Future of Education in the US

[Maddy]

One of the memorable quotes of the October 15 presidential debate came from moderator Bob Schieffer:

The question is this: the US spends more per capita than any other country on education. Yet, by every international measurement, in math and science competence, from kindergarten through the 12th grade, we trail most of the countries of the world.

The implications of this are clearly obvious. Some even say it poses a threat to our national security.

Beginning his reply, Barack Obama said:

This probably has more to do with our economic future than anything and that means it also has a national security implication, because there's never been a nation on earth that saw its economy decline and continued to maintain its primacy as a military power. So we've got to get our education system right.

Looking back over the past year and a half, President-Elect Obama has said several times that he intends to make reforming early childhood education a priority of his administration. I've summarizing his promises in this article on BrillBaby:
http://www.brillbaby.com/early-learning/early-childhood-education.php

Of course, Obama's no. 1 priority is going to be the economy. So it's encouraging that he has explicitly recognized the need to improve the US education system as a means to ensuring the country's economic future.

In that debate, Obama also spoke about matching education mandates with the funding to support them:

I do think that it is important for the federal government to step up and help local school districts do some of the things they need to do. Now, we tried to do this under President Bush. He put forward No Child Left Behind. Unfortunately, they left the money behind for No Child Left Behind. And local school districts end up having more of a burden, a bunch of unfunded mandates, the same kind of thing that happened with special education where we did the right thing by saying every school should provide education to kids with special needs, but we never followed through on the promise of funding, and that left local school districts very cash-strapped.

It reminded me of something Rachel Coleman, the creator of Signing Time, wrote on her blog. Rachel's daughter Lucy has cerebral palsy and is confined to a wheelchair. School can be so stressful for Lucy, she was dry-heaving out of sheer nervousness on her first day of term.

In her post, Rachel mentions how a lack of funding for special-needs kids affects her family:

Lucy would do better if she could have Sally as a full-time aide, since she struggles with transitions [between aides' shifts] but the district refuses to pay benefits and retirement for one full-time aide, so Lucy will have two part-time aides. And like clockwork, every week on the day that the aides transition, I will likely get a note sent home saying, “Lucy had a really hard day, she refused to work and cried a lot.” If the district lived it, like we live it, they would pay benefits, retirement and more.

Imagine that - once a week this poor child has to suffer in a school not designed for kids in wheelchairs, without someone to help her do all the things the rest of us take for granted. All to save paying someone full-time employee benefits.

For those of you who are US residents: What has been your experience of public education? Is the situation as bad as it was made to sound on the campaign trail?

I wonder why the US school system is crumbling (with many public schools literally crumbling) when the country spends so much per capita on education. Is it like the health-care system where a large percentage of funding gets wasted on admin costs?

[nhockaday]

Unfortunately, I live is a state where education and schools rank almost the lowest in the nation. I do not want to send Gabriel to a public school here. Drop out rates and high and test scores are low. Teachers here are not the greatest either. Some are great, but some cannot even speak properly and use proper grammar.


Where is all the money going? Good question. Teachers are underpaid, and there was a report on the news tonight that more and more public schools are using private funding.

[DomanMom]

Wow, this is an issue that is very close to my heart, I don’t even know where to begin. I have been researching the state of government schools for years now and there is so much to be said on the topic. However, for now at least, I’d like to address the issued of the “funding problem”.

I was appalled, yet not entirely surprised, when in response to “We spend more money on education than anyone else” Obama’s solution was “We need more money!” Study after study after study have shown that money is not tied to school performance, yet most Americans believe that government schools are under-funded, even thought we’re spending a national average of $10,000 annually per student!

I have an interesting story for you all that hammers the nail in the coffin of the “We need more money!” lie. What if we were able to take a large, troubled school district and undertake a comprehensive program of reform in which money is no object? Suppose the reform was overseen by an independent party committed to making use of all of the very best government school reform strategies? If we could do such an experiment, don’t you think it would finally settle the issue? Well, surprise! There was such as experiment and you might be interested in the results.

