 |
|
 |
 |
 |
 |
 |
 |
 |
 |
Public school bureaucracy remains the problem
Sunday, December 26, 1999
Evidence mounts that the greatest threat to the welfare of our children and to the security of our country is posed by the lazy, greedy bureaucrats who run our public schools.
The National Assessment of Educational Progress, which earlier in this decade documented that American school kids know next to nothing about history or geography, reported last month that they know even less about civics.
A third of high school seniors lack a basic grasp of the principles of American government, the NAEP said, and fully three-quarters are "not proficient" in civics.
A democratic system of government can survive if kids don't know how to put a condom on a banana. But it will not last long if, in Thomas Jefferson's words, schools fail to teach each American "to understand his duties to his neighbors and country, and to discharge with competence the functions confided to him by either."
The National Education Goals panel reported at the start of this month that, despite a massive infusion of bucks, public schools in the United States have failed to meet any of the goals set at an education summit convened by President Bush in 1990.
U.S. schools have failed to improve or have worsened the quality of teacher preparation, school safety and parent participation in education, the panel said.
Even apparent good news is sometimes false. Investigators have charged dozens of teachers and principals in New York City with helping students cheat on tests. The response of the teachers unions to the scandal was a call for less testing.
A story out of Williamstown, Vt., last month illustrates what is wrong with public schools. There, the teachers union is trying to get the most popular teacher at the high school fired.
William Corrow, a former teacher and a retired Air Force colonel, has been teaching, without pay, a course called "Conflict in the 20th Century."
As The Boston Globe reported Nov. 22, "The class quickly became a magnet for the school's best students, who liked Corrow's firsthand knowledge and his insistence on hard work."
The National Education Association is demanding that Corrow be fired, because he is not "properly certified," and, by teaching for free, he violates the union contract.
The union also has been irked, The Boston Globe said, because Corrow "has been blunt at times in his criticisms of the quality of teaching at the school."
As the case of Col. Corrow illustrates, teacher certification rules exist more to protect incompetents than to provide quality instruction for students. There are some very good teachers in the public schools. But far too many have second-rate minds and third-rate educations.
Prof. Robert Strauss of Carnegie Mellon University analyzed the SAT results for the fall of 1996. He found that high school seniors planning to major in education had a combined math and verbal percentile of just 37.7, compared with 85.3 for students planning to major in math, 84.1 for students planning to major in a physical science and 80.9 for students planning to major in language and literature.
In Pennsylvania, prospective teachers were in the 35.3 percentile on the SAT.
"If the academic achievement level of classroom teachers hovers at the 35th percentile, that means that two-thirds of the students in the classroom have stronger scholastic achievement than did their classroom teacher a few years before," Strauss noted.
Higher pay has not improved teacher quality because few school districts hire new teachers based on what they know, Strauss said.
A simple way to correct that would be to require prospective teachers to major in the subject - math, history, biology, English - that they plan to teach. But this common sense reform would threaten the rice bowls not just of the teachers unions, but of schools of education as well.
"By requiring true majors . . . within just four years of course work, schools of education will go through radical downsizing as their courses get traded for those taught in other departments," Strauss said. "It is likely that enrollments will drop sharply, since students who previously were able to avoid rigorous courses by taking education school courses will no longer be able to get away with this."
Jack Kelly is national affairs writer for the Post-Gazette and The Blade of Toledo, Ohio. His e-mail address is jkelly@post-gazette.com.