Our Failing Schools

I struggle to decide what crisis to comment on next. Should we focus on how we are destroying society to achieve 0% carbon free goals? Or should we address Denver spending two billion (with a “B”) dollars over three years to provide “homeless” services for a population that just keeps on growing, or perhaps we should puzzle over why the best and brightest of our college students give Hamas an exception for ‘never again’ holocaust behavior. The commonality of each which races through my overactive mind is the question “how can we be so stupid” which leads me to education and our public schools.

Recently, an investigative news report on the Baltimore Public School system revealed that in 23 schools (out of a total of 150) no student, none, zip, absolutely zero, were graded proficient in math.  Let that sink in for a minute. Out of all the students in these 23 schools, no student was proficient in math.  We are not talking about designing rockets or solving differential equations, we are more on the 2+2=4 variety.  And while 23 schools had zero students that were proficient, another 20 schools had only one or two proficient students.

Additionally, we heard the tale of one student who had passed only three courses over a four-year period for a 0.13 GPA. His mother was “shocked” that he was not going to graduate because, no one had informed her that it was this bad.  She figured that since he was promoted from Spanish I to Spanish II or from Algebra I to Algebra II, that things were ok.  A more interesting data point is that this student with the 0.13 GPA was in the top half of his class, 62^nd out of 120.

In response to this revelation, a city school administrator was asked what he would have to say to the parent.  The administrator replied, “I didn't have a hand on this student, but I worked for City Schools. So, he is one of my kids. I would hug her, and I would apologize profusely.”   Leaving the “he” “her” confusion in the quote above aside for the moment, the Baltimore public school administration, of course, is in full deflection mode.  The City Schools sent a statement (blah, blah, blah) about doing better and the steps it’s taking to improve math scores, including professional development for teachers, summer learning and an extended learning period at the end of the day.  Professional development for teachers?   Like learning their math tables?

Now I am sure that you are all saying “Thank God, my kids don’t go to school in Baltimore (except any readers that I may have in Baltimore), but like the mother who presumed that her son was doing ok because he was promoted at the end of the year, the scores for our own little tykes aren’t that great either.

To get local, everyone in Colorado knows that the Denver Public Schools are poor, and the current school board is a clown show even more than usual. (Don’t get me started). In the last Colorado Measures of Academic Success (CMAS), the Denver Public Schools had an average of 40.3% proficient in English and 30.3% proficient in math.

But going even more local, in my home school district, the Cherry Creek School District, previously one of the top performing school districts in the state and assumed to be associated with affluent residents possessing all the resources and advantages that money can buy, it scored a mere 9 points higher at 49.7% in English proficiency and 39.9% proficient in math.

Now I don’t know about you, but in my grading world, 39.9% for math is an F, and 49.7% for English proficiency is an F as well, even if the kids in the inner-city schools have bigger Fs.  If we paid a bunch of money for something that only worked 49.7% of the time, we would be screaming to get our money back.

The Pandemic

Of course, one of the current reasons/excuses articulated for the decline in academic performance and for all things unhappy, second only to climate change, is the pandemic, but I would suggest that public school institutions were not doing all that great when we were healthy and COVID free. National test scores of the National Assessment of Educational Progress exams (NAEP) showed that the average math proficiency for 8^th graders was 26% in 2022, but that was only a decline from 33% in 2019, and hey for all of you challenged by math, two out of three kids who are not up to grade level is not good.  The only conclusion arising from the pandemic excuse for bad test achievement is that our educational system was failing spectacularly in 2019 and now, we are failing more spectacularly.

Gimme more money

The educational establishment’s solution to any defect in its own performance is to get more money.  However, for a number of years, it has been apparent that money spent per student does not correlate with greater learning.  In a recent analysis of NAEP scores and funding per pupil, while Massachusetts led the nation in proficiency at $22,900 per student, number 2 and 3 were Utah and Idaho at $9,500/student and $8,700/student respectively. (New York at $30,300 per pupil didn’t even make the top 10.)  Charter and religious schools routinely achieve better results at lower per student spending.

What else?

In the struggle to divert blame for our public school institutional failures, we are led to a myriad of excuses ranging from poverty, to race, to parents who do not involve themselves in their children’s education, to parents who involve themselves too much in their children’s education, to climate change.

You may think that I am kidding about climate change, but think again, when they cancel school or delay start times for the 8^th snow day of the year or send the kiddos home because it is too hot for the little tykes to concentrate in the absence of expensive climate controlled air conditioning otherwise designed for maximum comfort to afford ideal mental conditions to absorb whatever the propaganda of the day might be.

