03.11.09
Fixing Education Will Take More Than A National Agenda
Obama backs teacher merit pay, charter schools
WASHINGTON – President Barack Obama called for tying teachers’ pay to students’ performance and expanding innovative charter schools Tuesday, embracing ideas that have provoked hostility from members of teachers unions.
He also suggested longer school days — and years — to help America’s children compete in the world.
Charter schools can help. Merit pay might also be helpful, but do we really want teachers that are only motivated by their wallets? Longer days? I think not
I believe Mr. Obama missed a lot of what is going on because he spent some of his school years in foreign schools. Let me lay it out briefly.
Schools still rely on industrial age concepts, in a technology age world. They expect to produce a uniform product when it is neither socially nor economically desirable to have a cohort of clones each year. Schools rely on state and federal handouts that come with strings. Schools have rigid, theory X management structures, much like those in the failing automobile manufacturers. Schools have obscenely overcompensated administrators whose pay depends on building empires of subordinates (including teachers and their assigned students). Schools relegate parents to subservient and advisory roles, when the schools should be subservient and advisory to the parents’ leading roles in training their children.
Any reform plan that does not deal with these issues will be a dismal failure, just like the “No Child Left Behind Act”. Schools need to be locally-funded, locally-controlled, and to target locally-created standards. In that sense, the charter school movement has shown that much of the educracy that clogs our school districts can be successfully jettisoned without ill effect on the students.
As for merit pay, the teachers believe that merit pay is an attempt to damage their unions. They also believe that determining who merits what pay will not be objective. I agree that the merit computation will be subjective and will be manipulated by cynical administrators.
As for the daily length of school, I believe that learning to play outside without the teachers’ looking on is probably the most important part of education. This is when people learn to get along with others who may be older or younger than they (something they cannot get in the schools), and learn to work together to set objectives and to achieve them. You can hear them discussing it: one wants to play kickball, another wants to play dodgeball, and a third wants to play football. They learn how to get along and enjoy themselves, even when they don’t always get their own way.
This depressurizing time is also critical to absorbing the myriad facts and figures that were spouted at students that day. Yes, I realize that many foreign nations have longer school days and longer school years, and that those nations often have higher scores on learning tests. But reality is not learning tests–reality is a changing world, in which unexpected situations and choices come up. That kind of mind-numbing process beats down the inventive and innovative parts of students’ minds, so that they become mindless drones in the workplace. Think about it. Teacher says “homework tonight is …” so the student never has to plan or allocate time and resources toward a goal that is several months off. Often, the work requirement is so detailed that there is no room for personalization.
WRONG, WRONG, WRONG. Destined to fail. Student performance comes from home, and is stifled by the school. Until the imbalance between the two is righted, plans like these are destined to fail.
Personally, I believe that school districts need to be small, locally-funded, and controlled by local parents. If there is one thing that the past forty years have shown, it is that funding and control by large, out-of-the-area entities like state and federal educational bureaucracies merely makes schools even less responsive to the students and their parents.
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