The Public Education Paradigm
The contrast between the way we approach national security and defense in the United States and the way we approach public education could not be more stark. This is not just a matter of budget allocations. It’s about the paradigm we use to evaluate the effectiveness and success of our military missions, versus the paradigm we use to evaluate the effectiveness and success of public education in this country. Dave Eggers and Ninive Clements Caligari address this contrast in a must-read op-ed published in yesterday’s online edition of the New York Times:
When we don’t get the results we want in our military endeavors, we don’t blame the soldiers. We don’t say, “It’s these lazy soldiers and their bloated benefits plans! That’s why we haven’t done better in Afghanistan!” No, if the results aren’t there, we blame the planners. We blame the generals, the secretary of defense, the Joint Chiefs of Staff. No one contemplates blaming the men and women fighting every day in the trenches for little pay and scant recognition.
And yet in education we do just that. When we don’t like the way our students score on international standardized tests, we blame the teachers. When we don’t like the way particular schools perform, we blame the teachers and restrict their resources.
Compare this with our approach to our military: when results on the ground are not what we hoped, we think of ways to better support soldiers. We try to give them better tools, better weapons, better protection, better training. And when recruiting is down, we offer incentives.
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For those who say, “How do we pay for this?” — well, how are we paying for three concurrent wars? How did we pay for the interstate highway system? Or the bailout of the savings and loans in 1989 and that of the investment banks in 2008? How did we pay for the equally ambitious project of sending Americans to the moon? We had the vision and we had the will and we found a way.
Those bracketed ellipses stand in for Eggers’ and Caligaris’ specific ideas for attracting the best teachers and taking our children’s education seriously. This is one of those pieces that cry out to be quoted in full — every line is crucial to the whole. But I will resist the desire to quote the entire piece in favor of urging readers to read the rest for themselves.
10 Responses to “The Public Education Paradigm”
Of course, everyone in the military is taught a common doctrine even to the point that everyone is taught to speak the same way on the radio.
Yet, teachers say that they are professional, can make decisions based upon their professional knowledge and experience, and will actively oppose outsiders who tell them how to do their jobs.
In the military, if the commanders said that everyone must learn the phonetic alphabet, then everyone learns the phonetic alphabet.
Yet, if teachers are told that it is beneficial for second graders to memorize the multiplication tables, most second grade teachers will active oppose being told what to do and refuse to have their students memorize the multiplication tables.
Thus, in the U.S. we have highly paid teachers and students who are incapable of ever learning algebra because they have no idea how to factor numbers.
I may be wrong, but it seems to me that the article equates “cutting school budgets” with “blaming the teachers”? School administrators (the “generals” and “chief’s of staff” of the education system). So the one the article seems to feel should be held responsible get protected.
So it would seem this analogy should push one to support politicians that look first toward cutting and replacing administrators. I know that in CA it seems that whenever the budget goes up by X dollars, they hire a few more teachers but when the budget goes down by the same amount, they say they have to fire more teachers than were hired when it when up. CA politics is so opaque as to make answering that dilemma difficult, but I can’t help the suspicion that this is because administrators get hired first and never fired.
I wonder sometimes about my own education as a child. And watching ‘education’ of my grandchildren. I think back to my teachers. The good, the bad, the downright ‘what on god’s green acre are you doing teaching?! Go elsewhere. Right away.’
I wonder about the many ways I’ve watched reading being taught, and math. I also wonder about why there are no classes in imagination and invention, beginning in K. I wonder why there are no classes in investment and job application, starting in K. I wonder at the 12 years spent, 12 long years that leave out so much that is needed to step into the world. Not at graduation. Starting at K.
Just my thoughts.
It always has been wrong to equate public spending on education with education — always.
As for good and bad teachers, I and no doubt other users on here can identify them during our schooling years.
Dr. E., kindergarten is too soon, probably, for investment, but there has been a constant cry among some for ordinary banking (keeping a checkbook balanced, included) and other real-life tasks. There is a substantial concern with public schools’ engaging in many other things than true schooling (the three Rs), not limited to driver training and sex education (or political things nowadays like environmentalism, homage-chants to Obama, and such). If we are going to have personal-development “courses,” of course banking and other real-life things are worth coursework.
