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I can't help but think there's a Submarine[1] effect going on with reporting on public schools in the U.S. The U.S. is a huge country with a heterogeneous popu

• Ntrails 12y ago
  As with many things I'm reminded of the west wing: "Mallory, education is the silver bullet. Education is everything. We don't need little changes, we need gigantic, monumental changes. Schools should be palaces. The competition for the best teachers should be fierce. They should be making six-figure salaries. Schools should be incredibly expensive for government and absolutely free of charge to its citizens, just like national defense. That's my position. I just haven't figured out how to do it yet." Rather than pretending it could ever be the case, I like to imagine that there's an alternate universe where it happens :)
  • tartuffe78 12y ago
    "... free of charge to its citizens...", except for taxes of course
    • acdha 12y ago
      … which will be paid at a much higher level for decades by the adults who received a solid education even if their parents couldn't have afforded it. This is hardly a zero-sum game.
  • Haul4ss 12y ago
    As with many things, it sounds flowery and perfect but the implementation would be a disaster. - You have to build/renovate schools. That alone on a national scale is almost unworkable. In more densely populated areas there simply might not be room to expand. - You have to agree on the "right" way to teach, as if there is such a thing. Pedagogy is constantly evolving, and frankly you don't want the One True Way to teach any more than you want the One True Way to write computer programs. - You have to accept that children are coming into school from wildly different starting points. I'm not just talking about poverty; the U.S. has huge influxes every year of people speaking languages other than English. - In areas of concentrated poverty you need to keep the schools safe and the children engaged when every other aspect of their life could be immensely more stressful than yours and mine. - You have to completely overhaul how we find, recruit, and retain teachers, accepting that many mistakes will be made along the way. And you're somehow going to do all of this from a centrally managed federal department run not by the intelligentsia but from rank-and-file bureaucrats. I support strong public education, I really do. But I think we lose track of how intractable of a problem that is on the national level. People hold up Finland (population 5.4 mil., 93% ethnic Finn) as an education utopia, but no one likes to talk about how different they are from the U.S. (population 318 mil., much greater ethnic diversity and 12% foreign born).
• acdha 12y ago
  Agreed. I'm married to a teacher and wince almost every time I read something about what's wrong with education because most of the problems I hear about are caused by social problems (usually symptoms of poverty). The public education system gets blamed for the effects but has very little funding or ability to fix the causes. There are two main drivers: the most obvious one is that teachers are one of the largest unionized groups so there's going to be a certain level of attack just from that particular culture war. The less appreciated one, however, is the number of companies and investors who benefit from changes. A major policy change means billions of dollars in new textbooks, curriculum materials, etc. — and almost inevitably follows this cycle where test scores drop (boosters: "see how bad it was"; teachers: "these kids have had the new approach for one year"), improve as everyone has time to get used to the new system and then plateau at roughly where they'd been under the previous system. Each time you repeat, textbooks companies make billions. The rise of charter schools gives an even greater benefit to attacks. Each student who switches is $10+K/year and there's a lot less oversight on where that money is spent so you have room for modern CEO salaries, dividends to investors, etc. so there are plenty of people trying to jump in. Attacking public schools also turns out to be a good strategy for a charter school to show results: the marketing appeals to the more motivated, generally higher-income parents, whose children were already likely to perform above average anyway. That helps the charter school and, if this happens enough like it does here in DC where this is about 40% of the students, lowers the public school ratings at the same time. This isn't to say that there aren't real problems in public education but rather that there are both no simple fixes and many people who stand to profit from ignoring the root causes.