Education Reform: Will the Current Political Solution Work?


George Bush is making a lot of noise about his proposals for education reform. And every time I hear him I have lots of questions and I wonder "Is anybody 'home'?"

Education reform has been a favorite political issue for years. People like to think they have the answer that will solve all our problems. Some would like to bring back corporal punishment. "Maybe, if the kids are afraid to go to school, they'll learn better!" Huh?

Others think we need to bring "values" back into schools. I could write a whole other paper on that issue. Since we are human we have values. Values are an integral part of every human enterprise. What these people usually mean is "We need to put MY values back in the schools." That would be acceptable for you (maybe), but then again those values might be the reason you think simplistic answers can solve complicated problems.

One of the more problematic "values" approaches is that we need to put "God" back into the schools. As if we could, if God is what they say he is, do any miniscule thing toward evicting him. What they mean is we need to be explicit about his presence. That would be fine in a private school setting, but it would be disaster (it has been disaster when it's been tried) in a public setting.

George Bush has taken the "accountability" approach. Using the "A" word makes it sound sophisticated, but accountability is just blame. "If something goes wrong, who can we blame?" It's usually the least powerful person in the organization; the one who simply carries out instructions of others; the one who does the actual work while others get the actual money.

The other day I heard the president giving one of his cheerleading speeches about his proposed legislation. He was talking about failing schools. He was proposing that we enforce standardized testing. If after a few years certain schools do not improve action would be taken.

I had to wonder, "What action will we take?" And if we know what action we're going to take, why don't we take it now before more teenagers graduate from these high schools without the skills necessary to get them a job any more sophisticated than flipping burgers?

Mr. Bush said something else interesting. He said that the federal government has "thrown" money at education for years and our schools are still failing. Let's do something besides adding money to the legislation. In short, let's demand that the schools do more, but let's not give them more to do it with. Huh? Knock, knock. Is anybody home?

There are two ways to deal with the drain on educational talent. One would be to pay teachers salaries that are comparable to the salaries drawn by other people with similar education and experience. It would break the budgets of all our schools, drive up taxes, and increase the gap between the incomes of teachers and the incomes of most of the families that send their children to public schools.

The other way would be to pay everybody with similar education and experience the same salary as teachers. (Oops, slipped into my leftist/populist mode! Sorry.)

What we will ultimately have to recognize is that mediocrity is the best we can expect of any public enterpriese, including public education. We ask our schools to do the near impossible (probably even the impossible) and so instead of being amazed at what our schools do with the limited resources they have, we carp and quibble.

Human society is a broad mix of ideas, world views, and values. When we put a lot of people together (even in a small community of a thousand or so citizens) it is impossible to match public policy to the preferences of everyone. Public education is public policy. The larger the body of people that make up the constituency of a school district, the harder it is to find common ground.

Limited by this need for practices that are acceptable (or at least only mildly unacceptable) to everyone, schools are condemned to mediocrity. It cannot be helped as long as the schools are public. Private schools can pick a narrow range of policies and practices because they have a very narrow clientele. So it's no surprise that private schools do better (perhaps it's surprising that they do so little better than public schools). It's also no surprise that our most mediocre, poorly-performing schools, are in the big cities where there is a very large citizenry to accomodate.

As a former teacher, I work in the quality department of a local manufacturer. What we're asking our schools to do is to increase the quality of their output. The industrial world has developed principles of quality output that are based on years of experience and which have since been succesfully applied to other sectors, such as service and finance.

Could we apply those principles to our schools? At first that might seem possible. But one of the primary provisions of any quality plan involves purchasing and receiving inspection. In short, a process that wants to produce quality output, must pay close attention to the input -- the raw materials.

Now if that doesn't bother you yet, maybe you've forgotten what the primary raw material is for a school. (It's the students, hint, hint.) Am I getting through yet? What have we done to our public schools over the last 20 or 30 years? We've demanded that they lower the standard for accepting students. Essentially we're asking the schools to take lower quality input and produce higher quality output. We should be amazed at how well they have done, particularly given how stingy we've been with the other resources schools need.

Now don't accuse me of opposing the progress that has been made in opening public schools to more students over the last few decades. I'm pointing out that it would be inadvisable to reduce the scope of education. But if you put enough pressure on schools to "excell," it is possible they'll put fewer of their resources into helping poor students and more into helping good students do better. Is that the kind of world we want for our children and grandchildren?

There's another very negative outcome that will almost certainly result from the current "accountability" drive. If a teacher knows her pay, maybe even his job, relies on the scores students get on the test, he or she WILL find ways to help students do better on tests. Most will probably not ecourage cheating, but they will "teach to the test." That is, they'll put a lot of time and effort into teaching the limited scope of knowledge and skills that it is possible to test, at the expense of teaching those things that make us human, not robotic. Those teachers who do the right thing and teach to the whole student, will be penalized.

By the way, there are things we can do about the quality of the raw materials we give our public schools to work with. But I can guarantee that with the political "center" being where it is today, those things won't happen any time soon. The way to increase the quality of the "input" to our schools is to increase the quality of the family.

Now I know there's a "family" movement in our political universe. But their approaches don't meet the real needs of families and, in fact, do much to reduce the quality of family life. (We'd have to move our focus from corporate and financial interests to the interests of the poorest, a very unlikely prospect given the influence of money on politics today. Don't get me started, OK?)

In short I'm suggesting that the reforms being proposed by politicians today, reforms that may well have the force of law behind them before the year is out, are a recipe for disaster. We won't see it right away. But in twenty to fifty years we will pay the price, in crime, lack of technological progress, possibly even in anarchy.

I once saw a placard on the wall of a classroom that read, "What if schools had all the money they needed, and the Air Force had to hold a bake sale to buy a bomber?" Think about it. We live in a very crazy world, and the current political climate is making it that much more crazy. Can we wrest the political process away from the interests of the inordinately wealthy? It seems unlikely -- a very daunting task. But the future of freedom and democracy rests on us doing just that. Who will join me in at least trying?


Send your comments on the above to: renae@catlover.com