In my third grade, we all had checkbooks and had to keep them up to date, with a paycheck each week and bills coming throughout the month. We also got bonus payments as rewards for especially good classroom achievements and were fined (an analogy to the demerit system used in junior and senior high school) for bad behavior or certain violations of school policy. This commenced after first being taken on a field trip to the nearby new bank branch a mile away and back (where we were issued our checkbooks) and at the end of the year those of us who did everything right and well got to deposit a substantial reward (or bonus). Those with us in this third-grade class with $3,000 in our accounts at the end of the year got to be taken to an Oakland Athletics baseball game in the Alameda County stadium.
Certainly (at least as an honors course) the later high school years could include a course on investment (even participating in a set of individual student investment accounts).
As it was, I settled for an extra elective in accounting.
Dr. E. wrote:
> I wonder why there are no classes in investment
> and job application, starting in K.
Ideally, junior high school would be useful for this (in junior high we had elementary shop courses, wood and metal, and had a garden for an eighth grade group). By that time if not earlier (fourth to sixth grade), a book like “Learn to Earn” would be very useful as a class “textbook” or required reading. (I got that book and another for my oldest nephew at around the fourth grade.)
(Readers, re. saving and investing, note the authors of this book)
http://www.amazon.com/Learn-Earn-Beginners-Investing-Business/dp/0684811634
Could someone please substantiate this “blame the teachers” claim? In common usage, “blame” means something much worse than “assess,” and “the teachers” implies something broader than the small set of the very worst performers. The closest the editorial got to backing up the charge was this:
I’m not sure if this is supposed to be an exercise in imagination or a report from the field. Where is it happening? What fraction of teachers get called “bad,” by whom, and based on what relative test score results? Is that the worst that happens to them?
While you’re at it, perhaps you can describe “the paradigm we use to evaluate the effectiveness and success of public education” that you’d recommend. “Pay teachers more” is probably a great idea, it’s just not a means of evaluating effectiveness.
This is a false comparison.
We don’t blame the soldiers is being equated with ‘don’t blame the teachers’.
But the teachers are NOT the soldiers, the students are. The teachers and administrators are the leaders who should be held accountable.
Now, I fully agree that overall teachers in particular take a lot of balms that belongs even higher up the food chain at the school board and higher levels, but that too is very military like, sadly.
Throwing more money is not the issue, as has been proven over and over again. getting rid of schools as a social engineering experiment is what has to stop, holding bad teachers accountable and allowing for them to be fired without 5 – 10 years of litigation, and also providing more direct authority back to teachers in the classroom.
Kids today know how completely hamstrung teachers are, and how completely ineffectual any form of discipline will be. Too many lack any respect for teachers or schools, because they know there is simply nothing teachers can do without fear of a lawsuit.
I had a wonderful public education K through 12, and I had some amazing, inspirational, and tough teachers too. Therefore I know it’s possible for public education to be done right. I fully agree with Inde’s last paragraph too, without respect for teachers, there can be no learning environment. I am inclined to place the failure of that on parents.
I also look at the parents, and at the problem (as written about by Neely in his 1992 book on the subject) of having the schools and other public agencies be sought as substitutes for the family.
Incidentally, the mutterings after 1994 about ending public education (which is distinct from ending federal involvement in education and abolishing the Department of Education, which is not radical) haven’t accompanied Ryan’s trial balloon of ending federal payment to providers directly in Medicare. (In fact, we haven’t heard post-1994 rumblings about ending entitlements, which concentrated on programs for the poor rather than the universal Social Security and Medicare, now, though Ryan’s “budget” trial balloon bunch includes shifting Medicaid to the states.)
If it’s any comfort, I absolutely have to blame the lawmakers for creating large administrations to enforce counterproductive rules. The powers to be just can’t keep their cotton-picking fingers out of the local school systems.