Education is the duty of the student. A student who studies will learn no matter how uninspiring the teacher. A student who does not study will not learn, no matter how brilliant the teacher.

Our educational system is compromised not because of teachers, who do what they can, nor administrators, who do what they can, nor of parents, who, barring the monstrous or incompetent, do what they can. It is because the students don’t give a damn about becoming educated.

This is because education has been made a right. One does not work for a right; it is given to you, and you may demand redress if it is not forthcoming. Kids (and their parents) expect their education to be handed to them tied up nicely with a bow. They don’t value it as a prize to be earned but as a tax to be demanded.

My great-grandparents both dropped out of school when they were 13, so they could work to support their families. It wasn’t a right in those days, it was something you had to deserve. I don’t see that either of them missed out on a full life because they never had to take high school algebra.

So the question becomes, exactly for whom are we expending all this treasure and noise?

As I’ve implied. the “business model” is not applicable. A business that produces low quality goods due to its use of inferior materials is doomed to failure. They are accountable for the fact that chose inferior raw materials in order to produce goods on the cheap. The public school system would improve vastly if the schools had a system of “quality control”, a concept which is standard procedure in any business. This is why a business can be held accountable for its product and the public schools cannot.

Of course.

Perhaps we could start by equalising funding, if that isn’t asking for to much?

How about focusing on the student? No, because the student is a product of his/her environment. Besides, his ego has to be protected.

How about the policy makers? No, because they don’t control matters after they set the policy.

How about the administrators? No, because they are trying to generate positive PR all the time.

How about the parents? No, because (we’re told) there’s no way that parents can be held accountable for a child’s behavior. There’s no way to mandate proper parent supervision, let alone the genes that they pass along.

That leaves the teacher. The teacher has direct contact. In spite of the fact that the teacher has absolutely no control over the parents or the child’s environment, the teacher is easy to blame. And the teacher is usually defenseless. It’s the teacher and the teacher alone against an angry parent.

Policy makers seem to think that they are forward thinking when they propose that schools should be run like a business, and that accountability is what makes a business successful. (Accountability like in AIG, GM, Chrysler, and the Wall Street brokerage houses?)

The business model when applied to public education has a basic flaw that evidently escapes the “reformers. Business can reject – indeed must reject- faulty raw materials in order to avoid producing a faulty finished product. Even so, autos and other consumer goods frequently are recalled by the factories that produced them.

The raw materials (steel, for example) going into an auto have no prejudice as to their involvement in the manufacturing of the auto. They can become a fender or part of the frame, or another other part of the auto. The raw material doesn’t rebel, doesn’t resist, doesn’t disrupt, doesn’t threaten, doesn’t come to the factory angry, etc.

Teachers have raw materials (students) who come to the factory (school) with a multitude of emotions and problems, most of which are due to influences of the home or the neighborhood or their peers.

The teacher can have a positive or a negative influence in shaping the attitude of the student, but in today’s society, the teacher is often pitted against the influence of the movies, video games, television and other powerful influences beyond the teachers control.

Yet the public expects teachers to abandon the only protective group that they can turn to, the teachers’ union.

The union may not leap to accept the latest educational fad to come down the pike, but anyone in education for just a few decades has seen personally witnessed “great educatioal reforms”
applied and then fall away, their grand promises unkept, sometimes leaving teachers and parents alike bitter and disillusioned.

Unquestionably, the unions have protected some teachers who should not be in the profession. But unions have also served a necessary function of making it difficult for a principal to get rid of
a teacher simply because a teacher stands up for himself and/or takes a position on educational matters contrary to the one(s) held by principal. Also, what profession doesn’t protect it’s members? Does the A.M.A.? You better believe it.

Whenever I read an article damning teachers or the teachers’ unions, I know that the authors of the criticisms have little knowledge of what the situation for teachers is like in today;s schools. I retired ten yeas ago after teaching for 34 years. I have met very few teachers in all those years who didn’t try their best to have a positive influence upon their students. Some drove themselves almost into a state of exhaustion trying to do perfectly everything required of them (in addition to actually teaching).

I do believe that some type of educational reform is needed, but I suggest that educational reform as it is usually proposed (on the backs of the already over-burdened teacher) is doomed to failure.

We must somehow undertake to reform our culture so that education is precious. We need to honor academic achievement the way we do athletic achievement. We need to have the faces of brilliant scientists displayed on postage stamps. And we need to make teaching an honored profession.

Until we begin to recognize that we need to change society – until we admit that we have a cultural problem and then begin to take the very difficult road to re-shape our attitudes, we will continue to slip farther away from the goal of having a world class educational system for the twenty-first century.

However, these attacks would have much more credibility if only policy wonks would admit some hard truths:

1) Administrators and general bureaucracy in school systems are at least as big of a problem as are teachers. Wasting money, retire/rehires are just a couple of the problems. The administration of my school system is, frankly, an embarrassment.

2) Kids in city schools come to school with a host of problems. Behavior problems are widespread, and many teachers have to spend much of their time dealing with angry/noncompliant students. That is not helpful to anyone; yet no one seems to have come up with a thoughtful way of managing behaviors. Or, if they have, we in the public schools haven’t heard about it.

3) Would someone please tell the state education departments that we need streamlined paperwork? At least in the state of Ohio-this is a chronic problem that is getting worse every year. Maybe the states need to look at their employees and stop hiring people who haven’t seen a classroom in the last 10 years.

4) Would someone please explain why public schools get SO much scrutiny, and charter schools get so little? Can we make the standards just a bit more equal? Until policy wonks hold everyone to the same standards, their criticism is worth little more than the paper on which it is written.

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