Category: Public Education and Homeschooling

The Wrong Path to School Choice

Adam B. Schaeffer offers some advice for “Changing School Choice Strategy” at Tech Central Station:

The legal, regulatory, and political bunkers manned by soldiers from the Democratic coalition make school choice a slow and difficult battle. What little ground reformers gain is constantly under threat of being lost. The school choice movement should step around these obstacles by concentrating their efforts on a drive, in each state with an income tax, for Universal Tuition Tax Credits (UTTCs) that allow all parents a true choice in education.

The idea has several problems:

1. Not every State has an income tax.

2. Even in States with an income tax, the size of the tax credit wouldn’t offset the cost of private schooling for parents whose income tax bill is already low because their incomes are relatively low, they can claim a large number of exemptions, or they have large itemized deductions.

3. States can reclaim lost income-tax revenues by raising marginal rates and/or increasing sales taxes.

I say, keep up the good fight for universal recognition of school vouchers. If Bush is re-elected the fight should become easier.

I Used to Be Too Smart to Understand This

When I arrived in college (eons ago) I soon discovered that learning is more than memorization, which had served me well through the 12th grade. I therefore began to denigrate memorization. It took me years to understand that it’s just as important as the skeptical and logical traits that I began to cultivate as a college student. Now, from
City Journal, comes this:

In Defense of Memorization

Michael Knox Beran

If there’s one thing progressive educators don’t like it’s rote learning. As a result, we now have several generations of Americans who’ve never memorized much of anything. Even highly educated people in their thirties and forties are often unable to recite half a dozen lines of classic poetry or prose.

Yet it wasn’t so long ago that kids in public schools from Boston to San Francisco committed poems like Shelley’s “To a Skylark” and Tennyson’s “Ulysses” to memory. They declaimed passages from Shakespeare and Wordsworth, the Psalms and the Declaration of Independence. Even in the earliest grades they got by heart snippets of “The Midnight Ride of Paul Revere” or “Abou Ben Adhem.” By 1970, however, this tradition was largely dead.

Should we care? Aren’t exercises in memorizing and reciting poetry and passages of prose an archaic curiosity, without educative value?

That too-common view is sadly wrong. Kids need both the poetry and the memorization. As educators have known for centuries, these exercises deliver unique cognitive benefits, benefits that are of special importance for kids who come from homes where books are scarce and the level of literacy low. In addition, such exercises etch the ideals of their civilization on children’s minds and hearts….

What the child discovers, in other words, is not only aesthetically pleasing, but important to cognitive development. Classic verse teaches children an enormous amount about order, measure, proportion, correspondence, balance, symmetry, agreement, temporal relation (tense), and contingent possibility (mood). Mastering these concepts involves the most fundamental kind of learning, for these are the basic categories of thought and the framework in which we organize sensory experience….

No less important, memorizing poetry turns on kids’ language capability. It not only teaches them to articulate English words; it heightens their feel for the intricacies and complexities of the English language—an indispensable attainment if they are to go on to speak, write, and read English with ease. Susan Wise Bauer, author of The Well-Educated Mind: A Guide to the Classical Education You Never Had, argues that memorization “builds into children’s minds an ability to use complex English syntax.” The student “who memorizes poetry will internalize” the “rhythmic, beautiful patterns” of the English language. These patterns then become “part of the student’s ‘language store,’ those wells that we all use every day in writing and speaking.” Without memorization, the student’s “language store,” Bauer says, will be limited: memorization stocks “the language store with a whole new set of language patterns.”

It also stocks those bins with a generous supply of the English language’s rich accumulation of words. Research suggests that the size of a child’s vocabulary plays an important part in determining the quality of his language-comprehension skills. “The greater and wider the vocabulary,” says education historian [Diane] Ravitch, “the greater one’s comprehension of increasingly difficult material.” Bauer points out that if “a student reads a word in a novel, she might or might not remember it for later use. But when she commits it to memory in proper context (as the memorization of lines of poetry requires), she is much more likely to have it at her ‘mental fingertips’ for use in her own speaking and writing.”

