Factors Creating Failing Public (Government) Schools

For decades education reformers have attempted to 'restore' luster to the eroding results of government run schools that began in the 1960's with the first federal involvement in state and local education programs (Elementary and Secondary Education Act, 1964, Lyndon Johnson). Just as we've seen of late with the Common Core State Standards Initiative, individual programs have been instituted at various times over the years toward this end, yet all have resulted in lackluster or poor outcomes for the money, training and resources provided.

Why? Because none of the issues effecting government run schools today can be solved by a single initiative, or by throwing money at one or two issues like spaghetti at a wall.

Below, I've attempted to identify a number of items - some of which I've witnessed personally, as a former teacher and parent - that must be addressed in order to return to the pre-60's educational excellence seen here in America for hundreds of years.

Changes to schools and instruments of schooling must come from the local level.

• Urban schools and rural schools aren't similar in socio-economic composition or community needs, yet laws created at the state or federal level force change on all schools.
• Traditionally, school boards allow parents the ability to assist in directing their children’s educations – shifting the responsibility from parents to the state conditions parents to become further removed from the process of educating their children.
• Parenting failures cannot be legislated as these tend to result from lack of values training best addressed by programs provided via churches and charities.

Laws created to address failing schools rarely address the fundamental issues behind the failures.

• Systemic failure results as one ineffective/unproductive law is replaced or augmented by another and then another – in attempt to bring about results largely unattainable via legislative means.

Teacher/Superintendent/School Board organizations are used to draft public school legislation which favors the needs of the educational ‘system’ and not the student and/or parent.

Education legislation and programming features a paucity of education history and research, instead focusing on the newest ‘trends’/programs in education.

• Integrating technology (computers/ipads, etc.) into elementary classrooms actually produce results antithetical to those desired, yet are utilized with consistency and touted as ‘cutting-edge’, which, also, ironically creates a nonexistent need for more funding.
• Replacing veteran teachers with Teach for America teachers replaces tried and true teaching methodologies with unproven methods utilized by skimpily-trained young people.

Today’s education focus is completely wrong-headed.

• Students should not be educated ‘for’ college or the ‘workforce’.
• Classically-based education programs featuring broad-based studies in United States and world history, science, classical literature, the arts and music, have, historically, created students ready and able to take on any challenge presented them.

Though taxpayers should work to create accountability in government, education is not a government function; education is a function of the individual first and community second.
American public education was created from an ideal articulated by both Benjamin Franklin and Thomas Jefferson.

• Both men believed schools should be created to teach students unable to afford the private tutoring system primarily utilized in their day.
• They believed schools should teach the Bible (the model upon which our Republican form of government was created), America’s very particular system of 3-branch government and free-market economy, and the history of America’s founding.
• Schools were to be created by and through churches or individual community organizations – not as a function of government.

Government has assumed the role of educating its citizens, creating numerous problems.

• Funding:  Each school receives the same amount of money for each student in a seat. This invalidates the principles of America’s free-market economy and creates a system in which mediocrity flourishes because excellence is neither expected nor demanded by those paying for its services.
• Partisanship:  Once education becomes a function of government, it begins to utilize tenets ascribed to government by popular culture, such as “political correctness”.

• This gives rise to a culture lacking in personal responsibility where administration and teachers refuse to make students responsible for their work and grades rather than deal with difficult parents.

• This situation also produces a lack of willingness to hold students responsible for their behavior, creating school climates in which bullying of students and teachers is unchecked.

• Usurpation of parental rights and responsibilities:

• Moving the responsibility for education to the state (and often federal) level relieved parents of their duties to provide for the education of their children by replacing their authority with that of a government official.

• State-empowered school officials necessarily had to create the notion that parents were inadequate to direct the education of their children in order to justify a government wage.

• Parents quickly became trained to see public school as a babysitter rather than a partner in the education of their children as the authority of school officials grew with government funding.

• Usurpation of student rights and responsibilities:

• Once government became responsible for education, education became relegated to a series of hoops (tests) through which a student must jump in order to complete their next task: move to a next grade, graduate, get a job.

• Students are never shown the value of obtaining an education for themselves so education becomes something a student does to please others, not to make their lives better.

