The Other Public Option
By: Matthew Keim
With sweeping health care legislation making its way through Congress, our leaders are overlooking one of the most pressing issues in the US: public education. Since the 1960s, our expenditures have grown and our grades, domestically and internationally, have dropped. Education, which is so important for a free and industrial society, has been left by the wayside for decades.
The United States public school system instructs 55 million children in over 100,000 schools. We spend on average $10,770 per student, which is one of the highest expenditures per student in the world; financed almost entirely from property and school taxes. Of course, spending money is not a panacea. The average vocabulary of a 14 year old in 1945 was 25,000 words; today it hovers around 10,000 for the same age group. Our dropout rate is about 30%, and the kids that do graduate are already academically behind based on international test scores. American businesses are importing more and more foreign talent rather than hiring our own, and many people fear that what happened to our auto industry from 1970 till now will happen with our job market. What is wrong with America’s oldest “public option”?
1) We have one of the ‘slowest’ curriculums in the world, meaning we spend a great deal of time reviewing material such as arithmetic in middle school when comparable schools in other countries are onto geometry and algebra. Our textbooks are set up to skim several topics instead of delving deep into a couple topics over the year, which produces students that know very little practical information on several topics.
Instead of separating the gifted students from the slower learners, all students are taught together in the same classroom to avoid hurting anyone’s self esteem. This leaves the gifted students bored as the teacher must teach to the lowest level in the class. Suffocating a gifted student intellectually is a far worse crime than hurting someone’s self esteem. We will never know a gifted student’s true potential unless they are taught at an accelerated rate fairly early on.
2) We spend about 4 times as much money on education than we did in 1960 and our teacher to student ratio has plummeted, so we should be scoring significantly better on the SATs, right? Well actually the scores have taken a nosedive; the more money we pump into education, the worse our students score. We have more full-time nonteaching staff and other administrators than ever, which contribute very little to actual instructing.
3) Ever since 1960, our education system has been on a steady decline, which leads to the central problem of modern US public education, unionization. In 1962 teachers were allowed to unionize, and ever since, the main beneficiary of the education system has been its employees, not the students. The point of a union is to use collective bargaining to protect its own interests. I find it incredible that on any day of the school year, a group of teachers can go on strike and shut down the school until they feel like going back to work. Despite what any teacher on strike says, strikes send a pretty clear message that personal interests of teachers trump quality education for the children. The late Al Shanker, teaching union founder and president, said it best with “I will begin to care about the quality of children’s education in this country when they start paying union dues.”
Stemming from the union contracts is the idea of tenured teachers. Right now there are about 700 teachers in New York that are barred from teaching because of misconduct, but can’t be fired because they are tenured. Their union contracts force the school district to go through a maze of paperwork that can take up to several years to get through. While their paperwork is being processed, they sit in a room provided by the district and make $70,000 a year – to do nothing. That’s $5 million out of the budget for New York alone.
We need to fix these problems.
We need to drop this “social re-engineering” garbage and get back to basics. That means less sing-song time for ‘praise the president’ and more time for fundamentals. We need to end ‘social promotion,’ which means advancing a student through the grades based on age and not test scores. If a student doesn’t understand the material after summer school, then repeat the grade. A superintendent (which rakes in a national average $148,387 a year) in the Miami school district flat out said, “Half our job is education, and the other half is social work”. This is not improving our test scores.
Instead of the age old fix-all of raising taxes and dropping more money into the system, maybe we should do the unthinkable and switch from a “free” system to a free-market system in which students pay tuition to go to a school. Private school students consistently perform better on standardized tests, not because of the biggest budgets, but because every school knows they must instruct efficiently or face closure.
Finally, teaching unions have to dial it down to control the rising cost of education. The tenure system must be weakened or dissolved in order to ensure that schools do not get caught up in the mountain of paperwork involved with replacing a misbehaving or just plain bad educator. Award a limited tenure based on performance reviews by an outside group, not seniority.
Perhaps instead of writing massive and broad legislation enacting more “public option policies”, we should take a stronger look at the ones we already have.
Sources:
“Center for Education Reform – K-12 Facts.” Center for Education Reform – Home. Web.
“Trends in International Mathematics and Science Study (TIMSS) – Overview.” National Center for Education Statistics (NCES) Home Page, a part of the U.S. Department of Education. Web.