All these benefits are especially important for inner-city kids. Bill Cosby recently pointed to the tragedy of the black kids he sees “standing on the corner” who “can’t speak English.” “I can’t even talk the way these people talk,” Cosby said: “ ‘Why you ain’t. Where you is.’ ” To kids who have never known anything but demotic English, literary English is bound to seem an alien, all but incomprehensible dialect. Kids who haven’t been exposed to the King’s English in primary school or at home will have a hard time, if they get to college, with works like Pride and Prejudice and Moby Dick. In too many cases, they will give up entirely, unable to enter the community of literate citizens—and as a result will live in a world of constricted opportunity….

Today’s public-school educators, of course, aren’t allowed to teach the true ideals of our civilization. (MLK is okay, but GW and TJ were just slave-owning honkies.) Perhaps those so-called educators would be willing to allow their students to memorize comic books. That might be better than nothing.

Whining about Teachers’ Pay: Another Lesson about the Evils of Public Education

I thought I was through with the subject of public schools, but I came across this piece of trash at MotherJones.com. It’s about how little teachers make, which forces them to augment their income in ways the author considers demeaning:

I vividly remember, while growing up in the Chicago suburbs in the ’70s, knowing that my sixth-grade math teacher was also—even during the school year—a licensed and active travel agent, and I recall seeing a number of my high-school teachers, all with master’s degrees or Ph.D.’s, painting houses and cutting lawns during the summer. This kind of thing still happens all over the country, and it’s a disgrace. When teachers are forced to tend the yards of students’ homes, to clean houses, or to sell stereos on nights and weekends, the quality of education is diminished, the profession is disrespected, and we parody the notion that we hold our schools and teachers in the highest regard. Teachers with two and three jobs are tired, their families are frustrated, and the students they teach, who want to —- and should -— consider their instructors exalted figures, learn instead to think of teaching as a part-time gig, the day job for the guy who sells Game Boys at Circuit City.

Socialist psychobabble! What’s worse is that “We pay orthodontists an average of $350,000, and no one would say that their impact on the lives of kids is greater than a teacher’s.” Then there’s this: “[A] San Francisco dockworker makes about $115,000, while the clerk who logs shipping records into the longshoreman’s computer makes $136,000.”

No, “we” don’t pay orthodontists. Orthodontists, who practice a profession the entry to which is controlled by a high-class union and licensing laws, are paid willingly by their patients. As for those dockworkers and shipping clerks, they simply belong to a more rapacious union than the ones that represent teachers. Public-school teachers — unlike orthodontists, dock workers, and shipping clerks — are paid with money that governments coerce from taxpayers. There’s not a moral dime’s worth of difference between any of these professions. They’re just practicing different forms of income redistribution.

But none of that explains why public-school teachers make what they make, which is not too little and — given that many of them are unionized and all of them are feeding at the public trough — is probably too much. After all, those teachers who don’t think they’re making “enough” can always get a second job (as many of them do) or take up a different occupation (as many of them do). But no one’s forcing them to teach. When’s the last time a school district shanghaied a passer-by, dragged him into a classroom, and said “teach, or it’s off to Circuit City with ye”?

Why then, do public-school teachers make what they make? Our old friends Supply, Demand, and Competition have the answer.

Let’s start with Demand. Governments have a virtual monopoly on education through the 12th grade. Through a long process of acculturation and co-option, governments have delegated their monopoly power to the “professional educators” (hereafter, Educators) who run school systems. These Educators, through another long process of acculturation and co-option, have developed a model of the ideal teacher. That model, which they apply ruthlessly, places far greater emphasis on arcane, pseudo-scientific teaching techniques than it does on the substance of what is to be taught. Competence in a subject is far less important than “competence” in the cabbala of education.

Not being content with form over substance, Educators demand low student-teacher ratios, even though the value of low student-teacher ratios is mythical. Educators also demand that taxpayers equip classrooms with the latest gadgets, not because the gadgets are especially useful teaching devices but because other school districts have them. (It’s a pedantic arms race.)

Thus, given the sums that Educators are able to extract from taxpayers without facing outright rebellion, they effectively choose quantity over quality. That is, were it not for low student-teacher ratios and expensive gadgets, they could have fewer but somewhat more competent teachers at a higher average salary. Instead they willingly accept more but somewhat less competent teachers at a lower average salary.

