Master Wang-Ka, my last post regarding funding clearly stated that the massive resources we devote to education don’t translate to massive resouces spent at the classroom level.
The most cleanly run, efficient bureaucracy imaginable is still a cost overhead that keeps resources away from teachers and kids. The bigger said bureaucracy is, the more this is so.
Master Wang-ka -
I don’t think we disagree as much as we agree.
But in the interests of disclosure, I taught English in a former life, with a concentration on reading. And it is not by any means impossible to use standardized testing to test reading skills - far from it.
Teaching literary analysis is a wonderful thing, but standardized tests are there to show that the students have the basic skills that are prerequisite for a higher appreciation of literature - vocabulary, reading comprehension, and so forth.
Over-emphasis on testing is a bad thing. Not teaching basic skills or anything else is much worse. Testing is a way to be sure basic, testable skills exist in the student.
But I expect public schools would benefit from being able to kick the losers out, and recoup a hell of a lot of students from private schools. But, as you say, that plays hell with funding based on head count.
Regards,
Shodan
Well, yeah, true enough. Are you suggesting that all this money is getting logjammed somewhere in the educational bureaucracy? I find that extremely hard to believe. Speaking as one who deals with the educational bureaucracy on an everyday basis, the only place it really COULD be getting jammed would be on the state or district level – at least, that’s where it could get clogged without me knowing about it, down here at the classroom level.
…which begs the question: what’s happening to the money? While there are, no doubt, corrupt district administrations here and there, I flatly refuse to believe that it exists on a massive enough scale to turn funding increases into massive statewide deficits. Not without some kind of proof, at any rate. This would imply that the politicos are in league with the state education reps to make millions of dollars simply vanish, and I’d like to think someone might have noticed by now.
Rather, I’m inclined to go with the simplest possible explanation: the money is being spent normally, and the flow is getting jacked around by politicians at the state and federal levels. From what I’ve seen, the federal level alone is enough to explain what’s happening here and now in Texas, and that doesn’t even have to take into account the weirdness in the state budget.
This isn’t to say that the bureaucracy couldn’t use some fat trimmed off it; I’ve seen plenty of district-level jobs that I couldn’t see any point in, aside from to put yet another fool on the payroll. But for some reason, whenever politicians choose to ride the educational system into office, nobody ever goes after district bureaucracies, or the state bureaucracy. For some reason, it’s the teachers who always take it on the chin. Wonder why that is? Don’t think I’ve ever seen any politicians who tried to get elected on the platform of “Smaller School Bureaucracies And More Responsible School Spending.”
And Shodan… hell, you’re preaching to the choir. I’d gleefully eliminate all rules, laws, and regulations making education compulsory. The way I see it, I’d simply give any American citizen the privelige of 20 years of free public education. Anyone so stupid as to refuse it would freely be permitted to do so, and come back later after they’d grown up enough to appreciate it.
Furthermore, you could lose this privelige by committing crimes on school property, once over the age of 18. Your country is offering you a great treasure, chums; if YOU fuck it all up, you have no one but yourself to blame.
Way I see it, this would not only save a great deal of money, but would clear out the monkeys and the punks right quickly, thus improving the situation for everyone who chose to remain, don’cha think?
Of course, this idea is not feasible. It’s not politically swingable, and expressing this idea in the wrong company has gotten me some remarkably ugly looks and at least one heated argument. Education isn’t a privelige, it’s a RIGHT! And what kind of (N-word) would suggest otherwise?
Yeah, well, something the politicians seem to love to bring up is how the Japanese kick our butts every year in terms of quality of education, test scores, yadda yadda yadda.
Y’know what? Education over there is a privelige, not a right, and you are expected to work your butt off for it. And I strongly suspect if we adopted ALL their ideas about public education, we could match the Japanese on most levels, including test scores. But, no, we’d rather simply pass idiotic laws requiring our teachers to somehow achieve these Herculean heights, without offering them any of the advantages in circumstance of their Japanese counterparts. Just … just make it all happen, somehow. The law says you gotta. Somehow. Funding or no funding.
…and you ask me why I’d trust a teacher or a school administrator before I’d trust a politician?
