Unconscionable Public Education Practices
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Budget cuts have brought the LAUSD to the point where classes are literally 50+% fuller than they should be. That's at least 45 kids in class rooms designed for 30. You go into one of these classrooms and you'll find kids sitting on the floor or one kid in a folding chair sharing a traditional desk with the other kid who is actually sitting in the desk. As atrocious as some of the behavior in the article seems it's been brought about by the hard reality of there being no place for these kids to go even if the school did hold them back.
(For frame of reference LAUSD had a budget deficit of around $894 million last year which is about $1,290 per student)
I have many criticisms of public schools in the U.S. but this isn't about that. This is about 3 Government bodies (Federal, State and Local) that all spent way more than they could afford on trivial things and now have no money left to do what's important.
I don't know where the number is now but in 2006 the city would have needed $10 billion to cover its pension costs and it didn't have that then: http://www.thefreelibrary.com/LAUSDS+RUNAWAY+BENEFITS+PRICE+...
I think that's ridiculous and I don't think they ever should have been given that kind of deal but the School District is still contractually obligated to pay those pensions. The city of Vallejo actually tried to declare bankruptcy because it couldn't afford the enormous debt generated by pensions and the result was the California Legislature voting to exempt pension payments from city bankruptcy.
In spite of that, we continue to believe teachers are underpaid.
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According to information provided to the Daily News by the LAUSD, the average salary for teachers is $63,000 - not too shabby that.
But more than 8,500 teachers pull in between $70,000 and $80,000 a year. Nearly 2,000 make salaries between $80,000 and $100,000, with a very lucky (and likely very experienced) 331 enjoying more than $100,000 in annual salary.
And then there's a benefits package that would be the envy of any worker not in the public sector. Medical, dental, pension - let's just say that anybody who puts in their time at the LAUSD won't be uncomfortable in their golden years.
===End Quote===
That's on a 180-day (or 36 week) per year schedule.
LA is one of the most expensive housing markets in the country. There's been some decline, but a few years ago a small, poorly-built house in an undesirable part of the metro area would typically run around $400K.
LAUSD covers an enormous area. Teachers don't get much say in their assignments, so might be commuting 1.5 hours each way.
At least some (possibly all) of LAUSD runs on a year-round calendar. Teachers don't get the same summer break as they would in many other districts. Most of their off-cycle time is spent doing professional development. Saying they only work 36 weeks a year is disingenuous.
Public funding might mean that a kid from a less wealthy family could afford to attend a private school via a grant from the state.
Public provisioning means that schools ultimately have more in common with the DMV than with elite educational institutions.
Public schools are intended to be daycare centers for the poor and middle class, so that women can join the work force without having to care for their children during the day.
The goal of public schools is to teach children to conform to the expectations of the work force, so depending on where the school is located the students may end up barely literate but sufficient to fill the local factory jobs, etc.
It's important to keep this in mind when thinking about public education. Public schools have not failed, they are succeeding quite well at what they are actually intended to accomplish.
Some public schools (those in rich suburbs) actually provide a good education (chances are someone who attended one of those schools will object to this comment). Those are an exception and exist in areas where residents could afford to send their kids to private school if necessary.
But when you look internationally, there are plenty of publicly provisioned education systems that deliver a far better education than the USA. (I am the product of one. I went to school in Canada, in a not particularly good neighbourhood.) How do you explain that?
Within the USA, once you control for parents' socio-economic status, measured educational outcomes are better in public schools than private. (Controlling for that factor is important because private schools have a different of wealth than public schools.) How do you explain that?
Public provisioning is not, a priori, an obviously bad thing to do.
People value things because they chose them and because they realized that "wait a second, I have to pick which one I want, so which one is better?" (I experienced this phenomenon first hand when asked about my preferences on china patterns, and it's visible even in poor communities with things like mobile phones and athletic shoes).
To your second point: In a rich community (Greenwich CT, the Chicago suburbs, etc.) the public schools are exceptionally well funded and well supported. I know people who attended public schools where most of the faculty had masters degrees and some had doctorates. This does not represent the success of public provisioning, on the contrary, it represents the ability of a community with enough sufficiently powerful and motivated people to shape a public school into what they want (with the aid of lots of tax dollars). I think it's fairly obvious that communities like this would find a way to provide excellent education for their children even if classes had to be held in an old barn. Of course, public school apologists are quick to take credit for any excellence they can find.