Now comes Supply. Teaching doesn’t attract many of the best and brightest, who have more lucrative options. (As I’ve just said, Educators themselves are to blame for the level of teachers’ salaries.) But there’s more to it than that. Teaching doesn’t attract the best and brightest because they are repulsed by the emphasis on form (pseudo-scientific credentials) over substance. The best and the brightest are often willing to accept lower wages in return for stimulating work. Public-school teaching can be stimulating, but public schools, by and large, insist on ritual conformity to pseudo-scientific educational psychobabble, discourage originality (“here’s the approved textbook and here’s the approved syllabus”), cater mainly to the lowest common denominator in the student body, and tolerate disruptive behavior. Public-school teachers are as much day-care providers as they are teachers. Well, day care isn’t a profession that attracts many of the best and brightest.

Finally enters the wraith of Competition, whose shadow doesn’t darken public schools. And that’s the root of the problem. Educators (the big “E” variety) get away with putting form above substance and quantity above quality because parents have no choice. The tax collector sucks parents dry, and few of them have recourse to vouchers for private education. And it’s all the doing of the Education monopoly, as I’ve explained before.

If vouchers were widely available so that private schools could compete robustly with public schools — and if governments allowed private schools to focus on substance (results), not form (credits in “education” classes) — they would hire more of the best and brightest as teachers. That would draw more and more students away from public schools until public schools were forced to compete with private schools in terms of quality. Then public schools would strive to hire some of the best and brightest for their own classrooms. The next thing you know (well, maybe after a decade or so), America’s children would be getting the world’s best education from relatively well paid teachers. But not many of them would be holdovers from today’s public schools.

Professional Educators and their unions aren’t about to let that happen. They may not be the best and brightest, but they have their priorities: first, jobs for the mediocre; second, baby-sitting (it’s easier than real teaching); third, teaching (to the extent they know enough to teach something).

School Vouchers and Teachers’ Unions

The American Federation of Teachers — exhibit A in the case against labor unions — is crowing on its web site about the Colorado Supreme Court’s recent 4-3 decision that declared the state’s new school voucher program unconstitutional. The AFT says that the decision marks “an important victory in the union’s ongoing battle against voucher schemes.”

At the bottom of the page about the Colorado decision there’s a link to another page: Find out more about why the AFT opposes private school vouchers at taxpayers’ expense. Here we learn that

The AFT supports parents’ right to send their children to private or religious schools but opposes the use of public funds to do so. The main reason for this opposition is because public funding of private or religious education transfers precious tax dollars from public schools, which are free and open to all children, accountable to parents and taxpayers alike, and essential to our democracy, to private and religious schools that charge for their services, select their students on the basis of religious or academic or family or personal characteristics, and are accountable only to their boards and clients.

There are several whoppers in that quotation. I’ll take them one at a time:

• “Public funds” are, in fact, tax revenues collected through the coercive power of government.

• The phrase “private or religious education” seems calculated to appeal to anti-religious sentiment (especially anti-Catholic sentiment). The distinction is unnecessary because a “religious” school is, by definition, a “private” school.

• Public schools would need fewer “precious tax dollars” if there were fewer students in public schools. Public school systems would probably become even more top-heavy with administrators as the number of public-school students dwindled. Then we’d see just how much they are “accountable to parents and taxpayers.”

• Public schools aren’t “free” and they do “charge for their services” — they just seem free to the naïve among us because they collect their fees in the form of taxes.

• “Private and religious schools” may or may not “select their students on the basis of religious or academic or family or personal characteristics.” So what if some of them do? It’s a two-way street. With vouchers, parents can select their children’s schools on the basis of religious or academic or family or personal characteristics. There’s nothing wrong with that, unless you believe that Johnny should be forced to go to school with a bunch of louts just because they live in his public-school district.

• Public schools aren’t “accountable to parents and taxpayers,” they’re “accountable” to elected school boards, whose members are usually co-opted by public-school administrators. Public schools are not accountable to taxpayers, who must cough up their taxes regardless of the quality of “their” public schools. Most taxpayers take no interest in the quality of public education because they are childless or their children aren’t in school.

• Private schools, on the other hand, have what the AFT sneeringly calls “clients” — that is, parents — who have a direct interest in the quality of their children’s education and who can vote with their checkbooks if they’re dissatisfied with the education they’re paying for. That’s accountability.

But accountability is the last thing the AFT wants for its members, who pay their dues to be protected from true accountability, which they would experience if vouchers were widely available.

It’s no wonder that more and more parents are willing to give of their own time (and some amount of money) to home-school their children. Teachers’ unions care first and foremost about protecting teachers’ jobs. If teachers’ unions really cared about the education of children, they’d go out of business.