In 1985 federal district court judge Russel G. Clark seized control of the Kansas City School District to implement a school desegregation plan. As part of Judge Clarks’ reign, he invited educators to think big and come up with a wish list of everything that they thought would improve students achievement in Kansas City schools. To implement the dreams of Kansas City’s highly trained education professionals, Judge Clark ordered over $2 billion spend to create the perfect school system. To finance all of this spending, the judge by fiat almost doubled the Kansas City property tax rate, imposed a 1.5% income tax surcharge, and forced the Sate of Missouri to provide all additional funds needed to implement his plan. [I can’t write this without commenting that what this judge did was totally unconstitutional. A judge’s job is to interpret the law, not write it, and he stepped way outside of his rights to do this. Anyhow, back to the story…]

Kansas City schools did change dramatically as a result of the spending mandated by Judge Clark. Here are some of the things that $2 billion bought:

-   Per pupil spending rose to $11,700, the highest in the nation on a cost-of-living adjusted basis for any major school district in the nation. [Imagine how much that would be if we adjusted for inflation! This was in 1985!]
-   The student teacher ratio fell to 13 to 1, the lowest for any major school district in the nation.
-   Teachers’ pay was increased 40% across the board and their workloads were cut.
-   Students were given field trips to Mexico and Senegal.
-   A model United Nations facility was built that included simultaneous translation capabilities.
-   15 new schools were built. Amenities included an Olympic-sized swimming pool with underwater viewing room, a zoo, a twenty-five acre wildlife sanctuary, television and animation studios, and a robotics studio.
-   Teachers from Belgium, Cameroon, Puerto Rico, Argentina, and Germany were recruited to provide foreign language immersion programs for students in kindergarten through 5th grade.
-   Computer magnet elementary schools were equipped with one personal computer for every two students.

So, $2 billion bought a lot of perks, salaries, and stuff. But what did it do for the school district’s performance? Are you embarrassed because you find yourself cynically thinking the answer is “nothing”? If so, relax. You are in fact a wild-eyed optimist. The results are worse than that. Here they are:

-   The dropout rate went up.
-   The Missouri Board of Education stripped the school district of its accreditation in May 2000 for failure to meet even one of eleven performance goals.
-   The school district hemorrhaged students to charter schools, leaving the school district in a financial crisis with overstaffed programs and half-empty buildings.
-   The educational performance of black students did not improve, and the three grade-level achievement gap between black and white students didn’t improve.
-   Kansas City Superintendent, Bernard Taylor, Jr., was so desperate to raise standardized test scores that he has proposed paying students to improve their test scores.

Maybe they just need more money.

[Sources: Paul Ciotti, “Money and School Performance: Lessons from the Kansas City Desgregation Experiment,” Policy Analysis No. 298, March 16, 1998; Cato Institutes, and Deann Smith, “Superintendent Wants to Pay District Students for Higher Test Scores,” The Kansas City Star, March 13, 2003. This story was extracted from The Harsh Truth About Public Schools, Bruce N. Shortt, Chalcedon Foundation 2003]

This type of experiment is not limited to inter-city schools, either. A similar “unlimited budget” experiment occurred in the town of Celebration, Florida (the “Disney Town”), which has an upper- to middle-class population. And, the results were the same – test scores went down and dropout rates went up, among numerous other problems.

“Throw more money at it” is not the answer. And, not only do studies prove this point, but in my opinion the best support of this point is found in charter, private, and especially home schools, who operate with a fraction of the cost yet consistently soar far above the performance of our dysfunctional government schools. Look at all of us, educating our little ones at home, and the superb results we are getting! With virtually no money at all, thousands of parents have successfully taught their little ones to read and to read well, something that government schools often fail to do after 13 years and hundreds of thousands of dollars invested into each child. How is this extreme failure even possible? Well, most of us still believe that the main goal of the school is to make sure that every kid learns how to read, add sums, and be familiar with geography. But that is simply not the case, and it’s not what American schools are about.

