious schools, where tuition averages
something like $4.000/year, as opposed to $9,000/year in public schools. But
secular private schools run around $10,500/year. Religious schools,
particularly Catholic schools, which are the plurality of them, depend on
property tax breaks, vast philanthropic contributions, and grossly underpaid
teachers, plus a selective-admission system that lets them pick and choose
which kids they'll teach. Those schools can only survive in an environment
in which the majority of kids are in public schools. Left by themselves, the
entire private school system can handle only a small fraction of the
population of students. It isn't a matter of letting them grow to meet the
market; it's a matter of market selectivity and a variety of cost supports,
made possible by the larger public school system, that is extensive and
deep-rooted.

I'm ambivalent about vouchers. With government money comes government
control. Right now, private schools are fairly free to do what they
think is best and do a pretty good job on the average.

Here is an example of government pressure on a charter school
http://cssrc.us/web/17/news.aspx?id=...ookieSupport=1
It's hard to be too upset about that school being pressured, but the
initial steps of government control always are hard to get upset about.

I thought Catholic schools now pay their teachers better because it was
getting hard to recruit nuns. I don't see why we can't extend the same
property tax breaks to private schools, though that also would lead to
government control.

Also, I think there is an unstated assumption in your paragraph above;
that private schools would have to absorb all students who attend
public school now. It might be only 10% to 50% of students would
have to move to private school to put enough fear into the public
schools to break the log jam that forces them into mediocrity.

As to the selective admissions, is that really true? And if it is
true, maybe that's a big part of the answer.

An anecdote. My previous neighbor had a kid named Steven. He
attended the same competitive high school that I described in
another post. One day I saw him outside and our conversation went
like this.
me: "Steve, are you still in high school"?
Steve: "Yes, this is my FIRST year as a senior".
me: "How many years do you expect to be a senior"?
Steve: "I've got 25 units now but I need 200 units to graduate. Maybe I haven't made the best use of my time"

Every time that I saw Steve, my kids got more work to do. :-)

Anyway, the money that the state spent on his high school education
was just expensive babysitting. His mother got him diagnosed
as dyslexic to get him into special programs, council, & etc.
Around here, a more common reason to get your kid labeled as
dyslexic is to be able to take an untimed SAT.

It comes down to a philosophical choice; should we make an education
available to everyone who wants one or should we try to give them an
education whether they want it or not? Is this an investment for
the future or a moral imperative? Right now we try to give
everyone an "education" whether they want it or not. We are willing
to sacrifice the middle half of students to try to help the bottom 10%,
even if the return on that huge investment in the worst students is
much less than the return we'd get spending the money on normal kids.
It's usually better to write off losing investments early.

If you look at the successful part of our education system, our colleges
and universities they have selective admissions. There is also some
competition between universities though there is a lot of government
involvement. Maybe that's a clue on how to improve things at the lower
levels

But most of all, the best performing systems are the ones in which the
cultural attitudes toward education are vastly different from ours. It comes
back to parents and communities. That's where the critical issues lie.

For the best students, our system works pretty well probably better than
anywhere else in the world. We don't do so well with the rest.

Bob S