Now I have made fun and will continue to make fun of several of the whiney excuses for the failures of our educational system, and I am sure that you can come up with a bunch more of your own, but I would suggest that one reason that may fit for our kids coming out of school uneducated is that our public school institutions do not prioritize what its essential purpose should be, education.

A Lack of Focus

We all understand that we accomplish what we focus on.  If we focus on reading, we will learn how to read.  If we focus on math, we will learn math.  But focus requires time, a lot of it.  In my humble opinion, the decline of kids not knowing basic skills results from a lack of focus, effort, and time spent on the building blocks for workplace and lifetime learning, i.e. the basics.

Look at what the current hot topics are at school board meetings.  Who can go in what bathroom or locker room?  Can dudes get state championships in girls’ sports?  What pronouns do you have to learn or use?  Can we expel a student out on bail for attempted murder if it would violate racial parity in expulsions?  How can we design a system of restorative justice so that when girls are sexually assaulted, they have to meet with their attacker to “talk it out”?  How can we abolish valedictorians, so those who are not valedictorians don’t feel bad?  How do we ensure that school mascots are sensitive to underserved communities?  Who gets to decide what morals our children shall be taught, school administrators or parents? 

Are you exhausted yet? You will notice that the above list is not complete and none of these issues, while important, at least to someone, are in any way related to the failure of students to achieve grade proficiency.  Our focus is so diverse (diversity…another issue) that there is simply not enough time in the school day to teach, learn, and remember the basic skills that are the building blocks for educational attainment to achieve the maximum potential for lifelong learning to live a healthy, happy productive life.

I know it must be boring for teachers to teach sentence structure, noun, verb and object, year after year, but for the students it’s their first and perhaps only time, they are going to have an opportunity to get this down.  I know it is boring to grade the same papers and correct the same mistakes of the usage of “their” and “there” and “they’re” or “your” and “you’re” or focus on the times tables for the 30^th year in a row, but that is the job.  Instead, it is much more fun to have a new reading curriculum or new math where the correct answers really don’t matter or to add different subjects such as teaching 1^st graders that the boys in the class may be girls or the girls may be boys or perhaps one of the 26 sexes that we have recently discovered. Learning this extraneous stuff takes time and when added to easy homework so that the little tykes don’t feel inferior in any way, we are not left with a lot of time where necessary learning or review can occur.

Then throw in the concessions to the unions to work less, and we are looking at Fall Break, Christmas Break, Spring Break, taking off the day after Thanksgiving…no wait, let’s take off the whole week!  We have non-student contact days, teacher preparation days, school closures for snow, closures for the cold, closures for the heat, closures for bomb scares, late start times, days of mourning, and the ever-popular field trips.  When does anyone have the time to learn to spell or do simple computations?

Unions

We can’t discuss the failure of our public school institutions and suggest a way forward without talking about school unions.  The largest and what many say is the most powerful union in the country is the National Education Association with over 3,000,000 members which includes their various affiliates like the Colorado Education Association.  Look, teachers’ unions are labor organizations. The role of labor organizations is to represent their members in negotiations with their employers to get better wages, work fewer hours and have better working conditions.  That’s it.  It is not the mission of teachers’ unions to provide a quality education for students or to prepare students to meet the rigors of the cold cruel world.  If the Unions’ initiatives happen to make our kids learn a little more, so be it, but it is not a matter of mission or design.  It is a matter of coincidence.

It was the unions who kept the kids out of school for so long during the pandemic demanding new HVAC systems in order to have COVID free workplaces, where none existed or would ever exist, before they came back to work.  It is the unions that strike in order to get more pay for themselves, denying students an opportunity to learn, and as school unions have become more politically radical over the last few years, they have made demands that have nothing to do with education.

In Fresno, CA, the teachers union was planning to go on strike leaving 72,000 students unschooled.  Among the demands of the union which had rejected a pay proposal which would have created an average teacher pay of $103,000 were allocating $1 million for clothes and school supplies, $1.75 million for creating a food pantry with hygiene products, $20 million for addressing student homelessness, $1 million for free laundry services, and $1 million for free yoga, meditation, and low-impact exercise. Hey, maybe it’s a good thing to provide the homeless with free laundry and yoga, but it has nothing to do with the essential purpose of a school district which is to educate children. (Update—the strike was averted, but I do not know how much of the nonsense got into the new contract).