Master Wang-Ka, the budget request for FY 2005 for the US Department of Education is 57.3 billion dollars.
What is your school district getting from the Depaerment of Education, that is worth this kind of budget?
There was talk from conservatives years ago of abolishing the Department of Education and replacing it with a small office devoted solely to handling block grants. The rhetoric has died, largely because, sadly, there seemed to be no traction behind this idea. I think, though, this is still the ideal solution, especially if local control of the schools is to be maintained.
Master Wang-ka -
Every time you post, we are more in agreement.
Except for one part -
Based on my and my wife’s experience (as described above), I don’t think the mis-spending is necessarily occurring at the state or federal level. In our case, the tax increase meant to reduce class size was redirected away at the local level.
Local school boards and school administrators are no less venal or politically driven than state and federal politicians - more so, if possible.
Although in the case of the Washington DC schools, I am sure mismanagement, corruption, and simple incompetence occur at every level.
I think the driving forces behind the cesspit of Washington DC and other failed school systems is that their problems can only be addressed by solutions that money cannot buy. I would bet good money that most teachers and most parents are fully aware of this, and fully supportive of measures that would address it - expelling the trouble makers in every class without mercy, focus on basic skills, firing incompetent teachers, return of unquestioned authority to teachers in classrooms, zero tolerance for excuses, and a half-dozen other steps that would be universally popular with concerned parents and universally unpopular with turf-protecting educational bureaucrats and unions.
My big beef with the NEA is that they want agreements in which we increase spending on education. In return, they promise - more of the same of the last thirty years.
Regards,
Shodan
I think we’ve beat this horse to death. I’d like to open up other promising avenues of argument. 
More Moto Musings
If private and parochial education have taught us anything, it is that you can get a very good education out of a teacher who does not have a certification. Public education, meanwhile, has taught us that it is likewise possible to get a lousy education from a teacher who has said certification.
I do not see the worth in teacher certification and the tenure system as it is currently constructed.
For one thing, and I hate to say it, teachers primarily get this certification by becoming education majors. The concentration is less on becoming a subject matter expert and more on educational theory. While this is essential in teaching children, I will admit, it is also prone to politicization and overreliance on theory rather than experience in the classroom.
The schools that concentrate in turning out teachers are considered second-rung colleges at best. Many are holdovers of the old “normal-school” system, when teaching was a field dominated by women and women got second-rate everything.
If a person chooses to pursue certification without being an education major in the first place, it is in many states a major pain. This closes the teaching field off from many people who might bring into it useful experience from business, the military, academia, and countless other fields of endeavor.
The teacher’s unions insist on higher salaries for teachers, saying that students deserve to be taught by the best and the brightest. But the certification system, as it is currently constructed, often ensures that this is oftentimes not the case.
Musing Number Two concerns special education. I am no expert in it, only an observer. But from what I can see, special education has had a couple of decades to work its magic in its current form.
The impression I get, from what every teacher tells me, is that special education sucks a massive quantity of resources into a completely unworkable and unmanagable system.
My brother is not a special education teacher, but he has to deal with special education students because many of them are mainstreamed into regular classes now. He was told a couple of years ago that he couldn’t take a knife away from one of these students, even though that student had been violent in the past.
Seems that knives with blades less than three inches in length aren’t considered weapons, and taking it away from him would have damaged his self-esteem sufficiently badly to put this action in conflict with the Individualized Education Plan.
Hope the kid never has to fly anywhere. I don’t think airport screeners give a shit about the IEP.
Other times, he has had to deal with IEP’s that specify that he can’t give that particular student a grade lower than a C.
Special education or not, how is this student being prepared for life? Even if this student can only ever get a job as a floor-mopper, he’ll still have to mop the floor. If he can’t do that, he’ll be fired. With no experience of failure, how can he see this coming?
The sad thing is, these travesties not only do a disservice to these poor students in the examples here. The IEP’s in the examples represented massive amounts of work from counselors, psychologists and teachers. The administration had to sign on, as well as state bureaucrats. They each probably cost tens of thousands of dollars. And each weren’t worth a dime.
The resources could have been better spent not only on better plans for these students but on a better physical plant, smaller class sizes, more science equipment, arts funding and field trips for more mainstream students.
