Education

Over the last few decades in particular, our society has been lamenting the shortcomings (real and imagined) of our education system.  For as long as we can remember we have complained that we spend far more on a per student basis than any other nation and it isn’t even close.  We have seen repeated efforts over the years by politicians who have never stepped foot in a classroom as an educator try to make policy that tried to fix the education system’s flaws, quite often resulting in simply more work for our teachers and less results for our students.  

I do not proclaim to be an expert on the field of education reform, but I do have one big thing going for me that many of our politicians do not.  I have actually taught in classrooms from kindergarten through high school as a substitute teacher for several years in my daughter’s school district, which just so happens to be the perennial number one school district in our state from the standpoint of student performance.  I have walked many miles in the shoes of our educators.  I have picked their brains, commiserated with them, felt their pain, and seen their struggles.

We all pay lip service in this country to how critically important education is, and how in a perfect world teachers would get paid like professional athletes and professional athletes would get paid the way teachers do.  

Yet when it comes to how education is paid for via property taxes, no one wants to pay more to do the job properly.  As a result, we build schools in this country with the same mentality of how we build prisons.  We wait until the existing ones are crumbling, over-crowded, outdated, and under-staffed before we build new ones or increase pay enough to attract better quality and more candidates….all the while sending a resounding message to our children and educators that they just don’t matter as much as we say they do.

Compare for a moment the difference in our approaches to military spending and how the military is revered before sporting events and our approach to education spending and how our society mostly takes teachers for granted.  

Make no mistake about it.  Both the soldier and the teacher are warriors and both are fighting hot wars.  But only one is doing so with the full resources they need to do their job, with the full and unquestioned backing of their government and society.  

Could you imagine if we tried to send a soldier to a war zone and before they left for battle said “oh btw, you’re going to have to pay for and get a lot of your own things to accomplish the mission out of your own pocket because we can’t afford to give you what you need to do the job successfully, and when you go on leave you’re going to have to do a lot of work on your own time as well just to make the mission a success”?  

No?  Well that is exactly what we do every day, year in and year out with teachers all across our nation.  They are paid modestly at best in most cases, many have second jobs after working all day with our children, and if they care at all about their students and doing the job properly, will spend hundreds and in some cases thousands of dollars out of their own pocket on average each year for the basic supplies to do their jobs to the standards that the job needs to be done to, because their school districts cannot afford to reimburse them in the slightest.  

Our educators are fighting a war every day for the hearts and minds and souls of our future generations.  If we are going to severely over pay and out spend any other nation on earth, before we do it with the military we should be doing it with our school systems.  

Instead of huge turnover rates of teachers leaving the profession, we need to make it so attractive a calling that even our worst school systems have to turn applicants away in droves.  

So many of our problems in our society are rooted in our voting age citizens not having received a proper education, and as a result we are left fighting so many symptoms of that one main root problem of ignorance.  For a child who slips through the cracks and gets passed on through the system year after year without ever being “reached” or winds up dropping out will turn out to be an adult that either is not a constructive and productive member of society, or at worst a drain on society.

We have to get back to the mindset that our teachers are there to educate our children during the school day, and inspire them as much as they can in the time they have them, yet at the end of the day they are OUR children and the ultimate responsibility for their academic success, perseverance, and lifelong love of learning is OUR responsibility as their parents. 

Our teachers have them for 7-8 hours a day.  We have them for the remaining 16 hours, all weekend, and during the time off throughout the year.  If our children do not do well in school, at the end of the day it is OUR fault, NOT the schools.  

Much has been made over the years about competing thoughts and approaches to education, from the assembly line approach and its flaws over the last 100+ years, to Montessori approaches, Common Core, No Child Left Behind, etc.  As a result our schools and educators are all over the map trying different approaches, with major yearly changes to curriculum that they have to quick learn so they can teach it (and guess what, buy all new stuff on their own dime so they can even teach it properly).  

As I have said before, nothing about this or any other problem is simple or easy to fix.  The devil is most definitely in the details, but there ARE some very clear and easy to understand things that we need to do with our education system if the two party system would allow the changes to be made.  

1. Drastically increase spending on education at the local, state, and federal levels….for school building, renovations, scholarships to become teachers, teacher pay, administrative resources and overhead to properly and proactively run our schools, and for the out of pocket things teachers are having to spend money on year round.  This massive spending increase is NOT an expense….it is an investment in our future as a nation that will pay us back many times over.

2. Go to year round school nationwide.  The school calendar we still follow in most of the country is a relic from centuries past and in more recent decades because older schools in older parts of the country simply didn’t have air conditioning to be able to go to year round school even if they wanted to.  We cannot be the world leader in education if we do not go to year round schooling.  

3. No laws or administrative decisions made by local, state, or federal legislative bodies or agencies that impact the world of education without it being either signed off on or originating from actual educators that have actually worked in recent years in the trenches with their fellow teachers.  We wouldn’t let a general with antiquated battlefield experience tell us how to run and fight a modern war, and we certainly wouldn’t allow a civilian that didn’t have military experience make decisions that affect the battlefield, so why on earth do we want to allow politicians and political appointees that have never taught or taught long ago make decisions that affect our teachers and students on the front lines in the classroom?

