How To Fix Public Education – Part One

First and most important, not all public schools systems need to be fixed. Granted, most do, but not all. Even in our own state of West Virginia there is a wide disparity in the quality of education based on the socioeconomic level of the area. The most difficult decision I had to make when writing this article was deciding where to begin. There are so many areas that need to be discussed that this was a difficult decision. I finally decided to begin where all the action takes place-the classroom. This is where the proverbial tire meets the road. This is where the transmission of learning takes place. If the system fails at this level, nothing else matters. Let’s begin.
Teachers have one of the most important and difficult jobs there is. Not only are they responsible for educating a very diverse group of students with their many needs, they must do it with minimal supplies and support. In the past, the classroom was the teacher’s castle. They created and enforced the rules in their room. No decision made by a teacher was challenged or second-guessed by an administrator. The teacher decided if an infraction required more severe punishment and had immense latitude in deciding what needed to be learned and generally stayed within the bounds of the 3 R’s. Apparently this very simple system worked fairly well due to the simple fact that our country emerged as the most powerful country and dominated the rest of the world in technology and production techniques.
In contrast, our modern system is about as alien to its roots as a system can be. First, the classroom is no longer a teacher’s castle and is generally riddled with a multitude of restrictions, guidelines and disruptions. Teachers are required to do benchmark testing every two weeks, project testing via the computer, writing tests and end of the year tests. With additional programs such as Positive Behavior Support or PBS, (teachers have another idea of what this means), assemblies, disciplinary disruptions, announcements and “pullouts” for clubs, pictures, fairs, to name a few; non-instructional time could easily approach 40%.
Second, all decisions are questioned by a higher power. I believe this to be the most detrimental change to the modern classroom. This means that if a student is disrupting ones classroom, discipline becomes a very involved inevitably and time-consuming problem. Removal of a student from class is equivalent to an act from God and more important; it is not the teacher’s decision. The old adage that one apple can ruin the barrel is true in a classroom of 25 students. One disruptive student can bring a classroom to its knees.
Thirdly, teachers are inundated with a blizzard of tasks. A modern elementary teacher may have to write lesson plans on any given day for 10 to 12 different subjects; depending on the principal, these could be rather detailed. Tack this on to grading papers, going to meetings, bus and lunch duty and little-to-no planning time during the day and you have a recipe for burnout. Due to the fact the educator spent a large amount of money to become a teacher and has financial responsibilities that require a regular paycheck it is a difficult decision to change careers. This in turn creates teachers who are no longer enjoying their career and decreases their effectiveness as a teacher.
Fourth and final is our obsession with testing. I believe this is a result of the fact that we do not trust the teachers to teach our students; therefore, we test students over and over to collect large amounts of data that have little to no effect on public education. Most states have learned to design their tests to show the results they want to convey.
Recently, I was having a conversation with my doctor. He feels that the problem with health care is the tremendous expense of needless testing done by the medical profession to protect themselves from malpractice suits. At first glance this may seem unrelated, but with a little thinking I came to this idea: the same reason doctors test patients to the extreme is one and the same as educational testing: a lack of trust in the professional who was trained and hired to perform a task. I think this is profound and may be transferred to almost every profession that deals with people.
This is the reason we have so much trouble in any area that deals with people. Because we are fearful of lawsuits, we create large, ambiguous bureaucracies in many different forms to protect ourselves from litigation. This also creates many levels of checks and balances to monitor the professional who we hired because of the training they received! Many times the monitoring is done by people not trained in that particular area!
This is my first article dealing with education. I plan to write several more over the next couple of months. I hope you send this link to any teachers you know and welcome as much feedback as possible. A country’s present and future is embedded in the way they educate their children. Next time I will talk about what education is and is not.

~ by streisel on March 10, 2010.