The American public school system: What gives?

The effort to undermine public education over the last 10-20 years has been primarily the work of the American Legislative Exchange Council, a conservative advocacy group that focuses on state level policy and legislation where they have a significant number of members among state legislators who do their bidding. ALEC takes one model bill and it is introduced in every republican-controlled legislature. It is good old boys club where legislators and conservatives from the private sector set the agenda for legislatures across the country behind closed doors.

Last year, there were at least 139 bills or state budget provisions in 43 states and Washington DC. to fund private schools with taxpayer money at the expense of the public school system. Their secondary aim is to gut the teachers's unions.

Cashing in on Kids: 139 ALEC Bills in 2013 Promote a Private, For-Profit Education Model | PR Watch

Combine that with the influence of the religious right who want to "Christianize" public schools in the name of religious tolerance and the American public education system is in deep shit, with no end in sight.

ALEC uses the same model on everything from reproductive rights to environmental and workplace deregulation to "ballot integrity" (ie making it harder for minorities to vote) and more.
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More on ALEC and education "reform"

 

All it really takes it one or two kids with behavior issues and if you have a big class you are screwed.
Jadzia had a class with 32 kids, one had an IEP that said he had ODD (Oppositional Defiant Disorder), 3 had been left back, 1 of them twice and 1 should have been classified but wasn't.
This was her easy class.

Her one advantage was that she would talk to the kids in ways that she never would have been able to get away with in a suburban school where helicopter parents would have freaked out.
She was direct and honest with the kids.
That gave her street cred, enough so that even after they graduated they came back to see her.

She was getting to hate teaching but it wasn't the kids, it was the administration.
The constant battle to be able to do your job without being second guessed or judged by people who either haven't been in a classroom in forever or got out as fast as they could.
The poorly run schools are the only reason bad teachers continue to teach not tenure.
If you have good administrators who do their jobs properly that won't happen.
Unfortunately too many school boards are filled with people who have political agendas rather than the children's needs at heart and they hire administrators accordingly.

 

My wife is lucky in some ways. She teaches at a private religious school as a specials (music) teacher. The classes are relatively small, and she pretty much sets her own lesson plans. The parents are probably a little more involved since most of them are paying to send their kids there. There are some scholarship kids.

There are downsides. Her pay after four years in about 80% of what she would get starting in a large public school district. She's a contract employee, she could be out of a job with no explanation, and as a specials teacher that's always a distinct possibility. Frequently she "volunteers" for programs at the church (which is technically separate from the school, hah!) that are very clearly not part of her contract.

We pay school taxes for Houston Independent School Dictrict. We don't have kids. HISD is a money pit. We don't complain about the taxes because innercity kids need at least some kind of education, even a much flawed one.

Some of our friends are teachers in large public shool districts. They complain about having to "teach the test." Apparantly the secret tests aren't so secret; cheating is rampant and encouraged by administrators.

 

HISD sucks. It needs to be disbanded and rebuilt from scratch, but it's too late for that.

That is why HISD and many large school districts offer enticing starting salaries. The problem is the pay raises once teachers are in.

 

Wow. I don't think I agree, but I will need to think about that one.

Maybe my perspective is too focused on economics, which is radically different in the two systems. The U.S. health care system has been successful at grabbing more and more resources from everybody else. The U.S. public school system has been unsuccessful at defending itself from everybody else grabbing its resources.

 

Education is much like healthcare, law enforcement, etc.
Many people want it, but very few are willing to pay for it.
Politicians give it lip service, but won't dare take the steps necessary to make real improvements because they avoid the "T word."

 

One of my sayings, based on the experiences of one of our friends who is an English teacher in a large public school district, regarding standardized testing:

They want the students to know how many plays Shakespeare wrote, but don't care if the students actually read any of them.

 

I like that idea.

 

Nationally, I think we've taken small steps in the right direction to correct the deficiencies of No Child Left Behind with adoption of common core standards by many states along with the federally-funded Race To The Top (RTT) program that rewards innovative teaching methods to help students achieve those standards.

But the opposition from Tea Party conservatives is fierce and monied with alarmist rhetoric of just another example of federal intervention in what they perceive to be solely a state/local issue (We dont compete globally state-by-state). Hell, these folks oppose teaching critical thinking skills or higher order thinking skills, believing it to be subversive.

I am not optimistic.

 

Those "failing" third graders in China can look forward to this....We've been exporting our worst religious bigots (Focus on the Family) to China to teach abstinence only education.
Abstinence program partners Chinese officials with U.S. evangelicals

 

I don't know, is it a good thing that our religious nuts are having to go to Russia, China and Uganda to get traction for their evil extremism?