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?