Meanwhile, the inner city poor beg for voucher systems and are denied by powerful teachers unions, etc. The poor simply lack the political power and resources to overcome the state sanctioned education monopoly.
Notably, one reason why your statistic of private schools being worse is true is because some of the largest serve vast numbers of the urban poor for pennies on the dollar (compared with public schools). Much of this (due to the shortage of funds created by the public monopoly) is via Catholic charities, but it's still a remarkable accomplishment.
Even so, those schools reach a limit and have to turn people away... Meanwhile funding gets pumped into failed public schools (many of which can't even offer a safe environment free of violence) and parents who weren't lucky enough to get a spot in an affordable private school must send their kids into these awful prisons every day.
On the second point, your arguments strike me as very confused. For instance you think that private schools are worse because there are large Catholic private schools that serve poor communities. But the relative quality difference exists even after you control for parents socio-economic status, which puts those Catholic schools on an apples to apples comparison with public schools in similar neighbourhoods. (In fact controlling for socio-economic status is important, because there are strong correlations between socio-economic status and educational performance, and private schools tend to have richer parents.)
Similarly while I agree that advantaged schools have extremely good funding, exemplary public schools compare very well with private schools with similar levels of funding. The funding difference between schools helps explain how parents socio-economic status leads to different educational outcomes. But again it doesn't explain the discrepancy between public and private schools.
It seems to me that you've correctly laid your finger on some of the blatantly obvious problems in how education is delivered in the USA. But your observations are not as general as you claim, nor have you made a convincing case that public provisioning is necessarily broken.
In the US many private schools are religiously affiliated. In the example I cited above, parents send their kids to a religious school in spite of its religious affiliation because they perceive the quality to be higher.
However, there are surely many cases in which parents take a youngster out of an adequate public school and send him/her to a religious school because of their religious beliefs, which in this case take precedence over their value of educational opportunity afforded by the public school.
Suppose this phenomenon is responsible for the discrepancy you mention. Currently public schools get a huge taxpayer funded subsidy, whereas the school that the religious parents send their kid to does not. Maybe with an additional $8K per year per student, the religious school could afford better teachers, computers, curriculum, etc.
Since so many more students attend public school (due to the economic subsidies), private schools do not obtain the same economies of scale or have remotely the same budgets.
Many urban Catholic schools outperform the nearby public schools on less than half the money per pupil.
Also, note that I'm not arguing that public provisioning is inherently worse than private provisioning, just that the way public education is provisioned today has a lot of problems that stem from the monopoly given to it and the lack of choice and competition -- for reference, suppose that there were two DMV offices next door to one another and employees at the one with lower wait times were paid a 30% salary bonus... how long do you think the line would be?
My own preference would be for government provisioned schools to compete with privately provisioned schools so that parents and students could have more options. Right now, private schools are at a major disadvantage... so one would expect even worse relative performance.
The main problem with government provisioning thusfar has been that the monopoly granted to public schools has been a target for greedy adults who want to capitalize on the government resources allocated to education. This is why we have seniority based pay, no competition, and why a teacher practically has to assault or molest a child in order to lose his/her job.
With private provisioning on at least equal footing (and the explicit prevention of monopolies rather than the granting of one), it is a lot harder for interest groups to hijack the public funding the way teachers unions have.
Incidentally, I think it should be illegal for any public official to send his/her child to private school or to receive care in a private hospital.
We have unexpected agreement on that.
On the rest, my experience of Canada says that the culture is not very different than the USA. The political culture does have some significant differences, but the people are more similar than not. If education works better in Canada than it does in the USA (my experience and international comparisons suggest that it does), then it can work better in the USA as well.
On the religious point, that may be a real factor in the difference. I ran across the one figure in The Homework Myth but don't have the level of detail to break down private schools by type. Another factor that I suspect is that there is a large gap between the factors that parents will see as quality, and factors that actually affect student learning. Private schools that offer a lot of extracurriculars and make good presentations to parents will attract investment, whether or not the students are truly getting a quality education.
Personally if I could afford to, I would sidestep the whole mess and home-school. But that is not in the cards any time soon. :-(
I'd be curious if perhaps other industries/services are better in Canada... for example, restaurant service, accounting services, etc.
There could simply be an aspect of the supply of qualified labor -- if Canada has 5% greater supply of qualified workers for a given position, then some of them will have to work in a job that is beneath them, in which they will overperform.