• Susceptibility to educational ‘trends’ including:

• Common Core State Standards vs those tailored to meet the educational priorities of parents/students at the local/state level.

• Whole word language assimilation vs reading taught by phonics and an understanding of English phonemes.

• Reformist, community-inspired, explanatory math vs learning traditional, fact-based algorithms and skills.

• World history vs American history

• American history from 1877 to the Present vs American history from the Pilgrims and Founding, to present

• Civics taught in high school vs developmental civics across each grade and stage

Federal government intervention has further usurped the influence of the state, local community and parents, and is now itself responsible for many of the ills plaguing public education today such as:

• Lack of student privacy:

• More and more personal student data must be collected by schools to satisfy the compacts of states with the federal government.

• Digital records are nearly impossible to redact, leaving student records exposed to future employers and educational prospects.

• A perceived need for increased funding:

• The more federal initiatives for which states apply (or are foisted onto them) the more personnel are required to fill out the ever-increasing paperwork necessary to keep the initiative, leading to loss of funds for teachers and needed materials that directly affect the classroom.

• Less flexibility to teach with proven methods and personnel:

• The federal Civil Rights in Education initiative for Teacher Equity forced onto all public school districts for example, is coercing teachers to move among schools dependent upon a set of federal race guidelines set for teachers in relation to student populations, violating the Civil Rights of teachers/students and causing many older teachers to quit the teaching profession.

NON-GOVERNMENT SOLUTIONS:

Private organizations in every city can help to create educational excellence by addressing the foundational pillars underlying education failure (as previously described) by devoting resources and funds toward any or all of the following ends:

• Support the ideal that state/federal legislation is not the way to move the needle on educational excellence – that partnering with local charities, churches and non-profits can produce results one-size-must-fit-all legislation cannot

• Community based adult and student English and financial literacy programs are an excellent example of successful business/community partnerships

• Support legislation (or repealer legislation) that:

• Stresses local control of education and prevents intrusion by the federal Department of Education at the state and district levels

• Supports parental rights and responsibilities

• Seeks to move accountability for education from the state/federal level back to the parent/local level 

• Resists the urge to narrow curricula and standards – allowing for classical studies and schools to bloom

• Creation of individual and/or community programs that:

• Develop bridge relationships among schools and businesses to create mentoring/intern opportunities

• Delivers business/vocational leaders who can speak to classes, or in assemblies and share their experiences with students on their level

• Provide scholarship opportunities in areas such as engineering

• Partner with job training programs to identify vocational skills gaps and educate students who desire the training, on how to attain these skills

• Identify private programs that produce educational excellence and partner them with businesses willing to mentor/intern students

• Empower parents to advocate for their children via tuition breaks or educational/job opportunities not available to the general population

Education for those who cannot afford private, individual education (or desire not to utilize a private system) should be provided in America. It should not be paid for in perpetuity via taxpayers, but by parents - whether they are allowed to keep their money for themselves (no earmarked taxes for education) or returned earmarked funds to spend in whatever manner is best for their child. Until parents are allowed (and returned) responsibility for the education of their children, status quo will remain and poor educational outcomes should be expected.

Mo Money

Last week, one of the bloggers I follow, okeducationtruths, released a blog about vouchers and, more specifically, Jason Nelson's bill on vouchers.  I added my two cents because, even though we don't always agree, the writer is a great listener and quite accommodating of opinions, and I LOVE that!  

I'm not going to get into the voucher thing here (if you're interested, you can find my comments at the link above) but I am going to paste my answer here to okeducationtruths last post.  It's a post I've wanted to do here on our blog for quite a long time, so it just seemed the right time to make this happen. 

I've had very definite opinions on money in public education for quite a long time and I would like people to hear them.  If you don't agree, that's fine, tell me why not.  I truly do LOVE hearing peoples thoughts.  In fact, the first line of response to okeducationtruths is:

First, I actually love that we don't always agree.  As I've told Nicole a number of times, if we always agreed the world would be a very dull place AND we'd have learned nothing to expand our horizons!

I think your points are excellent and well taken here - especially the point about not being able to add up tax dollars like chits.  True, however, there is an actual proportionality of tax dollars required by each tax payer that goes toward public education (your property tax bill has that fully delineated).  This is the amount of money I was referencing in this case.

