From the earliest days of our nation, the federal government has taken an interest in education. The Northwest Ordinance (1787) expressed it thusly:
Religion, morality, and knowledge, being necessary to good government and the happiness of mankind, schools and the means of education shall forever be encouraged.
In today’s schools though one is led to wonder if the goal is to educate children or to maintain reasonably cushy administrative positions. Test scores in general have either declined or held steady over the last few decades, while the testing isn’t considered as rigorous as it once was. The forces of political correctness have determined that testing is unfair to poor and minority students and demand changes regularly. And some parents consider the school a babysitting and restaurant service (since most serve free or reduced-price breakfast and lunch), not caring much about how their children progress or behave at school.
Some of these complaints were addressed under President Bush as the No Child Left Behind Act was sheparded through Congress early in his first term and signed in January 2002. While Bush asked for this act to combat what he termed “the soft bigotry of low expectations”, it also added more federal regulations to the multitude that already exist, and became a target for Democrats to constantly claim that NCLB was underfunded.
While I appreciate a set of measurable standards for school performance, in reality this law hasn’t done a whole lot to improve the learning status of America’s children. In my opinion, the law to its full extent wasn’t necessary and it encourages education in exactly the opposite way from what it should be.
I was educated in public schools for the 13 years of my primary and secondary schooling (as well as a state university.) There was a time in elementary school I was in a special class because I have what’s now known as ADHD, and I finished my high school years by taking vocational classes for my junior and senior years (drafting and related courses.) So I experienced a lot of different classroom situations, probably moreso than the average child.
What the schools taught me was all of the factual knowledge I needed to get through and get a good grade point average. History and math classes were pretty much a piece of cake for me and I did reasonably well in English. Science was pretty easy as well. One disadvantage I had was spending my middle school and high school years at a small rural district that didn’t have a whole lot of advanced classes. (Though to be fair, I went to vocational school so I didn’t opt to stay and take some of the AP classes that may have been available to me in 11th and 12th grade.) My older daughter did have a chance to participate in a gifted/talented program because she went to school in a large city district and took advantage of several of these classes to get her high school language credits in junior high.
But there were two things I learned in college that I never did in high school. One was how to study and manage time because I didn’t have to do that for most of my academic career prior to college. The other was something I’m still learning to some extent as most of us do, and that’s critical thinking.
Teaching to the test as most schools are geared simply teaches a child to regurgitate the facts that they’re taught without giving them a context to work from. This particularly affects kids when they’re taught history and current events. For example, if children are taught American history, they brush through the saga of the Pilgrims coming to America. If anything, they’re taught about all of the help the Indians gave the settlers and how they thanked the Indians by holding a Thanksgiving feast. They learn nothing about the reason they came (religious persecution in England) or the failure of their early efforts at communal living. Their bountiful harvests came after they abandoned that socialism and allowed each settler to keep and trade their own land and labor. Unfortunately, this and many other important parts of early American history are barely covered in schools today.
There’s also the question of ever-spiraling educational budgets that seem to take more and more of a bite of our wallets. Well over 2/3 of the money a school district spends is in the form of salaries and benefits. True, a good teacher is worth every penny he/she is paid, but too many teachers simply go there to collect a paycheck – and in extreme cases, due to union contracts, are paid despite not teaching at all as they’ve been proven to be a danger to children but can’t easily be let go by the school district.
I’m going to address the money issue first with my solutions. I strongly believe that since it’s us taxpayers who provide the money to educate the majority of our children, any money spent on education at the state or local level should follow the child. Whether it’s through vouchers or some other sort of mechanism, giving this power of the purse to parents will encourage schools to become better or lag behind the market. Also on the financial front is a message to the federal government: there’s no amendment in our Constitution that mandates the federal government either pays for education or hangs the sword of Damocles over local school districts by forcing them to do what the feds want (including NCLB.) So butt out of the education business. There’s already way too much bureaucracy at the local and state levels for the system’s own good, and having a federal layer tossed on top just creates a lot of make-work positions for pencil-pushers who are about as far removed from educating a child as we are from the moon.
Now to the curriculum. Obviously there should be more local input, however as a parent who’s had children in school not too many years ago I’ve seen some of the strange items that were taught to them. But there’s a lot they don’t have a chance to cover, particularly in the areas of American history, geography, and (at the high school level) economics. And given the writing and speaking skills I see out of a lot of today’s youth, English needs to be brushed up on as well.
If we can get money to follow the child as I wish it would, that would solve another issue that bedevils the educational world. Teachers who are really good at their craft would have more demand placed for their services, and actually it could be possible for them to create their own cottage industry and blend the best aspects of homeschooling and school-based education by becoming independent contractors. In fact, with this concept it’s likely a private or charter school could attract the best area teachers and lease them space in their school building. (And it’s why the NEA fights this idea tooth and nail.)
I also want to extol the virtues of vocational education while I have an opportunity. As I stated, I attended vocational school for my last two years and it taught me a lot about drafting in general and a bit about architecture. This was the Stone Age when we actually learned board drafting with pencil and straightedge.
But not all kids are college material and unfortunately our nation also suffers from a shortage of skilled tradesmen. To me, there’s nothing wrong with learning to be a CAD operator, plumber, carpenter, or machinist. Given how I did in shop class I’m certainly on the right end of the building industry as far as my skills are concerned, but we simply have too few people who are interested in these sorts of occupations. On the other hand we have way too many who drift through college not knowing what they want to be, or worse, get through school with aspirations to be a bureaucrat.
Education should be about what’s best for the children and I believe that the more options they have in their education, the better they’ll succeed in life. Instead of filling these “skulls full of mush” with just enough facts to pass a standardized test and not the context with which these facts fit, we need to teach kids how to think for themselves. Currently in our nation, those environments for learning that show the most success (private schools and homeschooling) generally have the least to do with governmental regulations and the most to do with the children through more rigid discipline, a course of study that emphasizes classical subjects, and a greater sense of morality through faith-based studies. I think it will be easier to get to a better educational model if those who dictate the rules in education are based as closely as possible to those they educate – not in some DC office.