Canada generally has a slightly higher unemployment rate than the US, so arguably this results in some degree of labor under-utilization and overperformance... this may be the case with Canadian teachers and could be enough to explain the superiority.
I think your point about the varying attributes of private schools is quite insightful. I don't necessarily think it's a bad thing, considering how much rote memorization of facts I was put through in the name of "education".
I still don't know what I would do to educate a child. I think home schooling would be very difficult to do well, and I do idealize some of the best (public and private) school environments...
Edit: For anyone who downvotes this answer me one question: How is this not exactly what he's saying when he says:
The goal of public schools is to teach children to conform to the expectations of the work force, so depending on where the school is located the students may end up barely
If he had said "logically this outcome is the end result of [insert economic factors here]" I'd have no problem with his statement. But when he says this is what we as a society intend and that there's nothing wrong with that I have a problem.
Besides, anyone who seriously accepted that "the goal of public schools is to teach children to conform to the expectations of the work force, so depending on where the school is located the students may end up barely literate but sufficient to fill the local factory jobs, etc." is a good thing is probably not posting here. And I think phrases like "barely literate" would tend to indicate disapproval, not approval.
I read it as coming closer to condemning the status quo than supporting it.
I personally am not sure this is the actual truth. I have relatives who work in public schools that tell a different story of teachers trying to do their best in bad situations, but with that said he is still trying to describe what is happening not saying that what is happening is right.
I think a few things are worth pointing out here:
The best 10-20% of teachers are really good, because teaching is (although not as admired as medicine or law) admired enough that some seriously talented people enter it. Those teachers are highly desired and usually end up at the most reputable schools teaching honors and AP classes. So if you're lucky enough to have such teachers, you're going to get a good education.
Good schools have no problem getting a satisfactory percentage of students to pass the assessment tests and therefore actually teach. Mediocre schools that are on the bubble begin "teaching to the test" (which means a focus of attention and resources onto the worst students, to the detriment of average and good students) and therefore the quality of education declines even further.
But there is nothing about teaching that would prevent a top teacher from earning $250K per year. The reason that doesn't happen (and the reason we don't see more luxury cars in the teachers' parking long) is because unions have forced wages to be based on seniority and not based on merit.
This means that rather than one teacher (a good one) making $70K and another (not so good one) making $30K, they both make $50K. This gives the bad teacher every incentive to continue being a mediocre teacher for decades rather than moving on and finding a career he/she is good at.
For an egalitarian [1], this should probably be a good thing.
[1] I use the word "egalitarian" in the liberal sense of favoring equal outcomes for all people/groups.
My wife works with undergraduate students at a major university every single day and she is a first hand witness to the poor quality of public education nationwide. The students that she encounters are often woefully unprepared for a college education-they have a poor grasp of written English, have low reading comprehension and their grasp of basic mathematical skills is better left unexplored. These students ARE NOT the bottom of the barrel either-the admission system filters most of them out. Its a very sad state of affairs.
Our children will be attending private school-even though I don't agree with their religion (most private schools here are Catholic) I can't argue with their results. My wife left her private high school with English, math and science skills that rival most college graduates.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dash
(Back on topic, my public school education never mentioned this. I learned it from the documentation for LaTeX. A sad state of affairs.)
An educational system that incentivizes learning via fear of failure (public humiliation in this case) is broken.
This false dichotomy of social promotion versus holding students back ignores the necessity of finding new ways to engage struggling students. Of course promoting kids to face material for which they are not prepared is going to be a problem. But having them repeat the material in the same manner and expecting them to catch on the second time around is lunacy as well.
The biggest problem that I see in education is the focus on measuring achievement in an easily-measured, narrowly-defined way. That such a system has become gamed to the point that even the successful students aren't really learning should be no surprise.
What's the solution? I know there aren't easy answers, but it has to start with making learning and teaching fun. The happiest moment in a teacher's day is when the light switches on for a student. Though it is cliche, learning is fun, but the caveat is that it's the most fun when the lesson is applied.
While nobody likes to fail, failure is not important mostly as a means of motivation. It is important because repetition often helps.
You claim that it is lunacy to expect that a second go will solve problems. Yet that "lunacy" has worked out pretty well for people I know who had to retake courses and grades. The second time through, usually with different teachers, the students learned. Part of it was the age advantage. Part of it was a different teacher. Part of it was the fact that if you halfway learn the first time, there is less to learn the second time.