In Colorado, the Colorado Education Association, representing 37,000 teachers and support professionals passed a resolution stating, “The CEA believes that capitalism inherently exploits children, public schools, land, labor, and resources. Capitalism is in opposition to fully addressing systemic racism (the school to prison pipeline), climate change, patriarchy (gender and LGBTQ disparities), education inequality, and income inequality."  Again, not real sure how the Colorado Education Association’s views on capitalism or Marxism have anything to do with how to avoid dangling participles or being able to figure out the answer to 55 x 3.

Look, I actually don’t have a problem with unions.  The difference between school unions and private sector unions which is integral to understanding why the institution of public education has failed, is that no private sector union has a say over who their employers’ representatives will be. For school unions, as a result of massive funding for school board candidates, unions choose who will be responsible for giving them good stuff.

We have to separate out the missions for each organization.  The schools’ role is to provide a good education.  The teachers’ unions’ job is to get more money, time off and other goodies for their members.  To quote Albert Shanker the legendary head of the American Federation of Teachers when asked what the Union was going to do for the students, he replied, “when the students start paying dues, ask me then.”   While the School Board’s role should be to provide a good education for students in the community, Union backed Board members too often view their role to assist those that brought them to the dance, the Union, rather than educate the students.

While I do not blame the teachers’ unions for doing their job to get their members more for working less.  I do blame members of the public who think that school unions have anything to do with quality education and particularly blame those who vote for school board members who are funded and endorsed by the union.

What to do?  A Humble Suggestion.

There should be no question that our publicly funded school system has failed too many for too long.  The question is: when a system having served its purpose for a time fails, can the system be reformed from within or do we need to get rid of it entirely and implement a new one.  The concept of universal taxation of the populace to fund governmental school monopolies is not the only way to educate students.  We are currently spending more and more money resulting in dumber and dumber kids who are qualified for less and less.

The only ones who can escape the system are the rich who can afford to pay taxes to the government system while still having enough additional money to pay to remove their children from declining schools and put them somewhere else where they can learn.   The poor and the middle class are stuck in the dysfunctional public system with the only hope that they are lucky enough to be in the 30% that are taught math or the 40% who can read at minimum levels. 

If our public educational system was subject to private sector standards, it would have gone bankrupt and disappeared a long time ago.  However, it is a government program and if we know anything about government programs, these are the closest things to immortality that we will see on this earth.

Blow it Up!

Hey!  Not really!  Please, this is a figure of speech. (if you learned in school what that is)  Do not call the FBI!  Bottom line, I do not believe that this system can be reformed from within. (See Baltimore Public Schools) From current school boards, to administrators, to school unions, they have too much power and too much at stake in maintaining the current system.  We are talking about politics, jobs, careers, and livelihoods.  Any reform attempt will be and has been crushed by the individuals who need to be reformed.  The interrelationship between school administrators, taxing polices, and school unions are so intertwined that complete privatization of school systems cannot be accomplished.

As a result, we need to create an alternative education structure, which leaves the public school system in place with all of its faults but strips it of its monopoly status to allow competition from alternative schools which will have equal access to public funding.  The money needs to go with the children to the schools of their choice not to the public school to which they have been relegated.  We have the beginnings of this in the charter school and school choice movements, but the money to support these new institutions has been restricted by the governmental monopoly schools. 

Despite their popularity with parents with demand well over the number of slots, these new educational institutions have struggled to gain momentum as public school systems, fighting tooth and nail to protect their monopolies, seek to incorporate, regulate, and then crush this competition.  As to the argument that competition will destroy public schools, I say…okie dokie. 

We need to break away from governmental control of charter and other alternative schools by public school boards.  To do that parents need to have access to the funds that have been allocated for their children to attend failing public schools and to be allowed to use those funds for alternative schools that will be answerable only to parents for their success or failure.

This movement has already started.  Already this year, lawmakers in at least 11 states—Idaho, Iowa, Kansas, Missouri, Nebraska, North Dakota, Oklahoma, South Carolina, Texas, Utah, and Virginia—have introduced and, in some cases, passed school choice bills. In order to have a complete free market, we need to get over our biases as to what types of organizational structure these alternative schools have whether nonprofit, for profit, private or religious.   We need to focus solely on educational results even if some students end up getting a little Jesus or Allah in addition to learning how to spell and add.  If we don’t, Dumb and Dumber will be more than just an old Jim Carey movie.