While most every other service in life has gotten faster, better, and cheaper, one of the most important things we buy -- education -- has remained completely stagnant, unchanged since we started measuring it in 1970.
Why no improvement?
Why no improvement?
Because K-12 education is a government monopoly and monopolies don't improve.
The government-school monopoly claims: Education is too important to leave to the free market. At a teachers' union rally, even actor Matt Damon showed up to deride market competition as "MBA style thinking."
"Competition may be okay for selling movies and cell phones, but education is different," says the establishment. Learning is complex. Parents aren't real "customers" because they don't have the expertise to know which school is best. They don't know enough about curricula, teachers' credentials, etc. That's why public education must be centrally planned by government "experts".
Those experts have been in charge for years. They are what school reformers call the "Blob." Jeanne Allen from the Center for Education Reform says for years attempts at reform have run, "smack into federations, alliances, departments, councils, boards, commissions, panels, herds, flocks and convoys, that make up the education industrial complex, or the Blob.
Taken individually they were frustrating enough, each with its own bureaucracy, but taken as a whole they were (and are) maddening in their resistance to change. Not really a wall -- they always talk about change -- but more like quicksand, or a tar pit where ideas slowly sink.
And the most powerful part of the Blob is the teachers' union.
This Saturday, I interview Nathan Saunders, the President of the Washington, D.C. Teachers' Union, and Joseph Del Grosso, President of the Newark Teachers' Union. They say things like, "the unions have a pretty strong history of advocating for high-quality public education... We have progress as a result of unions."
Their predecessors were more candid. When the Washington Post asked George Parker, when he headed the Washington, D.C. teachers union, why he fought a voucher program that let some kids escape failing government schools, he said, "As kids continue leaving the system, we will lose teachers. Our very survival depends on having kids in D.C. schools so we'll have teachers to represent."
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I was part of the major curriculum innovations of the 1960's, 70's, & 80's working in a very involved and modern school system. Unfortunately, the main reason these wonderful, and they were, programs failed was many(not all) teachers sabotaged them. Apparently those who did this thought they knew more than the curriculum innovators and the experts that trained them to teach those programs. It was also true in every other school system in which I consulted on these programs including several along the east coast and one overseas. I don't know how many times I heard,"I'm not going to use that stuff with my students." Working for a large foundation to determine the effects of one such program, in which the teachers were trained the previous summer and paid, we found it almost impossible to find teachers using it at times they said they were teaching. Unobtrusive measures of the teachers' guides, curriculum materials, etc., in May indicated little if any usage - no finger prints, coffee stains, underlining, ripped pages, materials missing from the kits, etc. The result was that very few, if any, students ever completed the entire curriculum, especially if it was for multiple grad levels.
ReplyDeleteget rid of the UNIONS. stupid is as stupid does....
ReplyDeleteeducation in this country will NEVER improve until it's brought back to the citizens as it should be. the "powers that be" don't have a clue.
the emperor has NO clothes.
The whole education system needs to be revamped. Students are taught to think text book style instead of outside of the box at times. The modern method discourages independent thinking and squashes creativity.
ReplyDeleteThis article is humorous for quite a few reasons.
ReplyDelete1. It shows no understanding for how weak the current teachers association in MD is.
2. Of course teachers are resistant, every 6 months, they are told everything they are doing is wrong, and another consultant is brought in... with a program (paid for by taxpayers) that everyone is now supposed to follow. The cycle repeats every 6 months... by the 3rd time through the pendulum of change, the average teacher sees the worthlessness of it, and just teaches somewhere between how they were trained and what works with their students.
Common core is arriving, and will soon be departing. How many millions of dollars have been spent on 'blob' to create it. In the end, it will change nothing... and will be replaced by something else in a year or two... just like everything else.
How are unions ruining education?
ReplyDeleteIt is not unions that have paid the most poorly educated, least independent members of society to have as many children as possible. What did you think the result of the welfare system would be? You don't need an education to support your family, and those who intend to never work have learned that just fine.
ReplyDelete