I've written several diaries about public education and received tepid responses from this blogosphere. Maybe nobody is ready yet to bite this ever-growing bullet of mediocrity.
I had dinner last night with a couple I had never met before. We had a common friend who was celebrating her birthday with all her friends. The man was a retired school teacher of government who taught my niece at the local high school. His wife told me that their daughter, now 13, was in 8th grade and that they were scared to death about the quality of her education. We talked at length about the education "culture" in our central Texas community.
As a former teacher in this region also, our consensus was "all sports, all the time." Teachers? If they can't coach something like girls tiddly winks, they don't teach. Fully 75% of the science department at this high school were coaches. The reasoning? Well, they majored in kinesiology, so they had biology and anatomy in college. Let them teach physics, chemistry and biology. Even AP biology, physics and chemistry are taught by coaches who are absent from time-to-time for extracurricular events.
I have another niece who attended this high school about 8 years ago. She is a bookworm who studies like the wind. She made mostly A's and B's in everything. At my urging, since biology is my thing having taught AP level and below, she took AP biology. Did she ever ask any help from me? Nope. Why not? Because she was acing everything to the maximum. But when it came time for her to take the international AP exam, she scored only a 2 out of 5. She just shrugged and said the AP class just didn't cover half the material that was on the test. It turns out that the teacher was assigned to teach this class at the last minute, had not been to the AP biology week-long workshop to attain his AP certificate and was busy coaching girls soccer to boot (sorry about the pun). I know science candidates who were turned down for these teaching jobs even though they had advanced degrees, worlds of functional experience and a spotless record teaching elsewhere. At teacher job fairs I met these people and became one myself when I moved here from Colorado in 2002.
Our good citizens were urged to expand the school "bricks and mortar" because the kids were falling out of the windows due to overcrowding. So, the city council put a bond issue up for building a new middle and elementary school plus expanding the high school. The citizens groups came back to the council and said, "No way we're going to support this without a new football stadium." So, the obedient council drafted another bond for a football stadium, got quotes and put it on the ballot too. The expansion bond was for about $6 million. The football stadium bond was for $7.5 million. The stadium bond passed 3:1, while the expansion bond passed by a bare majority. Even with a stadium on the ballot there were still people who wouldn't vote for better school facilities, never mind professional wages for teachers and administrators.
Much to my chagrin, this is an all too typical story around our country. People talk the talk about educating our children, but seem to walk the walk of living vicariously through their childrens' exploits on the athletic field, or the band room, or the sidelines as cheerleaders, flag wavers, or other such pageantry oriented foolishness. We've become a country of football fantasy lovers who don't really care about the quality and quantity of education for our children.
The cumulative affect of all this mis-appropriation of priorities creates things like "No Child Left Behind" that costs states millions of dollars for no purposeful outcome. The state-wide standard tests in Texas are know as the TAKS tests. It costs the taxpayers here $100 million per year to operated this "system." The TAKS test for science, that's biology, chemistry and physics (we don't teach Earth science here anymore) is only 40 questions long! Forty questions! And almost a quarter of them are thrown out every year for being too ambiguous. DUH! Is it any wonder that Texas kids are always at or below the national average for ACT and SAT test scores?
OK. I'm looking for answers to change the way we do business with public schools. I think we need to radicalize the reforms. One example would be to have school district superintendents be selected by the state board with mandates on curriculum rigor and fiscal responsibility. Local school boards hire supers for mostly political reasons: people who do the bidding of the council, which is often not in keeping with good practices in excellence. Of course, we also have to not only pay existing quality teachers a wage that is parallel to their equally educated peers in business and industry, but to attract higher-caliber educators who will embrace their jobs with love and energy instead of just showing up, do the paper work and go home - or to their coaching job.
So. Wadda ya think? Let me have it! We have got to put something forward soon, or we will continue to have a nation of under-educated people who won't be able to compete in the 21st century world market. If not, it's "Good by American Pie."