“‘School reform’ has been a staple of American social and political debate since at least the 1830’s. Of course, school reform has also always meant different things to different people. For social and political reformers, school reform is typically a subterfuge for getting control of government schools to promote their version of social and political change; for those associated with the education industry, ‘school reform’ always means pouring more money into government schools; and, for parents and the man-on-the-street, ‘school reform’ generally means trying to improve academic and moral standards within government schools. Of course, this last kind of school reform is precisely the type of reform that is least likely to succeed.” (Bruce N. Shortt)

If their main goal was to teach kids how to read then they would have accomplished that feat after 13 years. But it’s not, and schools are, unfortunately, more concerned with social and political reform – indoctrinating kids in their ideologies – than they are about teaching them how to read or add. Obama talks about bringing kids up to bar and helping the schools, etc., etc., but his solution – throw more money at it – makes it quite obvious that the only “change” he’s for is more of the same when it comes to education. More money won’t make our schools do better. Our schools are controlled not by parents, not by teachers, not even by administrators, but by bureaucrats and teachers unions who have been successfully blocking meaningful reform for decades (at least, that is, the type of reform most parents and laymen are concerned with – improving academic and moral standards). Throwing more money at a dysfunctional, corrupted, and broken system isn’t going to fix anything. As long as schools are dominated by teachers unions, as long as they have a super-monopoly in the education market, things are just going to get worse no matter how much money we pile on.

In “A Nation at Risk,” the National Commission on Excellence in Education reported in 1983 on the condition of American education. Among their findings, the authors observed: “If an unfriendly foreign power had attempted to impose on America the mediocre educational performance that exists today, we might well have viewed it as an act of war.” Yet, 25 years and billions upon billions of dollars of reform later, things have gotten much, much worse.

There's a lot of problems with our system of education but more money is not the solution - they need less bureaucracy, less politics - the system as is needs to shrink so that money is getting to the kids, not being wasted like it is, going through all these long systems of departments and branches and endless bureaucracy. Unfortunately Obama is the epitome of big government and it's not likely to happen under his administration - at best we're going to see more and more spending, more and more government regulations and standards and control and bureaucracy, but less actual academic improvement, less meaningful change. Obama's solutions aren't anything new - they've been around for decades and haven't worked, they can't work, because when it comes to education, piling on more money just simply doesn't work. And, that is literally all Obama has said he's going to do for education - give them more money to help them fulfill the NCLB act.

It's also sad what you mentioned about special education, as I am aware of the huge problems that NCLB has created. Not only has special education suffered but gifted education has as well. They are so vigilantly focused on bringing the kids at the bottom of the class up to bar (because of the requirements placed on them) that the ones at the top are being sorely neglected, as well as those in special education because they don't count in the overall test scores. NCLB seems simple enough (even though I don't agree with federal government sticking its nose in local education) - basically all NCLB is is that each state set its own standards and then meet them. This year I believe they had to have 60% passing (their own standards), and each year the bar goes up until I believe it is by 2014, they have to have 100% passing. However our school system is so messed up they don't know what to do with themselves and are in a frenzy trying to get these kids to read, write, and add. Besides the fact that the curriculums they have require them to spend so much time on non-academic subjects multiculturalism, sex education, save the environment, etc., that time spent on core academics is very low. Having so many discipline problems (because federal law requires every child have the right to "due process") makes it almost impossible for these poor teachers to teach because they can't control their own classrooms. This is one of the reasons why most new teachers quit within the first five years (60%).

I really don't like being so pessimistic but, the problems facing our nation because of the education system are huge, almost incomprehensible, and doing more of the same thing - throwing more money at it, and mandating more and more "reform" - isn't going to fix a broken system. America needs some serious changes in our education, but the entire system is corrupt and dysfunctional and it needs a great deal more than some extra cash.

After all that bad news I thought I would add a bit of humor. Sometimes humor is the best teacher. Enjoy:

<object width="425" height="344"><param name="movie" value=" <a href="http://www.youtube.com/v/LLDb2V86Ei0&rel=1" target="_blank">http://www.youtube.com/v/LLDb2V86Ei0&rel=1</a>">

[KL]

Wow, didn't realize this topic was so controversial!

Thanks for that, Elizabeth! What you said was very interesting indeed. It's incredible that they spent so much money only to see standards drop!!!

