Observations and inanities by a second-shift assistant supervisor in the Puppy-Grinding division of the Evil Atheist Conspiracy® (our motto: "Sure it's cruel, but think of the jobs!"), your host, Brent Rasmussen.
The YearlyKos Education Panel
I've been meaning to post something about public education since I became a frontpager here. Now TeacherKen provided me with an excellent opportunity in the form of a write-up of the YK education panel. The two main speakers were Jamie Vollmer, a businessman with ties to public education, and Tom Vilsack, the very pro-public education Governor of Iowa.
Vollmer's speech was the sort that nobody with even marginal knowledge of education outside the US would make even as parody. Most egregiously, he claimed that "for every mile a decision is made farther from where the school is, the dumber the decision will be." Anyone who knows something about what goes on in European countries, both Western and Eastern, will know that Vollmer has no idea what he's talking about, for the US has one of the first world's most decentralized education systems and at the same time performs close to its bottom.
Indeed, part of the problem in the US is that it's almost alone among developed countries in having no national standards students must meet to graduate. In Britain, graduation depends on passing a series of non-standardized tests called the A-Levels. Germany has a similar scheme called Abitur. France has the Baccaleauréat. International schools have IB, which is fortunately starting to make headway in the US.
Instead, Vollmer looks to such magical terms as trust, community, and understanding. Social capital can and does improve the workings of public administration, but its effect on education pales in comparison with this of decent curricula, expert decision-making, and proper funding. Vollmer's four ideas - understanding, trust, permission to experiment, and constructiveness - are good places to start once the American educational system has fixed its major pathologies. But until it does, there's no point; experimenting is futile when the experience of countless countries has shown that e.g. the best way of teaching math is the traditional way.
And even after the US brings itself to the level of the Netherlands or Finland or Japan, Vollmer's ideas will not be enough on their own. The US already has a national education lab called New York City that manages to do pretty well considering that its public schools are cash strapped. But many of the things New York's schools produce can't be replicated nationally; for example, many features rely on having public schools in the same district compete for students, a policy that's easier to implement in a school district with eight million people than in a district with eight thousand.
As for trust and understanding, these are always good ideas, but in the context of Vollmer's support for communal decision-making, they're tickets to the bottom of the international rankings. American school boards are elected by a populace that's 50% creationist. Expecting them to produce better science curricula than a board appointed by the NSF and the NEA is a pipedream.
I like the idea of treating the teacher as an expert analogous to a doctor. Parents have limited control of their children's medical decisions - for example, surgeons are required to obtain their approval before attempting risky procedures or administering drugs with serious side effects. But parents can't tell surgeons how to operate exactly or internal medicine practitioners how to diagnose their children, nor do they elect hospital chiefs of staff.
If communities decide they want more civic education, or more emphasis on foreign languages, or an experimental math teaching system, it's futile to overrule them. But it's equally futile for communities to be able to elect superintendents who can tell teachers how to teach science or math or reading, and who can completely destroy the teaching of foreign languages or science or the arts.
At the same time, decision making doesn't matter too much when funding is short. When it was time for questions, I asked how much of the problem was due to inequality stemming from district-level funding. Vilsack responded that he didn't know if there were widespread funding inequalities, but if there were, they should be promptly corrected. Well, there is huge inequality, and on top of it the trend toward de facto school segregation helps magnify the inequalities and make them more overtly racist.
Together with differential levels of overall funding, there's a problem of teacher pay. The above link to Appletree says not only that New York City spends $11,700 per student per year vs. $22,000 in one of its wealthier suburbs, but also that its median teacher pay is $53,000 vs. $87,000 in the same suburb. Although teacher pay has always been laconic in the US, this wasn't a problem as long as the sexist system prevented them from getting better jobs.
On the other hand, conservatives are right to say that funding isn't everything. Jodi Wilgoren documents how school funding in the US is barely below OECD average relative to its GDP, and above most OECD countries in absolute terms. In 2001-2, California's teacher pay was the highest in the US although its performance was among the worst, and New York state's funding was second only to D.C.'s despite having a middle-of-the-pack performance (which nonetheless was the highest of large states).
So although funding inequality is a huge problem in the US, the degree to which throwing money on the problem will solve it is limited. What distinguishes the US from Europe isn't so much overall funding as funding equality and curricular decision-making. Put another way, it's not that Americans don't spend enough on education, but that they distribute their spending poorly.
This ties in well with Vilsack's speech, which propelled him to the position of my second most favored Democratic Presidential hopeful (the first is still Feingold), tied with Warner. Vilsack focused on school curricula and international comparisons, which I still think are the two areas most fruitful for change in the US. For example, he recounted a story about a visit to a Chinese school where students learn a second foreign language by second grade and physics by seventh grade. This is why even middle-class American schools underperform by European or East Asian standards: they teach things inefficiently.
Still, curricular reform is the most difficult reform avenue to pursue, for it hinges on making parents understand that they're not qualified to decide how children should learn. And, of course, a national board of education staffed by the wrong people - say, anti-evolution hacks - will do tremendous damage. Plus, there is such a thing as excessive centralization. The French system suffers from it and has only recently begun to relax its centralized education bureaucracy. But done right curricular reform will do tremendous good in the US, or more precisely eliminate a tremendous pathology.
But for a partial success story of expert didactics, look at new math. Although Americans love to disparage the idea because it went too far, the basic idea of teaching real math in schools instead of home-ec math is sound. Surprisingly, it took mathematicians and other experts to push for a policy that should be painfully obvious.
Further, it's hard for people not well-versed in the practice of teaching to know where exactly to improve. All I know is that in East Asia and Europe, it's common for students to learn calculus in 10th grade. I don't know what exactly needs to change in the US to bring calculus down from freshman year of college to sophomore year of high school, but I know it can be done.
