How to Improve Public Education
This week’s return to school has put back in the forefront the troubles facing many school districts and individual schools. The problems are defined in different ways by different parts of society, but all the symptoms point to poor performance. Students are not learning as they should. Two questions seem inseparable: why, and what to do. They seem inseparable, but they are not. Conventional thinking says that if the reason for poor performance can be discerned (why), then it can be addressed with this or that program or plan (what to do).
But, in fact, every explanation and accompanying solution appears to have failure built-in to it. If the problem with education is that students are not learning, then setting absolute standards and testing for their fulfillment should prevent schools from graduating illiterate students. But such standardized tests produce statistics which expose some schools to criticism for not having enough passing students. So teachers and schools are required to “teach better” so test scores will improve. And they do. They teach so that test scores will improve–because their jobs depend on it. But improving test scores and teaching better actually are not the same thing. Because what actually begins to transpire is that good teachers pressed by lack of time and resources and bad teachers motivated by laziness “teach to the test.” That is, they learn how to teach students only what is necessary to pass whatever test is being given. And no test which can be given over a period of a few hours or days can actually determine the overall level of learning which ought to take place in a year.
So teachers, some good ones and some bad ones, rebel against the standardized tests. Some rebel out of a desire to teach real content, methods, and practices to their students rather than just the bare information necessary to survive a test. Others rebel out of fear that their incompetence will be revealed. But the problem has not been solved either way.
So what is the solution? “No child left behind?” “All children pushed ahead?” What program can solve the problem? One recent ruling from the Dallas Independent School District is intended to remove a barrier which apparently cripples some students. The barrier is incomplete homework. It cripples them by counting against their final grade. So the district has ruled that incomplete and failed homework will no longer determine a student’s success or failure in a class. The problems which will follow are obvious. Lowering the standards will take the schools right back to the place from which the standardized test were trying to deliver them. Is there no hope?
The solution is as simple as it is unlikely to be fully enacted. And it depends not one whit on identifying exactly from where the problem arises. Whether the problem is teachers, or student motivation, or resource distribution, or poorly defined results, the solution is F-r-e-e M-a-r-k-e-t. Using vouchers or any other system to send education back into a world where performing schools get more and more students to support better and better programs with more and more money is the solution. But it will not be enacted because those high-performing and high-earning schools will be in contrast to under-performing schools which will have fewer and fewer students and less and less money until they finally fail. So the employees of the failing schools who do not get recruited into the good schools will be looking for jobs in a different industry. While that result is actually good for everyone, including the employees who are not doing their best work in education, it is so painful that educators will oppose the move to a free market like the plague. Whether it should be so or not, when people have to choose between a paycheck and improvement, they will choose a paycheck.
Simply: the free market would overcome both the plague of dropouts and failures in the education industry and stop the frustrating cycle of increasingly distracting, bureaucratic, and inherently self-defeating government programs.
