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ATLANTIC HIGHLANDS HERALD |
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PUBLIC EDUCATION'S LOSING TEAM In New Jersey during the late ‘90s we knew a young woman who taught in a nearby town’s public schools. She was a bright, pleasant, nice-looking person – likeable and highly respected by parents and colleagues. Recently she had been honored as Teacher of the Year. One fall while we lived there she and her colleagues found that negotiations on their new contract with the school system were stalled. New Jersey is solidly union from way back, so the teachers felt comfortable (and justified) going out on strike and picketing for their demands. In retrospect, I believe none imagined this move might be controversial or that the public might not support it. My acquaintance received a rude education in union-politics, however, when parents she thought were her friends gave her a piece of their minds during the strike. Some shouted at her that she was “letting the kids down”. Others snubbed her. For the week of the strike, things were “very tense”. Afterwards, relationships were strained and some appeared permanently broken. All this left my acquaintance depressed and hurt. I heard her ask someone why parents didn’t consider the teachers’ contract “important”. Not having children herself, my acquaintance evidently didn’t realize that parents might be preoccupied with their children’s interests, not the teachers’. That strike – the town’s first – probably changed forever the easy relationship between public-school teachers and the townspeople who employed them. For one thing, it showed how far we are from those legendary schoolmarms who worked selflessly, at low pay, to help students. New Jersey public school teachers’ average pay in 2004 was $53,663 a year – 7th highest in the nation. Beginning NJ teachers averaged $37,000. Not big bucks, but not too shabby, either. This is not to argue that teachers are lavishly paid – simply to note that the “selfless” teacher-model of yore is way out of date. The question in that New Jersey town was whether teachers (and teachers’ unions) are truly committed to students’ welfare. In his 2005 article “The Public School Disaster” (1), retired Texas businessman Mike Ford answered it thus: “…educating our children is no longer the primary purpose of the public schools. Today their purpose is to employ 6 million people…It has been this way for at least 20 years. Legislators, the media, and the public may be confused on this issue, but the teachers unions are not.” As evidence, Mr. Ford cited the 1985 statement of Albert Shanker, president of the American Federation of Teachers: “When school-children start paying union dues, that’s when I’ll start representing the interests of school-children.” On the way to this significant “mission redefinition”, public education has laid aside a critical issue – the Great Unmentionable of public education: teacher-quality. In 1989 former Secretary of Education Bill Bennett addressed a management convocation at our firm. He described how he had talked with the superintendent of Chicago public schools about identifying and removing “substandard” teachers. With a wry grin he related how the superintendent insisted, “There are no substandard teachers in Chicago schools.” (Denial is not just a river in Egypt.) The public schools have many dedicated and capable teachers. Some are relatives, old classmates, neighbors, and friends. Many people will concur. They know “lots of good teachers”. There must be something else wrong with the schools. I had a hot discussion about this with old college classmates in New York state on a recent visit. The wife is a long-time teacher; their daughter is a teacher; and their son-in-law is a school principal. They bristled at any suggestion that teacher-quality might be a problem, insisting that they and all other teachers they know are “working as hard as we can”. “Administration and parents” were the true problem, they claimed. I can see their point. We often hear of contentious parents making a ruckus over grades and disciplinary matters. And school administrators sometimes seem obtuse. I read this week about Soon-Ja Kim, a popular third-grade teacher who has won numerous awards for excellence while teaching in a Rockville, Maryland, school for 23 years. Parents uniformly praise her, and her students achieve at high levels. Yet Montgomery County School officials are considering whether to terminate her because she speaks English with a heavy Korean accent. Mrs. Kim believes colleagues jealous of her successes complained to officials. A hearing will determine if she can continue teaching. (Bravo. Score one point to my New York friends.) But not so fast – let’s examine the claim that teachers are “working as hard as they can”. Suppose a Ford executive or a manager of a (losing) major league baseball team says that. How does it sound then? (“Absurd,” you say? I’m shocked.) Of course, it is absurd. In the Big Leagues, or in industries whose products (e.g., cars) nobody has to buy, how hard you are working – or say you are working – isirrelevant. Competitive enterprises can’t skate by on this. Most of us have to produce a good product that sells. Many folks who work extremely hard see their business fail. When a ball team is playing poorly, its managers scrutinize their roster. Is a quality player at each position? If not, can better players be found? Teams ruthlessly make trades and moves. A beloved player will be benched or even sent to the minors if he’s not producing. Horse-hockey about “how hard you’re trying” doesn’t cut it. (The fans will boo when you take the field.) Education doesn’t operate that way. This is a serious problem. Year after year the dismal reports keep coming about how poorly American students rank against students from other countries. Yet school budgets keep increasing. And it can take years and cost hundreds of thousands in legal fees to pry an ineffective teacher out of the classroom. It is almost