Research Shows!

I was interested today in reading that comparative educational system studies show that the single largest indicator of educational success for a system is teacher status and decent salaries.

The United States supposedly has the most expensive educational system in the world, but the lowest teacher status and salaries (that goes for all personnel, Counselors, Administrators, aids; etc.).

So how, I am sure the public is thinking can it be the most expensive?

First, it depends on how you do the study. If you do it per capita, per student, I am sure the United States would probably not be as expensive.

However, we are running three or four educational systems today in the United States. One is at the Federal level, and is the least expensive overall. The federal presence is not large compared to other countries, which have centralized control of their educational system long ago. But with its comparative cheapness comes a lack of control and authority. States can, in cases where no federal grant dollars are at issue, tell the federal government to mind its own business. This happened for years when the federal government attempted to enforce equal educational opportunity statutes in the south for example. It still is happening in scores of instances, where the federal guidance of education is blunted by state law. In short, federalism based on states rights, had NOT been good for educational reform.

The next is the state level. A large amount of money lies here, with little or no connection to the classroom. This is the state bureaucracy that you read about. States have actively resisted national reforms for years.

The next is the county level. This is a left-over of educational organization in the 1800s. County school offices exist to provide services often for very small districts who can’t afford them. County schools offices are another barricade to reform.

Finally, there are the local districts. These can range from single school districts, to multiple schools and mega districts; like L.A. Unified. There are layers of bureaucracies in these districts. Local districts often are ruled by Superintendents and Boards who are more into power than education. Unions have taken over many local districts, standing in the way of reforms that threaten their members.

I did not mention college districts and structures that lie outside of the K-12 system.

This labyrinth of educational organization does indeed siphon funds away from the staff who actually deal with children. This mess also blunts real reform constantly.

California for example, once a shining example of educational progress, has the lowest counselor and administrator ratio to children than any other state. What this means is less help for the children, and less supervision for the classroom. California’s budget mess threatens the very existence of public education.

Teachers love to bash administrators and claim too much is spent on them. The fact, substantiated by the recent study, is that educational leadership is a critical ingredient in student achievement.

The recent panic about teacher effectiveness, calling for the firing of “incompetent” teachers, runs headlong into a system that right now is woefully understaffed with administrators who are charged with evaluating the very poor teacher performance that the public zealots are so concerned with. Evaluations don’t get done when you don’t have the people to do them!

Moreover, without adequate support personnel, teacher’s aides, clerical staff; etc., the classroom environment suffers. The cuts that are going on right now across the United States are rightfully avoiding the classroom as much as possible, but crippling teacher’s efforts, because their support is being obliterated.

So, how do we reform this mess?

First, admit that the job we are demanding of our schools is larger and more complex than we care to admit. United States schools deal with extremely heterogeneous populations. For example, the African American population represents a tremendous challenge due to the nearly three hundred year subjugation which we really began to even address in 1964 with the Civil Rights Act.

Americans expected that in 10 years we could reverse educational inequality that had taken three hundred years to build. That was nonsense and present test scores prove we have a long way to go!

The “War on Poverty” was short-lived, and conservative Presidents stopped forced integration and other efforts to right an educational wrong that Jim Crowe had fostered.

The result is our present multi-tiered educational system, where African Americans consistently score lower on standardized tests than white children. In fact, the test scores have not improved much in the past fifty years, proving that what we are doing now does not work.

Add to this the challenges of Mexican-Americans and language difficulties, plus other immigrant groups, and what are left with is a very expensive proposition.

Therefore, our open society, that encourages upward mobility, and access to America opportunity for all, results in a very expensive system compared to Japan’s for example, with their homogeneous society.

And what has America done? Well, we have answered this challenge with shrinking the resources we dedicate to education. States are right now cutting billions from public schools, starving an already dysfunctional system; and demanding more efficiency.

It won’t happen. The first reason is good teachers will be leaving the system in droves, once the economy gets better. A large percentage will be leaving anyway due to budget cutbacks. Who would want to be the public’s whipping boy?

Competent and talented leadership is shying away. Administrators come from the teaching ranks (they should), any most teachers today who survive the budget cuts say, “No Way” to becoming a boss who everyone hates. When you have to lay off the Kindergarten teacher everyone loves, it is not a nice place to be; when an administrator has to evaluate out a failing teacher who is burned out from dealing with years of recalcitrant students, and it is a horrible experience.

No one likes to fire people; except in the private sector where it is almost considered sport. A school is a tight knit culture, any loss is grieved deeply. Teachers can fail for many reasons and many very decent, caring people fail because the stress of dealing with angry, resentful, and sometimes violent people everyday can wear on the best teachers.

