All Education is Education

We live lives of noisy distraction.  Most of what we are distracted from are the truly important and eternal things.  From the Greeks (or perhaps the Hebrews) forward in history, all political movements have been movements of education.  Much of that education has occurred while the populace floated along worrying about more important things:  money, sex, vacations, etc.  Whether you are speaking of the Sophists, Roman emperor worship, the Christian medieval Europe, Marxism, or the various forms of fascism in the modern day, such as that of Hitler, or what calls itself ‘Democrats’ and ‘Republicans’ in America, education of the populace is their own hope of success. 

Those who own the classroom own the collective mind, mostly.  There are always free thinkers who are outside the parameters of the classroom, usually in trouble and off in detention, or dropping out, or some such thing while the classroom gently and inexorably rolls through the compliant minds.  This is simply because the most practical thing is the world is philosophy.  Once the mind, yea, the soul, believes something is so, then the body quite simply follows.  Or perhaps I should say the life follows the learning.

So far, so simple and obvious.  But this is just where the needle slides loudly across the vinyl.  There is no education that is not education.  And at its heart, education must include all aspects of thinking, including the singular thought most kids rarely utter but are always seeking:  what is right.  I understand how loudly the American government educative establishment states that they are value neutral, but the loudness and repetitive nature of that assertion should be all we need to become suspicious that they “protest too much.”  You can’t educate apart from moral movement of some kind.  To imply that you can is a value that you impart to the student, roughly stated as, “there are no morals other than the moral that there are no morals.”

But this is all a generalization.  Let’s get specific.  As education is about morality, it must include some measure of accountability.  What you teach my kid determines what kind of person he is becoming, so, “what are you teaching my kid” is appropriate for all parents.  But for those elected to oversee education, it is even a more serious question.  Elected school board officials should have direct access to, and a deep concern for, all that is taught in our schools.  It is their job.

Now you can read the news item that prompted this blog:  here.

Mind control is not freedom.  Keeping the lid on what is being taught makes me highly suspicious of whatever is being hidden.  How can such things be almost daily news and yet we continue to support such ideas as the government raising our children?

Real Reform

I live in North Carolina, where just last week our Gov. Pat McCrory (R) signed a budget that purports to be heavy on “educational reform.”

I have argued previously that real reform must include the finances necessary to pay for education, but that if anything, the government is spending too much money and should be lowering its taxes and giving parents their money back so they can educate their children better than the nanny State is able to do.  So when I see NC using the budget to effect educational reform, it makes some sense to me.  Here is the skinny on what is in play with these reforms (source):

• Scholarships for children from low- and middle-income families. The Opportunity Scholarship Act will give students from low- and middle-income families and foster care the opportunity to receive $4,200 scholarships to attend private schools of their choice.
• A–F school grading. A transparent school grading formula on an A–F scale based on student achievement and growth will start the 2013–2014 school year. It will also grade high schools on graduation rates and enrollment in accelerated coursework.
• Teacher contract and dismissal language. The budget replaces existing tenure rules with renewable two-year contracts. Top-performing teachers will be offered four-year contracts.
• Phase-out of certain teacher salary supplements and move toward merit-based pay. Teachers and instructional personnel will no longer be paid based on paper credentials such as master’s degrees. The state will also move toward a merit-based teacher compensation plan, which will evaluate teachers based on student performance and growth.
• Teach for America expansion. Additional funding will be given to Teach for America to expand the size and scope of the program. Total funding will be $6 million.

And generally, those seem like a good start.  But here is the problem.  All too often these kind of political moves only go half way.  Remember, each kid in NC represents about $10K in spending (this is roughly true throughout our nation), so when a little over 40% of that is given back to parents, the private option is still a major cost and the other $6K is still funding a failing system.  And when this is only for low and middle income families and foster care, it becomes a form of redistribution that is fundamentally flawed as a principle to begin with.

I always smile when reform includes “a transparent school grading formula” as if now grades will be more objective.  I won’t restart my discussion of assessment here, but it needs more than a new way to arrive at a letter grade, especially when they continue to use numbers to get there.  A real reform would to go back to the day of true letter grading and drop the silly use of numbers.  But I digress.

I am not a fan of tenure (back in the day of honest public discourse it may have made sense, but in our characterless society it is ripe with corruption).  But I am not sure of what the basis for retention or dismissal can actually be in our day of unionization and obfuscation.  I am for the longer contracts, but want clear and real reasons for hiring, retaining, and dismissing teachers – something other than the current bureaucracy that seems to be topsy-turvy with good teachers suffering and bad ones benefiting.  I have the same concerns with merit pay.  Merit pay comes from corporate sales America where you get more for turning a greater profit for the company.  If you tie school money to test scores, and then hire teachers to get high test scores, it makes testing, not teaching (and I know there need not be much correlation between those two things), the basis for school and teacher pay.

I generally applaud any act that seeks to defund failure and put money toward those things that are good.  I am just not ready to call more of the same, but paid for more carefully, a good.  Real reform would change how we teach, what we teach, how we pay for such, and how we evaluate the quality of all that.  And it would start mainly by remembering that teaching is an art, not a science.  You pay for science when it “works” and you pay for art because you need it to live well.  The two are not the same.