impossible. Unions will fight like tigers to retain him. Many school systems simply give up and shuffle bad teachers from school to school whenever parents complain. The cost and effort of termination is too great. OK. So maybe there are a few bad apples in the barrel. But aren’t most teachers smart and competent? Emerging data cast doubt on this assumption. In her recent article, “Testing Teachers”, columnist Linda Chavez writes: “A recent study by the American Institutes for Research showed that education majors had the lowest levels of practical literacy among college students. When asked to evaluate the arguments in a newspaper opinion article… or summarize the results of an opinion survey, or compare credit card offers with different interest rates and fees, education majors score at the bottom of the class. [They] also have among the lowest SAT scores and do poorly on other measures of verbal and mathematical ability.” These data do not surprise me. When a close friend taught seminars for elementary-level math teachers a few years ago, one of the exercises required participants to write out a math problem in the form of text – i.e., a “word-problem”. She was horrified to see that only one or two teachers out of thirty could write a coherent paragraph that posed the problem. Most efforts had poor grammar, misspellings and incomprehensible wording. “It was pathetic,” she recalled. The No Child Left Behind Act now requires testing teachers for basic subject-matter competence as a minimal step toward ensuring teacher-quality. But wise drafters of the legislation recognized the need to “trust, but verify”. As it turns out, states’ competency testing varies widely. Miss Chavez reports that the Federal Department of Education has notified 34 states that “…their teacher testing had major problems and would be subject to mandatory oversight” under NCLB. Maine and Nebraska might lose federal funds because their teacher-testing programs failed federal standards. District of Columbia teachers can be certified if they score “…barely above the 20th percentile (i.e., the lowest one-fifth) on the Praxis test…used by 29 states to test who is fit to teach”. The 29 states aren’t much better, certifying teachers who score only above the bottom third of all those tested. Miss Chavez concludes: “It’s hard to imagine how students can perform better unless we ensure that teachers know the subject matter in the first place.” In an article last year – “Champion of Bright Children” – respected black columnist and Hoover Institution Senior Fellow Thomas Sowell noted that gifted American students fare very poorly in public schools. Their performance levels, he says, “lag behind foreign counterparts. Our brightest kids have been going downhill even faster than our average kids.” Dr. Sowell says gifted students are “…often resented by their classmates and teachers alike. Given the low academic records of most public school teachers, it is hard to imagine them being enthusiastic about kids so obviously brighter than they were – and often brighter than they are. Gross neglect of gifted students in our public schools is the old story of the dog in the manger.” These devastating critiques of public education are reinforced by Manhattan Institute findings that only 72% of female students and 65% of male students graduated from American high schools in 2003. (2) (Black males 55%; Hispanic males 53%.) Social analysts say high school dropouts are a drain on society because of wasted potential, low wages, poorer purchasing power, lower income taxes paid, and a greater draw on welfare and other public benefits. Are teachers and teachers’ unions to blame for this whole mess? Maybe not. But they aren’t innocent, either. During my wife’s masters degree internship at a Maryland public school she met a brilliant young teacher who “went far beyond the minimum requirements” with her class of third graders. Parents and administrators loved her, but her colleagues hated her because she made them look mediocre. (They were.) They made her professional life so miserable that she finally left. (So much for everyone pulling together and working as hard as possible.) We need accurate, objective evaluations of teaching skills that can ensure retention of good teachers. Yes, we can see if teachers have been effective (or not) at the close of students’ twelve-year public school education. But this is like finally seeing, in 2018, how the Yankees did in the 2006 season. At that time-remove you can’t tell who did what (or didn’t do it), and it’s too late to correct anything. More immediate measurements are needed. Although teacher-testing is barely a start, teachers’ unions are fighting it furiously. (Al Shanker would say teacher-quality isn’t his concern – only teachers’ jobs.) Some educators believe school-competition, via vouchers, could stop public education’s long slide. It shows promising results in some locales. Private schools are usually not unionized. They seem to have a greater interest in finding and retaining teachers of high quality. Their students do well. But big media have joined the campaign to distort data and smear the vouchers-effort. Obtaining genuine school choice for all children will be a long, difficult struggle – a war, really, against the entrenched forces of public education and teachers’ unions. Teachers who have read this piece might be mad at me for being unfair. I’m sorry, but not apologetic. The world outside public education is a tough place. I have known many people who worked their hearts out in a business, but it failed and they lost a lot of money. (How fair was that?) Some failed because they lacked sufficient skill at the work. Their product wasn’t good enough. Public education has many problems. I’m not sure what all the solutions should be, but something must change. The public is right to insist on it. The team ain’t winnin’. *******
(2) From the report “Leaving Boys Behind”: http://www.manhattan-institute.org/html/cr_48.htm
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