Editor’s note: This commentary is by Peter Berger, an English teacher at Weathersfield School, who writes “Poor Elijah’s Almanack.” The column appears in several publications, including the Times Argus, the Rutland Herald and the Stowe Reporter.
I’ve been a public school teacher for 30 years. In that time I’ve known many good teachers. Yes, some of us are incompetent and unsuited for the classroom, and most teachers’ skills, while acceptable, do fall short of excellent. I can say the same about the doctors and auto mechanics I’ve done business with.
I mention this because dealing with those few incompetent doctors isn’t the impetus behind health care reform. In the same way, the competence of America’s teachers isn’t the chief problem confronting public schools.
Our schools do face serious problems. American children, and adults, have changed since I was a student. We’re less self-reliant, more narcissistic, and our sense of entitlement has far outstripped our sense of responsibility. This decline in national character has contributed mightily to the decline in our students’ academic achievement.
On the school side of the ledger, education experts have led us in a catastrophic direction since the 1970s. Most of these leaders, from the Secretary of Education on down, were never teachers or fled the classroom so quickly or so long ago that they bring no practical understanding to the problems they profess to solve.
In 1983, after their reforms had failed for a decade, A Nation at Risk denounced the “rising tide of mediocrity” that reformers had visited on our students and schools. Nonetheless, at their direction, public schools have repeatedly recycled the same bankrupt reforms, even to the present day. Experts’ obsession with standardized testing, which has proven embarrassingly unreliable, and their companion fascination with equally unproven education technology have only further afflicted our students and compromised efforts to educate the nation’s children.
They also cost a lot.
Alongside our questions about education quality, Americans are understandably concerned about education’s cost. Part of this discussion centers around property taxes, the mechanism by which many jurisdictions pay for their schools, and associated, relevant debates about equity and local control of schools.
Some critics target teachers’ compensation. If we lower teachers’ salaries and benefits, though, no one should be surprised when fewer “highly qualified” candidates want to be teachers.
Other taxpayers raise questions about smaller class sizes and declining enrollments. Lower societal behavioral norms and the inclusion of special education students, however, have changed the way classrooms work and warranted smaller classes. In addition, an overall reduction in student population doesn’t necessarily translate into significant changes in the number of students in each grade, and how many classes and teachers you need as a result.
Cutting costs by consolidating schools and districts faces two substantive obstacles. First, consolidation reduces, even eliminates, a community’s control over the school their children attend. Second, it rarely saves any money. Bureaucracies tend to grow as their turf expands. Superintendents of consolidated districts tend to hire assistant superintendents.
Poor Elijah has a few alternative proposals.
1. Eliminate all administrative positions above the level of principal. This is not as extreme a proposal as it might first appear. In fact, for most districts it would be eminently practical. These upper echelon employees – superintendents, curriculum coordinators, assorted specialists and consultants – are the most expensive, even as they contribute the least to educating students. Their bureaucratic demands and pipedream initiatives often actually impede teaching and learning.
Every problem a student faces isn’t a school problem, and the “seamless web” of programs that purport to solve those problems aren’t really school programs, even when they happen at school.
The farther from the classroom administration gets, the more expensive and less constructive it becomes. Some larger districts might need a superintendent to coordinate efforts, but in most schools, existing state curriculum guidelines would enable principals to maintain sufficient consistency from school to school.
2. Reduce state and federal regulations. This is a job for our legislators. Some unifying regulations and protections are necessary, but schools stagger under an unimaginable burden of ill-conceived, time-consuming statutes and rules, and the endless compliance reports, action plans and committee meetings they spawn. These expensive, burgeoning requirements have given rise to expensive, burgeoning state education bureaucracies and the entire federal education department, the creation of which happened to coincide with the decline in student performance.
I’m not making a Wall Street deregulation appeal based on the wisdom of the marketplace. I’m saying that if we eliminate the great weight of unnecessary regulation, we can streamline school administration at all levels and simultaneously free our principals and teachers to better address the specific needs of our schools and students.
Poor performance rarely stems from a school’s lack of goals, objectives and policies, especially those imposed from above. If anything, schools are distracted from teaching by the often conflicting initiatives, programs and mountains of mandated paperwork.
3. Place reasonable limits on special education expenditures and expectations. Consigning students with special needs to the school basement, as happened when I was an elementary student, is wrong. However, spending as much on one student as you spend on 10 is also unjustifiable.
Some individual student special education plans are appropriate and legitimately educational. There’s a difference, though, between assigning a staff member to teach a willing student, and paying somebody to chaperone a student every day because he’s unwilling to behave or do any work.
If society opts to extend extraordinary medical, behavioral or mental health services to a particular student, let’s stop calling it special education and including it in the school budget. Let some other appropriate agency pay for it. Otherwise every regular education student will continue to suffer budget cuts necessitated by special education costs.
4. Exclude the cost of social services programs from school budgets. Schools have been adding nonacademic personnel and programs for years, from psychological counseling to healthy snacks. Except every problem a student faces isn’t a school problem, and the “seamless web” of programs that purport to solve those problems aren’t really school programs, even when they happen at school. It’s burdensome enough that they divert resources and time from academic learning, but paying for them increasingly gets built into school budgets, further inflating what we think our schools cost.
Some people say that if you think education is expensive, you should try ignorance. They’re right. Ignorance costs even more.
There are, however, steps we can take that will both save money and improve education.
We should consider them.
The post Poor Elijah’s Almanack: The cost of doing education appeared first on VTDigger.