Teaching in many areas of America today is one of the hardest jobs in the world. Unfortunately the American public holds teachers in very low regard, choosing to make heroes of doctors and lawyers in the media. How many T.V. shows are there about teachers these days?

So, we continue to believe that we are paying too much for education, while we admit that we are paying good teachers too little (note the use of the word good), and we blindly cut budgets, which lay off the good teachers.

Now, some brainless hacks are suggesting we lay off the senior teachers so we can protect the good new teachers. This stupidly ignores that it takes at least seven years for a beginning teacher to learn their craft, and many more to become accomplished; like any other profession. If you eliminate seniority in layoffs, in the present broken system, the truly good teachers will be fired primarily because they COST too much, leaving poorly paid and less experienced teachers to do their jobs. In some regressive states, like Florida, this madness is already being done, applying “business practices” to teacher layoffs, resulting in firing the most expensive teachers,

A comparative approach would be to cut experienced surgeons who had a malpractice suit against them and keep interns while trying to save money in the health care system; and then acting surprised when the interns slaughter their patients due to their inexperience.

It is remarkable that the health care system in the United States is way more expensive than the educational system comparatively speaking, but nobody cutting the rich doctors to save costs.

Our dedicated teacher corps stand defenseless against people like the Wisconsin governor who cut taxes then made up the difference with attacks on senior teachers by gutting collective bargaining. Last hired first fired exists for a reason; protecting experience!

The result of all this? The President is right when he says that education will be the prime ingredient to compete in the World Economy. America is failing the test by refusing to reform its hopeless educational bureaucracy and attacking the very people who are making the biggest difference in the future of the country: teachers, counselors, aides, administrators, school nurses, librarians, secretaries, bus drivers and the rest.

It’s the people stupid! People are who make our schools successful. You cut them, you make American unsuccessful. Listening to those who preach the simple solution (fire bad teachers) ignores the underlying cause of the failure.

Here is how to reform:

Federalize the entire educational system in the United States. Enforce nationwide standards. Federalize all educational personnel. Eliminate all state and local school districts. Establish, along other successful country’s guidelines, a federal system of school control, leaving the local schools to be led by Principals. Allow site based leadership to be the norm, not the exception.

Increase teacher pay by 40% across the board as well as support personnel (including administrators).

Improve administrative training in evaluation and remediation of teachers, making it possible without spending millions to release incompetent teachers. Allow for retraining of teachers who fail, so their commitment to teaching is not without some insurance.

Again, teaching is NOT easy; having an Ivy League education is no guarantee a teacher will succeed in south central L.A.

There will be consequences of this action. Thousands of state and local educational personnel will be displaced. There will be some room in the new system, and pushing former administrators back to the schools to supervise will not be a bad thing.

Currently, successful administrators become Superintendents or work for the state department, putting them as far away from teachers and students as possible. We need to keep the competent leadership as close to the classroom as possible.

Establish regional professional Boards, staffed by professional educators with citizen representation, who administer regions of 50,000 students (adjusting for geography). These Board would be responsible for personnel, curriculum; etc. The local school would depend on this bureaucracy for support, but would be free to order supplies and materials on their own as much as possible. School administration, which would be larger than currently, would have site based management of their school. Site Councils would be mandatory, where the stakeholders in the school would have their say.

Unions would still be a factor of course, but would negotiate at the federal representational level. We would try to keep union interference as far away from the local school as possible.

Salary schedules would hence be negotiated regionally, but bands of salary would be enforced, so teachers could transfer all over the country, into any area, and not realize a substantial change in salary. This would end the current practice of rich suburbs getting the best paid teachers. All teachers in the United States would ultimately make over $125,000 as they became more experienced, with full health care coverage. All would pay into social security and Medicare, and would have the same hybrid federal pension system as current federal employees. This would end the local pension system headaches for states and local districts.

Firewalls should be built into the legislation prohibiting Congress from making changes to the system unless strong quantitative testing data showed the need. National testing norms would be established along with other criteria for judging the success of a school. WASC would merge with the federal Boards to evaluate the schools periodically at every level to determine school effectiveness. Schools that were not effective over a reasonable period of time would have staff transfers and changes to change the school culture. This determination would be made by WACS/Federal school evaluators. The same school qualitative review would occur all across the country according to national criteria.

You get the idea. Every other country that is currently embarrassing the United States with their test scores have centralized unified school systems. These systems maximize centralization for process and policy, but minimize it for teaching and children. Site based education works best.

Only the United States continues with a system that is positively a labyrinth of failure. School funding is so complex in most states that even the state department doesn’t understand it. It is no wonder districts go broke.

Our educational system is broken, but not because of the poor overworked teachers, counselors and administrators. The system is broken because it is antiquated and no long fits our modern, mobile, urban society. As long as we continue with the present structure, or better lack of, we will continue to fail our children.