For another example, intensive language courses can teach a person a language in a month. They require far more work than can be expected of schoolchildren during a school year, but not so much work that it will be impossible to teach kids a language in a year at normal levels of workload. There's certainly no excuse to fumble bilingual education the way American schools do.
I'm more informed about education than most Americans, so I can know what some problems are and which of them are solvable. But I'm not an expert on education, and neither are the people who vote for school boards (nor, for that matter, the people who sit on school boards). It takes dedicated educators and educationalists to spot which problems are easier to fix than others and which problems it is most important to fix, to provide the details of how to solve problems, and to see how the system can improve further after its major pathologies have been eliminated.
It's here that Vollmer's speech departs from reality the most. Individual schools can make good case studies and sandboxes, but most decisions can and should be made at the highest level. Teaching set theory in elementary schools is a bad idea in every district, every state, and every country. Parental and political micromanagement is ruinous everywhere. And no curriculum, community, or management can save an underfunded school.
Bookmark/Search this post with:
I think you are totally off
I think you are totally off in your interpretation of Vollmer. No matter how decentralized in the sense of not being nationalized our school systems are, they are increasingly centralized at the state level, and because of things like consolidation often far too centralized at the local level. I teach in a district with almost 140,000 students, which is a far cry from the less than 6,000 in the district in which I was educated.
I also think you are very far off on how you approach issues of funding. Raw numbers never tells the problem. Average teacher salary comparisons are meaningless without some controls for (a) total education [since teachers are on different scales depending on eduction] and (b) years of experience. Here's an illustration of a simple average, somewhat out of date because of ongoing charity, but it makes the point. The average networth of Bill Gates and teacherken is about 40 billion. That's 'cause he had about 80 billion and I had the net value of my house, which is not even in the 7 figure range, much less the 10 figures necessary for one of Bill Gates's billions.
Funding by itself addresses little unless you know where the money is going.
Decentralization is often quite important, because otherwise you have a tendency towards one size fits all models that fail to meet the needs of the children in each school, in each classroom.
I am a classroom teacher. I also do peer reviews for professional publications, am published in the field of educational policy, and officially am ABD in the field, although I decided that finishing my dissertation (easily within my grasp) made less sense than doing other things. I think what I am responding demonstrates a fundamental misunderstanding of the nature of the real problems in schools.
I only happened on this because someone doing a google search on me pointed it out to me.
Please note -- I think the way we fund our schools is ridiculous. I also think our entire approach to teacher compensation needs to be reexamined. But NEITHER directly addresses the real issues in our schools. They touch on them, but do not address them.
In the immediate DC metro area, I work in the district with the lowest average teacher pay. But that is to a large degree a function of high turnover of new teachers. Yes, we have paid less on some scales, but we also have a masters + 60 scale that only one other local district offers. Thus I am paid MORE than I would be in other districts whose comparable pay on other ladders is higher than ours.
What is a greater issue is class size, teacher load. This may be a function of funding, but it may not be. A district could be paying much higher rates of special education, which is very expensive. Total expenditure per student could be higher, but expenditure per nonSPED student is consequently much lower.
I think your approach is overly simplistic. I invite you to examine the issue much more closely. I think your heart isin the right place -- equity is a real concern But our CENTRALIZATION tendency, especially with regard to how we are using testing (punitively) will merely exacerbate the problems of inequity.
good points
One of the biggest stumbling blocks here in the US is that many of our schools don't have adequate funding, which can only be remedied with higher taxes, or more equitable distribution of funds. Most reform efforts are an attempt to pick option C: find a magic bullet that will make underfunded schools perform well.
So most of the efforts of education "reformers" is devoted to finding something that will lift underperforming schools without providing significant new funding. But simply testing kids won't do it, and neither will threatening underperforming schools with reduced funding. More challenging curricula only work if students don't get books, or if their instructors are teaching outside their area of competence. Vollmer's call for decentralization is just another in a long string of reforms that are meant to avoid the central problem.
As you say, funding isn't everything, but schools need to meet a minimum standard of facilities, faculty, and equipment. Right now, we have schools that boast indoor swimming pools and full-time football coaches who make six figure salaries, and schools that have to hold classes in trailers. Decentralization and school uniforms won't help the kids in the trailers.
Comparing funding levels to other countries can be tricky, though. American schools are often expected to provide services that are provided elsewhere in other countries, like meals and basic health care. And comparisons of funding levels tend to look at aggregate spending, so the schools with high per-pupil spending get lumped in with the inadequately funded schools. Researchers then look at test scores that are held down by underfunded schools, and conclude that investing more money wouldn't help.
Exactly
One of the reasons I like to pay close attention to reformers who neglect funding concerns is that a lot of what they say still holds for a subset of American schools. Few middle-class American public schools will give you the same quality of education as academic European schools. Sure, if you go to Stuyvesant or Bronx Science you'll get world-class education, but when a school has a pool of 90,000 students per year of whom it admits 800, being world-class is trivial.
But other than that, you're totally right: the USA's main problem is funding equality. The State of New York may have the country's second highest per-student funding, but it also has its highest level of inequality between high-income and low-income schools (link). So overall the net result is that New York State's performance is about average by American standards.
In retrospect, I wish I had expressed the point about funding equity more forcefully. Instead of "How much of the problem is due to district-level funding?" I should have asked, "What have you done to mitigate the funding inequality resulting from district-level funding?". The most obvious solution to the problem - eliminate district-level funding and replace it with state-level funding - has been tried in Kansas and failed. Bussing has repeatedly failed to do much for decades. So it's time to look for more creative ideas to make sure rural and inner-city kids don't get shortchanged.