Your comment, "I do have a problem with the mentality that everything can be done better when left to private markets", is also interesting to me.

I can come into agreement on that as well for the most part.  In fact, I think the most nefarious thing about this whole latest 'reform' package is the fact that it IS private companies/philanthropists (without any educational expertise on any level in a whole lot of instances - the Chamber of Commerce?  Come the heck on!) making these pronouncements instead of ideas unfolding in a more 'democratic' style.  "He with the gold makes the rules" as it were.  That is NOT American if you ask me.

Here's where I think I get the most frustrated.  I was not for state question 744.  I am not for pouring more money into schools.  The idea that we should somehow be equating money with educational 'rigor' (ack, I can't believe I said that word in a sentence!) or outcomes of any kind is a red herring.  (PS I totally appreciated hearing the definitions provided for both Red Herring and Straw Man!)

I am constantly attacked for what I'm about to say, but I think it speaks to my conviction (or stupidity!) that I keep on message: we put men on the moon when computers took up rooms and rooms, most advanced mathematical computations were done on slide rules and the federal government had yet to really sink their hooks into the educational system.  There are home schooling families out there that use little more than books and flashcards to give their kids a well-rounded, classical education, that has been shown to produce better overall results than public education. 

I studied lots of ins and outs of spending as I researched my arguments against 744 and here is what I found (in general terms).  It takes a HUGE amount of money at the state level to administer federal grants for which we get - after administration costs - pennies on the dollar, yet our state goes running to FedEd constantly for all kinds of programming.  Much of this programming has never been tested or tried - or has been proven NOT to provide much, if any benefit (Head Start, for example) yet we do it because we get 'free' money.

Oklahoma legislators are very fond of riding public education with a heavy hand.  A very large number of education laws are passed because someone in a district needs/wants that very thing they ask of the entire state.  Most laws won't/don't translate well to another district, but suddenly, all districts must fall under the edict.  We have mandated public schools into near complete commonality and the poor house, as most state education laws end up in the unfunded category.

That said, there can be no way that the largest (well second now behind health care I understand) budgeted item in the state needs MORE money to succeed.  (Yes, as a teacher, I DID buy a number of my own things and as a science teacher I was often begging for supplies, just for the record.)  What we do need, however, is an enormous AUDIT of programming, unfunded mandates and job descriptions at the state education level.  We MUST return money to classrooms from the administrative level so science teachers can buy microscopes (instead of watching online videos about Paramecium, the novel idea would be that kids actually get to see them for themselves!) and any other amount and/or kind of tool necessary to teach kids.  There is money in the system, it just needs to be reapportioned and why shouldn't we demand that this happen?  Why must we use federal money when it comes with strings and gives us only pittance for our beseeching?  Why must districts go to the state for money when their 'customers' are right in their own backyards?  Our cities are run in this fashion.  If schools were administered at the district level instead of the state level, it would certainly be a lot easier to reapportion unnecessary funds and redirect money into classrooms...but then do the powers that be really want that? 

Educational Equity doesn't always come wrapped up in a perfect little box labeled "money".  We need to get out of this rut, expand our horizons and realize that few things in life are ever really 'equal' and that equal education is really a subjective term - for parents and even communities.  The only reason we love the word 'equality' in education is because it happens to be the only thing we can use to make that label mean the same thing to everyone - the objective quantity of dollars and cents.  Sadly, true equality in education is only going to come when schools/districts can do for their 'customers' what is actually best for them and NOT best for the state.

What's Good for the Goose...? If Sandy Did It, Janet Will Too.

 

I found a very surprising article in today's paper (3/20/2012), "Current State Education Department Officials Used Funds From Nonprofit Foundation". This, after the breaking story last week "Oklahoma Education Department Spent $2.3 Million Through Slush Funds, Audit Claims" about State Superintendent Janet Barresi's predecessor, Sandy Garrett.