Taking failure off the table out of excessive concern for hurting fragile feelings does everyone a disservice. And is a far greater lunacy than being willing to tell people, "You haven't learned this material, you need to try again."
There's more at stake than students' hurt feelings. Your anecdotes aside, statistics show that retaining students is expensive and largely ineffective [1].
What's most dangerous to me is the idea that without the threat of failure there is no incentive to learn.
That's a viewpoint that deserves scrutiny.
It's narrow-minded and serves mostly to blame the student. It also closes the door to examination of alternative ways to best serve the section of the student body most likely to be considered for social promotion.
The other side of the spectrum is standardized testing, which places the blame on teachers and encourages them to narrow their focus to material that will be on the test.
And it's all built around proving that students can fill in the right circles on a standardized test, such that even the successful ones aren't guaranteed to be able to do practical things (e.g. CS majors that can't write a program).
The bottom line is that we are not really teaching. More importantly, we are not teaching kids how to learn, which is the key to motivated students.
You are arguing against a straw man. I gave you several specific reasons why it is good to fail students who have not learned the material they need for their further education, and you have addressed none of them.
To your straw man I'll reply with something that should be both obvious and important. There is no possibility of learning when you are put in a classroom with material that assumes you possess a foundation you don't have. Furthermore if the teacher attempts to address the deficiencies of those who haven't learned the basics, there is no possibility of teaching what was supposed to be taught in that class. Therefore social promotion creates a situation where teachers get a choice of bad options, and no available good ones.
The costs of these poorly set up classrooms are extremely difficult to properly measure. But they are absolutely real. And it is important to note that a significant fraction of those costs fall on the students who were not socially promoted.
Looking at the research you quoted, this critical factor is ignored. Yes, students who are allowed to fail learn less than ones who are socially promoted. There wasn't strong evidence whether they learn less by the same grade. But the most important fact to me, whether or not OTHER students learn less when put in classrooms where teachers have a broader mix of students - wasn't even looked at.
Furthermore the option of summer school wasn't addressed. That gives you the best of both worlds. Students who need it get extra time. And get to stay on course. It worked well for me. I personally had a crappy grade 9 French teacher, was passed when I should of failed, then failed grade 10 French. I retook the course in summer school and passed. It would have been better still if I had failed grade 9 French instead. (And better still if I had a decent teacher there, but such is life.)
You can't teach kids who come home to parents who do not value education.
An oversized classroom is not as bad as students who have no interested and no motivation to learn. But it's not the student fault, it's their parents.
Sad thing is, it's kind of an endless cycle. Maybe we should punish the parents... but I don't know how well that would work either...
In private religious and secular schools, I have noticed that parental involvement is much higher.
[1] Set at the state and national level as a result of funding.
[2] In many locales, set by unions and un-elected administration.
The education I got was by all means "good," but it was VERY herd mentality, and it as very much about standardizing a body of knowledge and culture NOT about promoting active discourse etc.
Yet, I still ended up alright, whereas, considering how "good" a high school I went to, many of the kids did not.
The difference was the home, the neighborhood and the culture we went home to at night. Now I know all of this is circular, and a bit of the chicken egg issue, but there is really nothing you can do for people when the household they go back to doesn't support their education. Conversely, even a horrible school can't ruin a good education provided by your family and community. You can give them all the help in the world, but no matter how many free college workshops you have, if education isn't explicitly a goal among their friends, family and community they'll realize pretty quickly that it wont be useful in their lives and will disengage.
So I'm all for education reform, I think it should be a constant in our society. Education ALWAYS needs improving. But we need to be a little more careful with understanding what exactly an education system can and cannot provide.
The problems that are in this article can't really be fixed with a better education system, they are symptomatic of far bigger cultural issues that need addressing.
I grew up in a small town in NH (population ~5k people). I have a close friend whose sister was in a "special attention" program (let's call her Jane). Jane was in a program for kids who were "slower" than the other kids. They didn't have any physical learning disabilities, just poorer grades.
The time came for the yearly standardized tests (called the CATs in NH). On the day of the tests Jane's class was taken out on a special 'field trip'; they all went bowling. In the morning the kids lined up for class and Jane and her friends gloated to the other suckers who had to stay behind, "We get to go bowling and you have to stay here and take tests."
The result? The school's scores were a little bit higher that year.
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From everything I've seen, big bureaucracies are Bizarro World.