Fixing Our Schools – Part 2

Just to be clear: I’m completely aware that I’m not an authority on this topic.  But nor can I stick my head in the sand.  I’m asked to vote on educational referenda and levies.  Our society’s economic and intellectual health depend on quality education for each citizen.  As an employer, I need qualified applicants.  I also pay taxes to support public schools.  Like it or not, I’m a stakeholder—a moral owner—and I feel the burden to learn how to think critically about this issue. 

 

Just letting the educators (the ‘professionals’) decide the solutions is completely bogus.  That’s like the notion that you should look to your doctor for moral advice.  Teachers, like doctors, are vendors of professional services.  They have exceptional technical knowledge which the rest of us ignore at our own peril, but we should never delegate critical thinking and policy making to them.  

So far, I’m developing more questions than I am answers.  For instance, school boards rightly hold the authority to act on behalf of the moral owners of public school education.  But the more school boards there are, the less likely we are to attract only the most capable citizen fiduciaries to those boards.  Just because someone is elected to a school board doesn’t make him the best choice.  I’m not questioning the value of democratically electing school boards, mind you.  I’m just asking whether having so many school boards helps or harms efforts to improve educational quality?  

    

I watched the documentary Waiting for Superman a couple of weeks ago.   I cannot recommend it highly enough.  The contrast between the failing public schools and successful charter schools profiled was stark and the kids in the movie will break your heart.  

You could almost rename the movie Waiting for Randi Weingarten, though (you’ll know what I mean when you see it).  Between this one and the Juan Williams documentary, A Tale of Two Missions, I came away feeling like the answers are just to 1) bust up the teachers unions and 2) send everyone to charter schools.
 

The reality, though, is that charter schools have widely varying outcomes.  

The 2009 CREDO Study tracked the performance of charter school students in 16 states over 15 years, beginning in 1994, and compared their results to those of kids in traditional public schools (TPS).  17% of children in charter schools performed significantly better than TPS students in their localities, while roughly half performed the same  and 37% performed significantly worse.  It seems like more work needs to be done on distilling the factors that have led some charter schools to perform very, very well.  Likewise for the ones which are failing miserably.

I’m also learning that many educators are deeply suspicious of or firmly opposed to promoting competition among teachers.  This one really, really baffles me.  On the surface, it seems to me that some of the school under-performance issues could be solved by just having more truly professional educators in the classrooms—people wired to teach and who are truly passionate about educating kids—as opposed to people who want a 'good job'.  

Having held jobs that were incongruent with my skill set and passions, I can say from experience that my failure to succeed in those environments helped me discover where I would fit best.  When you watch Waiting for Superman, pay attention to the discussion about “lemons” and how administrators have learned to deal with under-performing teachers.  Hint: they can’t just fire them.

If you’re like me, you had some really awful teachers.  You probably also had some who cared so deeply for you and had such faith in who you could become, that you felt more alive and inspired by them than almost anyone else.  A great teacher might have even pointed you on a path that changed the trajectory of your life.    

Who is hurt by competition among teachers?  The students?  The moral owners of public school education?  Society at large?  Employers?  Parents?  Tax payers? Good teachers?  None of these are, as far as I can see.  

The only people I can see that are hurt by competition are union leaders and some of the lemons.  The union leaders have sold the fear that if members didn’t have their representation, they’d all be paid peanuts and subjected to galley slave working conditions.  What if that fear is wrong—not necessarily willful deception, just incorrect?  And what if, instead, unions became suppliers of the most highly qualified, passionate teachers due to their extensive apprenticeship programs? 

 

Some of the lemons would benefit immediately from being fired—they’d be nudged out of the nest to find their passions.  Others are just there to collect a steady paycheck and don’t give a hoot about what the kids learn.  I believe it’s our moral obligation to purge the system of those dregs.

What’s wrong with teachers competing?  What am I missing?