Teaching is closed to academia???
Sure.
A college professor can’t, in many states, get a job teaching high school students in the public schools. She’d have to jump through a lot of hoops first.
Well, if my school district was getting fifty-seven billion, I suspect we wouldn’t be cutting back on teachers for next year. The quote has no meaning in that context. If you mean, “Do all America’s schools really need 57 billion dollars?” then the answer would be, “Yes.” Do you know how many public schools there ARE? And if that 57 billion was ALL the funding they got, most of them would close up shop overnight. What we do is NOT cheap. Hell, American public education provides durn near everything the military provides! Education, housing (eight hours a day, anyway) huge amounts of training, meals… we don’t provide uniforms, or weapons, or big armored vehicles. Then again, the Army doesn’t provide much in the way of textbooks. Priced any schoolbooks lately? They’re horrendously overpriced. Pure profit for the publishers… and it’s completely legal. Furthermore, we often don’t have a choice as to whether or not to buy these books; these decisions are forced on us from above, often from government.
As to abolishing the Department of Education… hm. Good question. Precisely what do they do, anyway, that isn’t duplicated on the state level? Aside from shuffling federal money around, I mean.
Well, no, I guess I shooda stated my thoughts better. I was speaking in general. I can’t argue with what you’ve said; it’s true. I have known some sterling school boards and administrators… and I have known some stupid school boards and administrators… and I have known three school board members and one administrator who were as crooked as the day is long, and were not in the least interested in serving the community as they were in obtaining personal power on the local level.
I was under the impression that private schools did not wish to hire teachers without certification. I am underinformed about parochial schools. Nevertheless, your statement here is essentially true.
Y’r dancin’ on the edge, here. Hordes of teachers get degrees, THEN get certified. The requirements for alternative certification, most places, involve completing a sequence of classes, then a student teaching experience (lasting a half year, or a year), then taking certification tests and wrestling with the state bureaucracy. I majored in education, and I can testify that they beat you to death on theory AND practice, AND require a hellacious amount of field experience before they ever even think about certifying you, particularly in Special Ed.
I regret to announce that this statement is basically crap, as written. Which schools are we talking about? Every school I can think of that prides itself on its education department is a first-string university.
True. This is not the government’s fault, though. It is usually the universities’. They don’t LIKE people horning in on their education programs. They’d much rather you got your degree by way of the education department itself, if you intend to teach. Unfortunately, this involves a tremendous amount of bullshit. Therefore, bureaucratic crapola must be loaded upon those choosing to get their degrees in other fields, who then decide to get teaching certificates.
Y’see… there is a delusion on a lot of folks’ part that teaching is a science. If it is done a certain way, with a certain amount of this, and a certain time period of that, then it will be effective, and the children will learn.
This is largely bullshit.
When a stand-up comic goes before an audience, there is no formula on which he can fall back. There is no procedure which guarantees him that the house will laugh themselves sick if he follows it.
Each house is different. Every audience is unique. All he can do is have his plans set up, his ducks in a row… and then depend on his knowledge of how to play the audience… how to handle their feedback in order to effectively make 'em laugh. It’s his powers of oratory and his knowledge of how humor works, versus the given group dynamic of any given audience.
I am rapidly approaching the belief that you can’t really teach this. You can’t give someone a four-year course on how to be an effective comedian, even if Jim Carrey, George Carlin and Eddie Murphy are your professors.
You’ve either got the knack, or you don’t. The best you can do is hone what you’ve got. And that’s what teacher education is all about.
Teacher unions and professional organizations are all up in arms right now because of a bill that would allow anyone with any kind of college degree to teach (after passing certification exams, no college certification needed). I can understand their point of view. It’s a THREAT! Ordinary professionals may well come marching in and take jobs away from PROFESSIONAL TEACHERS!
Of course, any sane professional with a degree isn’t going to want to teach. It’s a thankless job. You have to want to do it. If you find yourself doing it solely for the paycheck, your days are numbered. You can’t do this job effectively, and you will find yourself hating it more and more as the days go by. Trust me on this one. I’ve seen it happen.
Then again, considering the violently screwed state of the economy right now, the last thing I want is a buncha dips with degrees and no ed credentials or experience wandering in because they can’t find jobs anywhere else. Seems like there’s two sides to this issue.
