Dan Among Den

1. Increase parental involvement: I don’t know how you make it happen (that’s next week’s question), but this has to be the most important difference in getting a good education vs. getting a bad education. Parents who are willing to get involved in their kids’ education will make sure that they get a good education. I attended one of the richest and best (widely recognized) school systems in the state of Texas, perhaps even in the nation. (We won the national Academic Decathlon something like four or five years in a row, but I digress…) Furthermore, I was on the “honor” track, so in theory I got the cream of the crop in teacher selection. However, and I say this with glowing respect to the teaching profession, most of those teachers didn’t teach me anything, or at least not anything worthwhile. There were exceptions of course (kudos to Shoemaker, Gorman, name-forgotten-Geometry-teacher, Steele, Wolgehegan, Fabian, and Taylor), but for the most part, they shoveled a plate of facts and formulas in front of me and asked that I regurgitate them at appropriate intervals. What really made me learn was the constant driving by my parents, especially my father, to learn that stuff and “get those tickets”. My theory is that the main reason rich districts produce such good students (in general) is because rich parents believe in the importance of education and whip that into their children.
2. Disband the NEA: The NEA (the national teachers’ union – slap my hand if I got the name or acronym wrong) is the biggest roadblock to improving schools. Now, yes, I do believe that teachers should have the same right as anyone else to organize their labor for the purpose of collective bargaining, and yes, I agree that teachers do know a thing or two about what separates good education from bad education. However, the NEA as an organization has tremendous lobbying power and a strong voice in setting national, state, and local education policies, and they have used that power to oppose virtually every recent school reform except for “spend more money”. Now, you might think that spending more money really is the solution, but the NEA’s primary goal is NOT to improve the education of students. It is to increase the salaries and benefits of its members, the teachers. If the real solution to improving education turns out to be in opposition of teachers’ pay, then you can be sure that the NEA will oppose it, claiming to be a body of unbiased experts. So, I suggest blowing it up (not literally, but I wouldn’t mind seeing them go down in a fire of union fraud and bankruptcy) and replacing it with a bunch of local, unrelated teachers’ unions and one or more national professional associations, similar to the IEEE or ACM. Let the local unions deal with local salary/benefit issues, and let the professional association discuss and opine on the best ways to education children. Those two functions are unrelated and should be separate.
3. Don’t spend more money: Well, maybe you do have to spend more money, but I am sick and fucking tired of hearing the old mantra that we just need to spend more money. Hell, we’ve been spending more money for thirty years as we’ve watched the schools get worse. (I assume they’re getting worse – why else all the angst? Either that, or it’s all a hoax, trying to extort more money, but I digress…) I’m also tired of the constant comparisons of dollars per student ratios. “New York schools are better than Texas schools because New York spends the most per student while Texas comes in at 44th.” Whoever thinks that is in much more need of an education than I, a Texas-educated idiot. Did it ever occur to them that it’s just cheaper to live in Texas than in New York? And where it’s cheaper to live, the labor is cheaper. In general, New Yorkers make more than folks in Austin, from the teachers to the cab drivers, the plumbers, the window washers and so on. Does this mean that New York has better cabs or pipes or cleaner windows? No, it just means that labor is more expensive in New York than in Austin. The same goes for comparing Plano and Round Rock to Laredo and San Angelo. Spending more money doesn’t necessarily mean you’re getting a better product. All it really tells you is that you’re paying more. If you’re going to rely on a metric, pick something better.
4. End Zero Tolerance policies and return authority to man-on-the-spot: I know this came as a reaction to some pretty bad situations with drugs and weapons in schools, but these are a ridiculous solution. They aim to please the masses by saying that the problem will go away because we won’t tolerate the problem. Well, the problems haven’t gone away, and all they have done is upped the ante for getting caught breaking the most trivial regulations. [See the War on Drugs and mandatory drug sentencing for a similar “success story”.] Instead, give some authority back to the local administrator to use his judgment to decide which infractions can be ignored and which require harsh punishment. While I am a big fan of the predictability of the rule of law, I’m also a big fan of the independent judges who administer that law.
5. Require results and experiment in the face of failure: In some cases, the public schools deliver. In some cases, they don’t. There are at least a hundred ways to measure this, and I’m not strongly in favor of one vs. the other. Also, I don’t believe in equality of outcome. Some schools are just going to outperform others, but if we have to pay for the education, we should expect results. That doesn’t necessarily means every student must pass a certain test, or that a set percentage of students must graduate. In truth, I think those standards should be set locally since that’s where the money is coming from and where the parents of the children live. And if a school (whether public or private) is failing to deliver those results, we need to be allowed to experiment with other solutions. Maybe that’s charter schools or even the dreaded religious schools [insert hysterical Christian Fascism diatribe here] or maybe just some fundamental changes to the public schools. But don’t just shrug and say, “Well, it’s a complex issue that needs further study… but in the meantime, I know that more money would improve things.”

Well, not my best, but not bad for off the cuff.

Oh, the answer to the bonus question is: On alternate Tuesdays, but only if the price of silver is on the decline. I'll give Adam partial credit for his own surrealism.

Other Friday Fiver’s are running for school board here.