4. Stop spending public education dollars on private schools (ie charter schools, vouchers, and “school choice”).  As Benjamin Franklin famously said during the American Revolution “We must all hang together or surely we will all hang separately”.  If people want their child to go to private school, that is their right and I applaud them on it….but pay for it yourself or get a scholarship to the private school.  The rest of us that are paying taxes that go to the public school system are relying on every one of those tax dollars going to the public schools our children go to, and that is exactly where they should go to.

5. National Goals, Local Control…to a point.  I am all for local control of our school districts, and allowing innovation, but it is critically important that our broad educational goals are determined at the national level and coordinated nationally so that we are better able to compete against the rest of the world to ensure that we are producing the best and the brightest from our schools.  What that means is that if a local school district continually fails to meet our national goals and metrics, then it is in our national interests for the federal government to tell the state in which it is located to either fix the problem or the feds will.  The old saying that “we are only as strong as our weakest link” is 100% the truth when it comes to education in our modern, global economy.   

6. Re-think Guidance, Part 1.  Why is it that we only have guidance counselors starting in middle or high school in many cases?  Imagine if we only started going to a doctor at that age and the doctor has no knowledge or history of the patient from early childhood.  What we pass off as guidance in this country is in many cases doing more harm than good, because our guidance counselors are over-worked, have way too many kids to handle, and as a result do fly-bys of each student and send them on their way into the world.  When I was in high school 25 years ago, I met with my guidance counselor twice I think in 4 years, and each time for less than 20 minutes to talk in generalities about what I wanted to do when I went to college.  My younger brother a few years later took a test that was supposed to tell him what he should major in and it said something like ‘manual/crafts’.  That is not guidance.  We need to strongly consider having students assigned to guidance counselors when they start school in kindergarten and have that individual meet with them and their parents routinely every year throughout their educational career so that when it does come time to help guide them into the world of college or the working world they have a much better true sense of who the student is, what their life experience has been up until that point, what their interests and passions are, what their strengths and weaknesses are.

7. Re-think Guidance, Part 2.  Imagine for a moment another military analogy.  Let’s say the army has specific personnel needs in the areas of infantry and logistics and a bunch of recruits join up.  But the recruits overwhelmingly want to go into special forces and artillery.  Does the military say “oh sure, do what you want to do” and leave their holes unfilled?  Our economy has a major problem with structural unemployment.  There are literally millions of people looking for jobs every year that cannot get them because they are trained and/or educated in fields that the economy does not have a need for, yet there are literally more millions of jobs unfilled in our modern economy in areas such as healthcare and computers that could theoretically employ every single person looking for a job.  Yet every year our colleges and universities are continuing to pump out art history majors, English majors, and dare I say political science majors like myself.  Every student going to college, whether for 2 years or 4 years or graduate school of some kind, MUST undergo an in depth guidance session explaining the modern economy and what kinds of jobs it currently has a need for, what kinds of jobs and careers it will need by the time the student graduates, and what kinds of jobs it will need for the next several decades after they graduate.  This way they can make a more informed decision about what they should pick as their major.  Maybe instead of being an English Lit major they decide to be a nursing student and minor in English literature.  

8. Free College Education….on two conditions….a) you choose to major in a field of study that the economy has a desperate need for, and b) upon graduation you work in that field for at least 4 years.  If you drop out, or change your major to one that the economy does not have much need for, then you have to re-pay what has been paid for.  If you graduate in that field of study yet do not fulfill the 4 year commitment to work in that field, then you have to pay back the portion of the 4 years that wasn’t worked.  

9. Coordinated College Offerings—Going back to my point earlier about what the economy needs vs what our universities are pumping out in terms of degrees into the economy, we have to have 100% coordination between all colleges and universities about how many positions will be available in each course of study based on the needs of the economy.  Let’s say hypothetically that annually we know through Dept of Labor statistics that only 30,000 art history majors will be hired by museums and other employers, then guess what, all universities across the nation that offer degrees in art history will have to participate in some sort of system whether it is a bid system, rationing, or lottery to determine which colleges and universities get to have those 30,000 slots, and that is all that gets to be offered, regardless of whether it is a private institution or a public one.  There would of course be exceptions for people who simply want to take classes for their own enlightenment that already have steady jobs, but on the whole we would be drastically realigning what our colleges and universities offer to more accurately reflect the needs of our economy both now and in the future. 

10. Eliminate Teachers Unions….Eventually.  Organized labor was absolutely essential from the time of the industrial revolution up through the mid-20^th century, but lesser so in more recent decades.  Unfortunately, teachers unions are still very much needed because of how low on the totem pole/pecking order teachers’ needs and concerns are in the minds of politicians.  It is my fervent hope that once 1 thru 9 are implemented, that the need for teachers unions will become a moot point and they too can go away, but for now they are critical to making sure the needs of our school systems are being met, which is sad that is what it takes to get administrators and politicians to listen.