The effort to regulate schools ever more aggressively costs money that should be used to hire smarter teachers and provide them with greater planning time and smaller teaching loads, as is done in many other countries.
More than 25 percent of those hired into teaching each year are not fully prepared and licensed for their jobs (National Commission on Teaching and America's Future, 1996), and these underprepared teachers are assigned primarily to schools and classrooms serving the most educationally vulnerable children (Darling-Hammond, 1988; 1992; Oakes, 1990). IQ testing is off limits, but we can be assured that the lowest quartile of any college supplies the teachers, the top quartile of course going to the sciences and law.
Naturally these disabled teachers tend to be more autocratic in the ways they manage their classrooms, less skilled at managing complex forms of instruction, less capable of identifying children's learning styles and needs, (Darling-Hammond, 1992). Then, because the competence of the teaching force is so uneven, more legions of supervisors and specialists are hired to develop systems to guide and inspect the work of teachers who are not able to manage classrooms competently. And so the cycle that favors bureaucracy over teaching repeats itself.
EDUCATION
Progressive education demanded highly skilled, brilliant teachers, and it failed because such teachers could not be recruited, not without much higher pay inducements. People of that calibre will go into law or medicine or the sciences. Or take their chances in the corporate world of business and finance or the glamor professions. There wasn't one boy in any school I went to that ever wanted to be a teacher. We all wanted to be good providers, clever, successful, affluent, and live in graceful houses.
Until we can offer young people real financial success in schoolteaching, and that will never happen, the status quo will stay pretty much the same.
I hate to think I've hit on the heart of the matter and have no more to say, having written only about a fiftieth of a book, but that is that. All I need is a title, and three hundred pages of filler.
A MODEST PROPOSAL.
Schools should be able to draw young people away from the remunerative professions by offering them similar financial incentives. Simple as that solution appears, it is the solution. That's the business model. Entice a young upward mobile graduate away from the other more lucrative professions. Only one way to do that, with big money, and it has never been possible to do. Don't give teachers raises, hire teachers at very high pay. And that can't be done because it's unfair.
Most american schools are denied really gifted teachers because they don't have the funds needed to hire them away from law, medicine, business engineering and scieitific research. You get a lot of very bright women with successfull husbands in the field, and in fact, our schools arent' all that bad. I mean, what do we need schools for anyway. bright kids learn on their own. Paul Goodman mad a good case for that over half a century ago. THERE IS PLENTY TO SUPPORT AN ANTI SCHOOL DOCTRINE. SEE A BOOK, DE-SCHOOING SOCIETY. IN MY EXHAULTED OPINION, SCHOOL IS MOSTLY MAKE WORK. BEN FRANKLIN NEVER FINISHED SECOND GRADE. IT'S A RESPONSE TO OUR DECLINING NEED FOR WORKERS. AGAIN, I MIGHT SUGGEST FUCKING MYSELF IF YOU DON'T SEE3 THE VALIDITY TO THAT, EVEN IF CERTAINTY IS FAR OFF. NO, YOU GO FUCK YOURSELF. I'M MAKING A PERFECTLY REASONABLE POINT HERE. AND IF I HEAR "ANYTHING'S POSSIBLE" ONE MORE TIME I WILL BE MORE PISSED OFF THAN USUAL.
True, in Indonesia, and singapore, phillipines, beginning teachers pay is equal to beginning doctors. Do you get it? Do I have to write a whole damned book. That is the simple truth, and covers the whole big picture, and shows us how we are mired into the status quo because of tenure. Don't give teachers raises, hire brilliant new teachers at very high pay. And that won't be done because it's unfair and humiliating.
In all my years in teaching, I never heard about greater planning time or smaller teaching loads. all the leaders could talk about was longer hours.
NOTES FROM THE WILSON QUARTERLY
Bad schools are not going to sink the American economy. Despite what the headlines say, U.S. students fare well in international comparisons. It’s the schools serving the poor that demand our attention. Our best public schools are first-rate, producing more intense, involved, and creative A- plus students than our most prestigious colleges have room for. That is why less-known institutions such as Claremont McKenna, Rhodes, and Hampshire are drawing many freshmen just as smart as the ones at Princeton. The top 70 percent of U.S. public high schools are better than they have ever been, thanks to a growing movement to offer Advanced Placement and International Baccalaureate courses.
Our real problem is the bottom 30 percent of U.S. schools, those in urban and rural communities full of low- income children. We have seen enough successful schools in such areas to know that many of those children are just as capable of being great scientists, doctors, and executives as suburban children are. But most low- income schools in the United States are simply bad. Not only are we denying the children who attend them the equal education that is their right, but we are squandering almost a third of our intellectual capital. We are beating the world economically, but with one hand tied behind our back.
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