Weirdly enough, **Mr. Moto ** is right on target, here; you wouldn’t think this is true, but it is. I know a professor who shifted to the high school level because she wanted a full time job with better benefits. She had holy hell working through the alternative certification process at the local university (see above). Lots of utterly pointless bureaucratic hoops, put there solely to make it a pain in the ass to NOT go through certification the *traditional * way… a four year plan in the Ed Department.
As to the “best and brightest”… man, I have an easy solution to that. Make alternative certification easier. Then jack teacher salaries and benefits way the hell up. Then pick and choose the best people who apply for the jobs. For years now, I have had to put up with that “Those Who Can’t Do, Teach” crap. No, the truth is, “Those Who Cannot Put Up With The Bullshit And The Hokey Pay, Leave. Those Who Can And Who Love The Profession, Teach.”
I DO believe that a certain amount of training in pedagogy is necessary, and a certain amount of field experience should be happening, there, before certification can happen. ESPECIALLY in Special Ed. I’ve seen people go through four years training, then crap out in less than a week in a real classroom. It takes a certain mindset to work in that field.
How is the system unworkable and unmanageable? I will admit that I am not completely happy with it, but this is a very provocative statement. First and foremost, SPED is largely dictated by law. You don’t like it, you need to change the laws. This ain’t a matter of local policy, or teacher preference. One of the reasons I went into SPED was the autonomy from administrators and the relative immunity to the ever-changing cockeyed testing and exams process. “Hey, I am in compliance with the law. I have done exactly what the law requires me to do. Give me a reason I should screw that up, simply because an administrator wants me to dance.”
Your brother’s boss is a fool, Mr. Moto. A knife is a knife. I wouldn’t necessarily throw the kid out of school simply for having it – I’m not a wild believer in zero tolerance – but if he gets it out in MY class, it just became my knife, and if he wants it back, he can have a parent show up and ask me for it, in person. The personal safety of students and school personnel is THE ultimate priority, and if I see it threatened, I am going to act, and fuck the administration sideways. Let them sue me. Local TV channels love this kind of stuff.
…and my union or professional organization will protect me if the administration tries to scrape me off the payroll simply because I did the right thing and made their poor little lives inconvenient.
As to IEPs… An Individual Education Plan is required by law for each student receiving SPED services. They are assembled by counselors and SPED teachers, after a meeting to determine its contents. This meeting is mandatory, and is attended by an administrator, at least one counselor, and the student’s SPED and regular teachers. The student himself may attend, and the meeting can NOT take place without at least one of the kid’s parents or guardians present.
…and herein lies the rub.
Parents are a snake pit, Mr. Moto. Not all of them, certainly, and not even most of them. But I do not remember most of them. I remember the one who got in my face and told me I could not fail her child, because he made Honor Roll in middle school, two years ago. I remember the parent who showed up for the ARD meeting drunk off his ass. I remember the parent who threatened to find out where I lived and burn my house down because I referred her child to CPS due to suspicious bruising and some weird-looking cuts across the buttocks (as the law requires me to do, regardless of what I think).
Parents have certain rights, by law, that must be respected in the ARD meeting, and if the parent in question does not wish to abide by the recommendations of the ARD committee, they may put their foot down… and we, the school, must obey. By law.
This is good. It means that incompetent or uncaring school officials can’t ramrod a kid into whatever is convenient for them, regardless of what’s good for the kid.
But it’s bad, because we deal with thousands of parents every year. Some of these parents are unpleasant people. Some are criminals. A few are insane. And we have no choice but to work with them as best we can, to try to meet a given child’s needs.
Let’s take that IEP **Mr. Moto ** mentions where the child could not be given a grade below a “C.” Now, certainly, this sounds nuts, even to me. What kind of teaching is taking place here? What kind of administrator tells you that a child will not be allowed to fail, regardless?
I dunno. Insufficient data. My first impulse would be to read the IEP and suggest major changes. The idea here is to educate the child as best we can, not simply float him along until he graduates and is no longer our problem.
