Ernie the Attorney quoted Philip Greenspun in his blog today, talking about how to “fix” the educational system in America. Now, I enjoy reading Ernie’s blog, and he usually has some good insight, but how anyone could find this statement “brilliant” is beyond me. Greenspun said (of government schools):
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“Everyone who works there is either a bureaucrat or a union member. None of these people incurs any kind of pay loss or risk of firing if the kids remain totally ignorant.”
That statement is, for lack of a better word, bullshit. Pure and utter bullshit. I have no doubt that there are teachers in public schools who are coasting. Of course, that never happens in private schools, or at universities with the tenure system, does it? Oh, right, bullshit.
I went to a public school and I could count on one hand the “bureaucrats” who didn’t care if kids were “totally ignorant”. The fact is that I had many talented and dedicated teachers who worked their asses off to make sure we got the best education possible.
In the face of already unmanageable class sizes and dwindling budgets, many of these people sacrificed money from their own pockets or came up with creative ways to stretch pitiful funding even further. I suppose Greenspun thinks those people just became teachers so they could take summers off?
The problem with public education lies in not just a lack of resources, but misguided attempts to qualify education with standardized testing that causes schools to miss the forest for the trees. Teaching to tests sounds good in election sound-bites, and does painfully little to actually educate the populous. The problem is systemic, because we as a society value lower property taxes over increased funding for our schools and because our society seems to somehow equate poverty with stupidity. In fact, the stupidity really emanates from ignorant attitudes like Greenspun’s.
His rhetoric is typical elitist bullshit. Technology is hardly a panacea for a broken system with broken values, and the broken values are typified in comments like that.
Sorry you have such a strong reaction to my praise of Greenspun. I guess context always helps understand where someone is coming from. Here in New Orleans the educational system is incredibly poor and, while lack of funds is a big part of the problem, an even bigger impediment is rank politics. The State of Louisiana was ranked at the bottom of all of the nation’s schools because of about 6 or 7 schools in Orleans parish. Orleans Parish just last year hired a new Superintendent of Schools, who received high marks from the local school board about 6 months ago. But then just a week ago, when the School Board found out that the State was going to divest it of some powers (i.e. entering certain routine contracts), the Board quickly called a special meeting. Everyone knew that the reason for the meeting was so that the Board could fire the Superintendent and stem the loss of its powers. A federal court enjoined them from taking the drastic action and now the smoke has cleared and everyone knows what was going on. The Board members are scrambling to spin their actions since everyone, including the voters have figured out that they were embarking on a pure power play. In other words, the Board was more interested in preserving its power than in helping the central administrator. You can find bad examples in the private sector too, but it’s interesting that New Orleans has 5 School Board members that collectively thought that they could get away with an asinine power play. This sort of thing is what makes it hard for us to attract qualified candidates for the post of Superintendent. Anyway, it is from context such as this that I find myself in agreement with Philip Greenspun. Even elitists sometimes have altruistic views. And I can tolerate elitists a lot better than I can tolerate people who debase an educational system that they are entrusted with simply to advance their own petty political objectives.
Heh, sorry… Perhaps I overreacted a little. 🙂
It does pain me to see people as intelligent as Greenspun falling into the whole “teachers don’t care, they just want a paycheck and their union holidays” crap though, it’s an intellectual cop out. But I sympathize on the school board issue… It seems that all too frequently the post is so political that everyone loses sight of the reason for its existence. We have a big educational issue here in Illinois too, with the Governor recently moving to abolish the Board of Education in favor of making it just another department that reports directly to him. That, too, has resulted in a lot of political infighting that certainly does no service to the children who are getting short-changed out of their educations.
Teaching to tests was not part of the system until recently. The tests were insisted on by the owners of the public schools to try and fix the bad results we were getting then. Taxes were lowered in California in 1978 when the results of the educational system were already poor, and when inflation was making taxes unbearable for many property tax payers. There have been dozens of impositions upon the public education system over the last 25 years. Each of them, in its time, has been blamed by the teachers as “the problem” with schools today. Each of them, in its time, has been motivated by the state of schools before the imposition.
The system seems to work like this: We pay money, we get bad results, we can’t fire anyone importantly responsible, we decide to “reform” the people we can’t fire, and the people we can’t fire just seem to figure out how to conform to the reform without doing a better job, for example, “teach to the test.”
I don’t share your frustration, but we do share frustration.