A parent's prescription for fixing public education

A lot of the discussion on Elk Grove Patch revolves around the education system.  At least one regular blogger is a school teacher, and there are regular articles about the newest charter school proposed for Elk Grove and diatribes about the school administrator salaries.  Kind of makes one wonder if there is, or ever will be, a solution to the whole mess that our public education system has become. 

Pay cuts for administrators, pay increases for teachers, pay based on test results, more tests, fewer tests, charter schools, vouchers—The list could go on forever.

Here are my thoughts about all of those things.  As I mentioned in an earlier blog posting about the public pension system, having government agencies compete against each other for employees makes no sense.  As a result, I’d favor some type of pay scale for administrators and teachers established at a level other than with each district.  The reason administrators get $250,000 per year, with all sorts of incentives and bonuses, is because on district upped the ante and others had to follow.  So, set some salary standards, including adjustments for higher cost of living areas, size of district, etc., and apply them across the board.  End the competition for public sector employees.

Teacher salaries have to be increased dramatically.  It still boggles my mind that teachers make as little as they do, even after years of teaching.  Unfortunately, to make real money teaching, one has to eventually become an administrator.  As a result, the good ones, who want to do the best they can and get paid accordingly, frequently end up leaving the classroom.  Raise salaries, too, and more qualified individuals might be drawn to the profession.

The trade-off: End tenure as we know it. Teachers should still have safeguards to prevent unjust discipline, but if a teacher can’t teach, or doesn’t want to put in the effort anymore, that individual needs to find a different job. Teaching our children is too important to be left to people who have lost the motivation to do it right.

With respect to testing, I believe it is simply impossible to base teacher evaluations on standardized testing.  Equally, the idea that all students will be able to perform to a certain level of competency on standardized test scores is a pipe dream dreamed up by conservatives, who oddly believe that liberals have the monopoly on pipe dreams. 

When my oldest son was in the fourth grade, I spent some time volunteering in his class.  I worked once a week with the five or six kids who were the lowest performing.  It was, unfortunately, painfully obvious that those kids were virtually assured of failing at some point.  They were so far behind, so unwilling to really do anything, and so clearly lacked parental support.  In addition, there were another five or six students in the class who were right on the edge.  To hold teachers accountable for being unable to crack the code for those kids and get them to the arbitrary line of competence identified by the feds in No Child Left Behind, or based on a standardized test, is simply wrong.

Ultimately, the rush towards standardized testing we’ve seen over the last 10 to 15 years is the biggest mistake our education system has made—as well as the massive amounts of homework assigned to our children.  We aren’t making our children smarter.  We aren’t providing a well-rounded education.  We aren’t teaching them to think differently, creatively, or independently.  Instead, we’re teaching that learning is labor and the only thing that really matters is what the test says.  Of all the things discussed in this post, if I could do one thing it would be to eliminate the emphasis on standardized testing.

Vouchers are an idea that have no place in the discussion unless they provide a real and equal choice to all students and not just a stipend that helps the already wealthy to afford the private school of their choice.  Any voucher system has to provide the poorest student the same choice as the wealthiest.  Charter schools have a place in our education system, but they are definitely not a panacea.  They have many of the same problems as regular public schools, but in some situations, they’re less accountable and more harmful to students.  Every single charter school, because of its ability to avoid some of the rules in place at other public schools, should have to go through a more onerous audit and review of their methods and results.  (Public schools of all types should do that.)

One last comment: The layers of bureaucracy in public education need to be done away with.  One example is the special education system.  The federal government mandates services and education for students with special needs, but doesn’t even come close to fully funding it.  In California, there are multiple layers of agencies responsible for special education.  The Department of Education, school districts, county offices of education, special education local plan areas, and probably others I don’t know about.  It boggles the mind why so many different entities need to be involved in the provision of special education services.  Consolidation is not a dirty word and could actually save money being spent on the bureaucracy and re-direct towards much needed services.

What are your ideas?