Let's do some brief analysis here by breaking down each event separately so we can compare:

SANDY GARRET'S ADMINISTRATION:

• 2 accounts found totaling 2.3 million over the course of 10 years
• Monies were collected from private sources to fund two events/year = Encyclomedia and The Superintendent's Annual Leadership Conference
• Non-profit Oklahoma Curriculum Improvement Commission held both accounts composed of private funds 
• Monies transferred in 2010 to Oklahoma State School Boards Association (a non-profit association) who managed the accounts for 25,000/yr fee (Barresi closed and had remaining 783.51 deposited into Foundation for Innovation in Education account though Communications Director Damon Gardenhire said initially they did not - they were deposited in a revolving fund - oops?)
• Former Republican State Chairman, auditor Gary Jones, maintains both accounts were "off book" and unknown to the boards of either OCIC or OSSBA
• Donations to the accounts made by vendors that had, "multimillion contracts with the Education Department for various education services"
• Donations went to pay for "alcohol, food and lodging" including a chocolate fountain and kegs of beer
• Food and alcohol at at 2005 reception cost $12,694 

JANET BARRESI'S ADMINISTRATION:

• 1 account found with no dollar figure given according to the Oklahoman but possibly $213,747 over the course of 1 year (right about 2.3 million over 10 years at that rate)
• Monies were collected from private sources to fund Innovation 2011
• Non-profit Foundation for Innovation in Education held the account composed of private funds
• Foundation board (paper did not indicate how board members were chosen) managed the account 
• Finances handled by CPA (Pam Pollard, Vice-Chair of the Republican Party)
• It is unclear how Foundation board members were chosen but board dissolved directly after meeting was held
• Origination of donations to account not disclosed by the Oklahoman
• Auditor Gary Jones said he knows about Barresi's account, but did not look into it.
• Donations went to pay for vendor space, rooms, convention space and audio gear (as per the Oklahoman, totaling approximately $154,226)
• Food (without alcohol) for reception and superintendent's lunch cost $12,612

I think we can stop there, as I hope most everyone is getting the picture. Apparently, misdeeds are in the eye of whomever's party is represented by the person sitting in the chair!

Yes, there has been impropriety alleged by the OSDE under the tutelage of Sandy Garrett. Here is an interesting blog alleging firsthand (hearsay) knowledge of such impropriety. Certainly, one can peruse the entire State Auditor's report for themselves to determine exactly how far reaching was this alleged "corruption" at Garrett's OSDE.

I think two things are important to note here:

1. This sounds just like the VERY PARTISAN stink that was raised over Janet Barresi's initial meeting with her board that led to Republicans running to her aid and producing legislation (before the air had even cleared) to give her power over her board. (As a side note, I tend to agree with the opinion of this blogger on that issue)
2. Janet Barresi - as her first order of business as State Superintendent - funded no less than THREE STATE employees with PRIVATE funds. The board asked that the AG's opinion be sought on the legality of the matter of the hires, but Barresi simply blocked the motion (in imperious fashion) during the regular board meeting. Senator Andrew Rice then asked for a ruling instead. AG Pruitt ruled AGAINST Barresi, calling the hires (who had been working in the department prior to the board meeting at which they were to be approved for hire - against state law) "usurper(s) who lacks the authority to carry out the official duties of the State".

Where is the persecution/prosecution of/for Dr. Barresi? Why does she get a 'pass'? Blind allegiance by members of her own party to the party?

I am closing with the comment I made to Megan Rolland's article of today:

Wait...did nobody digest the fact that the State Department of Education - through a Foundation OF THEIR OWN CREATION (members of which were hand picked by the Department and not an outside group) pay for VENDOR rooms and space? WHAT? So I can essentially go to one of these great "INNOVATION IN EDUCATION" meetings (paid for by a private entity) as a vendor and not only retain the money from the goods/services I am selling but also be TREATED to a room and free vendor space? Does that not just trip anyone's sense of sensibility there?

No wonder some of the attendees I spoke with felt as though they were there to be 'sold' on different items, not to become 'educated' on current teaching practices. So was this 'convention' for educational purposes or to scratch the backs of vendors so the OSDE can get back-door deals?

Let's not forget as well, that the OSDE had a PRIVATE agency pay for the salaries of two employees that the Board didn't like. Where's the accountability for a STATE FUNDED agency if they simply solicit private funds to do whatever they like?

Sorry, I'm a Republican and this doesn't look good at all for our team. What old saying applies here? "Judge not lest ye be judged?", "Do unto others..."?, ["What's good for the goose is good for the gander"?]