    

Even though throwing money at it is the solution, it doesn't mean that it doesn't require money.  My sense is that it requires MORE than just money, and the key is HOW the money is spent.  Just because a lot of money was spent and it didn't work doesn't necessarily mean that money is not needed. (I think you agree with that.)

I also agree that a lot of bureaucracy can probably be cut down, and maybe the savings from that can produce the money needed even.

In any case, you make many good points, and I hope people from the Obama administration will read your post!

Oh, and thanks for the video - I loved Yes Prime Minister! Hilarious! 

[lawrence]

But there's one last ingredient that I just want to mention, and that's parents. We can't do it just in the schools. Parents are going to have to show more responsibility. They've got to turn off the TV set, put away the video games, and, finally, start instilling that thirst for knowledge that our students need.

I don't think bureaucracy will ever go away, however in the same speech Maddy mentioned, the above is quoted from Barack Obama.
And I think he's hit the bullseye with this one. Regardless of where you live, the environment and the guidance that is provided by parents will have the strongest effect on children.

[KL]

Here's another recent article written (in the NY Times) about this:

http://www.nytimes.com/2008/12/17/us/politics/17early.html?_r=2&hp

[patreiche]

I think the key is to do earlier education for all while the children can still learn and before the parents screw things up. We have tried everything else. I would suggest a radical overhaul of our entire education system. Start earlier and teach as much as possible before kids reach the age of rebellion. Get them interested in education before they become interested in everything else.

[texaslady22]

I think the key is to do earlier education for all while the children can still learn and before the parents screw things up. We have tried everything else. I would suggest a radical overhaul of our entire education system. Start earlier and teach as much as possible before kids reach the age of rebellion. Get them interested in education before they become interested in everything else.

We huge a HUGE head start here because we have a consideble poor population. But I'm really not sure that taking 3-year-olds away from their parents and putting them in a room with 20 other 3-year-olds so that they can learn from 2 trained adults in the answer. In our head start program, they focus on teaching the letters and numbers to 10 before a child reaches K. The rest, they admit, is mostly "social skills" (ie babysitting).

If early childhood education IS the answer, we can't do it the traditional way 

[KL]

Just came across this video. More about Obama's policies:

<a href="http://www.youtube.com/v/_vEg-deTXkc&rel=1" target="_blank">http://www.youtube.com/v/_vEg-deTXkc&rel=1</a>

[patreiche]

I think we need some sort of incentive system. Giving teachers incentives does not work, so lets give the incentives to the parents.

The states have made the test the children have to pass pathetically low because parents complain. My daughter passed the test in 8th grade before ever entering high school and our state is one of the harder test. She thought the test was a piece of cake and could have probably passed it in sixth grade if it was offered. She was slightly above average student not a genius. If she passes this test in 8th grade where is her incentive to learn other then parental guidance. The federal government should get out of the states business. The federal government should not provide the state any money for education. Since the states are unwilling to create an education system that can compete in the world. The federal government needs to create a curriculum that can compete and provide it on the internet for parents to follow and teach their children.

The federal government needs to set up its own educational system using the internet, this should include early education techniques. The federal government would set up a free site on the internet with  educational material to help any child excel. States could use the material if they desire in the classrooms.

Give the parents a monetary motivation for their child to learn. Give them a tax refund for passing a national test, not controlled by states, at different milestones. By setting different milestones the parents that want their children to attend college versus have an 8th grade education will follow different paths. The monetary incentive should increase as the difficulty increases. Then parents would have a vested interest in having their children learn. If the parents receive money for their children achieving a certain level of education with different milestones, they will be more interested in their children's education. If they save these incentives they could pay for college. Instead of a tax break for going to college for your kid to party, they should have to have a 3.0 to get tax break. Put qualifications on the money the government hands out! Parents are so important to a child education.

The test would be computerized testing and administered at test centers that test for certifications to avoid cheating and proof of who is taking test. This would eliminate the cheating problem that also exist in our school systems.

[KL]

Good points!

[texaslady22]

Giving parents a monetary incentive is an interesting idea--what do you all think? I'd love to have more people chime in on this one. Share your ideas!!

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