Commentary critical of public education floods conservative and libertarian websites. In a recent article, I gave educators a chance to speak for themselves, in a sense, by providing information that public university education departments present to the public and to prospective students. I also related my own classroom experiences with education specialists. Articles by Thomas Sowell and others, and by me, tend to relate such facts as they are understood by those of us outside the profession. While this is necessary, missing from the usual fare is a study how things appear from the inside. Here, then, are some problems with public education as experienced by teachers in public schools:
Every public schoolteacher faces two primary obstacles to educating students: social promotion policies and uninvolved parents. In Alabama, for example, a student is to be promoted if he fails "only" math or reading and one other course. Thus, a student who can get (mostly) passing grades in math and other subjects, but is known to the teacher to be unable to read, must be promoted. The teacher has no choice in this. A result of such policies is that regardless of whether a given teacher derives immense satisfaction from successfully educating students, a sixth-grade teacher who inherits a student who cannot read is almost hopelessly hamstrung. (To be fair, Alabama is trying to reform their social-promotion policies right now.)
As for uninvolved parents, what is there to say? There is no excuse: While 74% of impoverished households ("impoverished" per government classification) in the United States own VCRs, and the average new VCR sells for around $140, the average children's book at a garage sale goes for about 25 cents. I have friends who troll garage sales finding books for their toddlers, so I know it can be done. Combine this with two other data: Reading is the most important learning skill at any age; and the typical improverished child shows up for first grade unable to read. While many critics, myself included, like to find fault in government nannying – and there is plenty of government fault to find – parents must share responsibility.
Teachers outside Alabama face other obstacles, among them lack of administrative support for discipline and forced inculcation of statist politics and permissive – sometimes deviant – moral codes that many teachers find repugnant. While teachers around the nation tend to enjoy guaranteed job tenure divorced from quality of performance, a condition unheard of anywhere outside the profession, teachers tell me that opposing the school system's official moral or political stance is almost the only thing a teacher can do to get fired.
Additionally, teachers face unique obstacles just to get hired in the first place. They endure being taught psychological education theories that are often no more than politically correct psychobabble; they must satisfy their professors that they "understand and are sufficiently committed to" the profession, according to some public university catalogs (which can mean whatever the professors want it to mean – usually that the student is sufficiently liberal); and they must have the proper degree from an approved institution. Further, they have to remember the psychobabble long enough to reproduce it on a certification exam. Unless they leap all these hurdles, they don't get a job. The end result of this process, of course, is well documented: The strongest students usually get disgusted early and flee from education programs, leaving behind the ones generally most susceptible to the psychobabble and weakest with regard to the subject matter they'll be teaching.
Certainly there are intelligent public schoolteachers, and many of those wish they could do more, such as changing policies, to make public education effective. So far, I have been speaking in left-handed defense of the teachers, but there is more to be said even when seeing things from their perspective. Most startling is that in many states, 40% and more of public schoolteachers send their own children to private schools. This shows these teachers are fully aware of the failure of public schools, more so because private schools cost money and public schoolteachers usually are not highly paid.
Thus, even taking into account the factors making it difficult for them to do their jobs well, public schoolteachers must bear significant moral culpability: If 40% of the teachers in a state or county system were unified and vocal in their resistance to the most damaging policies, they could not help but have an effect. If 40% or more of the teachers in a given district let it be known that they would not vote the teachers' union party line in local elections, there would be change. But don't hold your breath waiting for that to happen.
As long as teachers face all these obstacles, and as long as the informed and conscientious ones abdicate their responsibility to improve the system, the solution for those of us who care remains the same:
Home school your children.
March 16, 2001
Brad Edmonds, Doctor of Musical Arts, is a banker in Alabama.
