"Bob Summers" wrote in message
...
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.

As with most cases of assigning scapegoats, that's hardly an accurate
picture. That's like saying the goal of your fire department is to ride fast
in big trucks and to play with big fires, while being perceived as saving
property.


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.

Well, then, maybe it's time to look at those countries that keep beating our
pants off in reading and math, and see how they do it. Because, in almost
every case, central control is how they're structured.

So far, the only thing we can say about local control of education in the US
is that it's a part of the failed system. We put amateurs in charge of
school governance and expect an expert result. We'd might as well elect a
team of housewives and retired candy-shop owners to govern your local
electrical power grid. Then we'd blame the electrical workers' union for all
the blackouts.

Apply 19th-century solutions to 21st-century problems, and then find a
scapegoat to blame when it all goes bad. It's the American way.


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.

As noted by the New Zealanders who have tried local governance, a key result
has been rising costs because they've lost large-scale purchasing power. So
it goes both ways. No matter what you do, there will be something to
complain about. d8-)


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.

The problem is that the "problem," if there was one, is the opposite of what
you're suggesting. Short on time, I tracked just one of these to see what
actually happened. Textbooks in Racine, WI (your "Barack Obama" link) are
approved by the Racine Unified District School Board, not by the state.

This was a complaint by a dunderhead parent, but the selection of the
textbook was made by a textbook committee of teachers and a curriculum
committee, and approved by the Board. So the decision-making about the
choice of a textbook was local.

It caused a dust-up and if you want to see how it came out, look he

http://www.racine.k12.wi.us/?do=main...ils&newsID=743

Read at least the "Memo to the Board of Education." That explains the
process -- and also notes that there are multiple references to John McCain
in other school textbooks. The chapter in question was not *about* Obama. It
was *by* Obama. And it was germane to the curriculum; it was selected long
before he was running for president; and it's been well-regarded by real
literature critics.

I haven't seen any of George Bush's or John McCain's literary reviews, but
there's always hope...g


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.

See above.

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.

Like the dunderhead mentioned above. Thanks, but no thanks. The teachers are
far better at it, and expert boards of education professionals are better
still. See "Europe, Educational Performance versus the United States of
America." Or Japan, if you prefer.


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

Because it does, all around the world. Nothing is likely to be much worse
than our local boards of bored retirees and semi-literates. In my experience
(and my experience with school boards involves more than 100 hours of
sitting through their meetings, in three different districts, plus writing
several blistering op-eds and a much milder one I ghost-wrote for a local
activist that was published by the New York Times), they do best when they
keep their mouths shut as much as they can stand doing so -- which isn't
very much.


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.

Tenuous, indeed, then, to suggest that doubling-down on what we have would
result in an improvement. This is the irony of it. We can see what works,
but we then claim that it can't have anything to do with the way they
operate. See "19th century solutions to 21st century problems," above.


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.

They pay their lay teachers poorly. That's the reason for the high turnover.

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.

It's only a small part of it, and it wouldn't solve much of the larger
problem. I probably shouldn't have mentioned it because it's a distraction.


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.

My wife teaches pre-school learning-disabled and handicapped kids. Some of
them cost our district over $20,000/each, and, if they have to go out of
district, up to $100,000/each. State and federal support picks up only a
part of the cost. That's part of the reason why public schools look costly.

Private schools won't touch these kids, nor other kinds of "problem" kids,
unless they're set up specifically to rake off some of that big money,
charging $30k - $70k tuition (the public school district pays the tuition
here, BTW). If you have a higher percentage of kids going to private school,
public school will wind up with a higher percentage of the precipitant, and
it becomes increasingly difficult to run a quality program. If private
schools take them, based on real experience with private schools for the
handicapped and disabled, costs will go through the roof. That's real-world
experience, not theory.

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

Yes, it's true. And yes, that's a big part of the answer.

There are Catholic schools that go out of their way to take troubled and
poor kids. There are many more that don't take kids with real problems; they
actually avoid them. Their "reason" is that they don't have the resources to
handle them. Of course they don't, because they know the public schools have
to deal with them. On the average, Catholic schools, and private schools in
general, take very few problem kids.

The higher-end private schools are very selective about admissions. And they
raise the average performance level for private schools in general.

You may find this hard to believe, but in the better private schools in NYC,
parents compete to get their kids into kindergarten. No kidding.


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.

So, is he really dyslexic? And if so, why was he in high school before
anyone realized it? Someone let that kid down, big-time, if he was dyslexic.
If he wasn't, the school's certification screening board didn't do its job.
They tend to be VERY skeptical, because agreeing to a special certification
costs the district big money. And that hurts the teachers and everyone else
in the school, because there generally isn't more money to get.


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?

The latter. That is, if you want to live in a modern society. We could
always go back to share-cropping or feudalism, but you wouldn't get much
support for the idea. d8-)

Is this an investment for
the future or a moral imperative?

Both.

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%...

I don't know how they're "sacrificed." What happens is that it just costs us
more money.

...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.

Right. We'll just sell the worst students to foreign investors in a fire
sale, and write them off our books. Maybe we can arrange them in tranches,
toss in a couple of idiot savants with high math scores to sweeten the pot,
and get Moody's to rate them AAA. g

There's nothing like applying the business model to social issues to see
just how bankrupt it can be.


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.

That's for sure. Now, what do you do with the rest, teach them to string
beads?

I think we agree that parental and community attitudes toward education is
the basic, overwhelming issue. But the irony is that we see other countries
with centralized education structures beating our pants off, and we somehow
come to the conclusion that going the other way, making our local governance
model even more extreme, is the solution. Like the Republicans who say their
problem is that they aren't conservative enough, but who fail to recognize
that the conservatives voted in high numbers and that it was the center that
they lost, we just want to put on blinders and double-down on our failed
approach.

Nobody seems able to step back and ask if we aren't looking at it the wrong
way around. I don't get it, except that we're locked into old models of
governance and business models that tell us to cut losses and set them
adrift (without telling us what we do when the "losses" wind up at our door
demanding help) -- when we know that education for all is the key to
thriving in a global economy.

It's a national affliction. When I think about it too much I become
depressed. Fortunately, I think we're in for some changes.

--
Ed Huntress