…but you know what? In the case of an obstructionistic parent, a parent who is determined to get his or her way, some administrators will do just that. Float him along, let him graduate, let him get on with his pathetic little life. What we could not teach him, what we were not ALLOWED to teach him… well, real life will teach him soon enough. His bloody parents were so damn rabid about his “rights,” well, let them take it up with Darwin. Not our problem any more.
Wrong? Sure. But it happens. And if you can suggest a workable alternative, I would be happy to hear it, no sarcasm intended.
The Department of Education has been around for only thirteen years or so. Tennessee’s former governor was the first Secretary of Education and he agrees that the department should be abolished and more decision making placed in the hands of parents and teachers. That makes sense to me.
But the parents must also be held to high standards. No more of the bullying that Master Wang-Ka has described. (Such parental conduct is not uncommon.)
Decision-making must be in the hands of people who have realistic views of what is actually going on in public schools.
Zoe, the Department of Education was born in the Carter Administration. It has been around for nearly a quarter-century.
I really don’t think education has improved much in this time. Test scores surely don’t show that it has.
If the true measure of a federal program is in its results, the Department of Education is a miserable failure. F
Of course, we all know that the true measure of a federal program is in protecting its budget, exerting more control over other programs (federal, state, local) and people, and hiring more bureaucrats. The Department of Education plays this game very well indeed. A
Not necessarily going to argue with you on this one… but statistics can be made to say whatever you want them to say.
If we made a point of testing only the college prep kids – leaving out the academics, the special eds, and the alternative eds, like the Japanese do – I wonder what the test results would tell us, then?
Europeans, like the Japanese, accept that not everyone is going to college. Some of us are going to be politicians, and some of us are going to be ditchdiggers. It’s not a happy fact, but it is a fact. And parents hate that.
…so the government and the schools bow to that. I think No Child Left Behind is the ultimate example of pandering to that desire on the part of the parents… the idea that no child will be ALLOWED to be stupid, or lazy, or noncompliant, or retarded by 2014…
That’s very true.
Let’s ask ourselves, though, why parents get upset if their kids don’t go to college.
It’s because those kids will now be on the next rung down in American society for the rest of their lives. They will have lower paying jobs, if they’re lucky to get jobs at all. The upward mobility American society used to be famous for well be sharply curtailed for them.
The simple fact is, many jobs that used to require a high school diploma now require a college degree, even to get your foot in the door.
My father just retired. He was a foreman at a steel mill. At one time, foremen were promoted from the ranks of laborers. This is how my dad got the job. Now they’re hired right out of college and have no experience working with crews of laborers.
My dad was the last foreman working at the mill with only a high school education.
Now, you don’t need a college degree to be a steel mill foreman. In fact, my dad insists things ran much more smoothly when ex-laborers were the foremen, because the flow of communication was better.
However, foremen are considered management. And the steel company doesn’t want people in the management structure that don’t have a college degree as a part of their credentials.
This overcredentialization of American society is driven by a basic distrust of one credential - the high school diploma. That high school diploma used to be a basic guarantee of literacy and math skills, at least. Nowadays, it can’t even guarantee those.
So employers have turned to the associate’s degree or bachelor’s degree as their guarantee of literacy and math skills. And, in fact, many community colleges and four-year colleges have remedial programs in place, to teach their students what they should have learned in high school. Attendence in these programs is, reportedly, booming.
Unfortunately, all this dumbs down the bachelor’s degree. Some jobs then become available only to holders of graduate degrees, even when there really is no real need for them.
Graduate degrees used to be reserved for the professions and academia. Now they are required for many business and government fields as well.
The rich and successful will spend the money to buy the credentials they need, as they always have. The poor - well, they’ll just have to make do, as they always have.
So we’re now entering into a brave new world, where:
the dropout is the new illiterate
the high school grad is the new dropout
the associate’s degree is the new high school diploma
the bachelor’s degree is the new associate’s degree
the master’s degree is the new bachelor’s degree
the doctorate is the new master’s degree.
Everybody who worries about religious, private and public schools getting public money to teach students - well, you really shouldn’t worry. It’s already happening. The only real difference is is that the high school education is being taught in a building called a “college”, the vouchers are called Pell grants and student loans, and the students learning the course material are four years older than they should be.