Yes, but it’s a joke, that bill. It won’t get out of committee.
http://www.npr.org/sections/ed/2017/02/09/514148945/about-that-bill-abolishing-the-department-of-education
There’s an inconsistency here. If you want to prove Massachusetts schools are better than Mississippi schools, you first have to come up with an objective way of comparing school quality. If you want to show Massachusetts teachers are on average better than Mississippi teachers, you need some common way to measure the instructional efficacy of each.
No one ever wants to hear this, but workers in nonunion professions face those same issues that could put them in jeopardy.
It is a meritocracy. We can’t all get that raise, so in that respect, you are forced to compete. No one wants a project that has no good solution, as there is no way to show success, but sometimes you have to just do it. If a new boss is hired, he can clean house and hire his own team. If something out of my control has to be conveyed to management, and I have to covey it, if there is fallout, my boss can throw me under the bus…
On the plus side, if you are not good at your job or don’t do it, I can fire you. And if you are good, I can reward you…meaning you get market pay.
Many people go unionless without incident.
The Gores, The clintons and the Obamas have never sent their kids to public schools either…
^^^ Not sure I understand the point…
@Center, actually, the Obama girls were in a public magnet school before they moved to DC, likewise Chelsea went to a public school before her dad became president.
@Postmodern ,The point is that public schools systems in urban area are by and large pretty bad and the ‘advocates’’ (a.k.a. recipients of NEA money) of public education like the Gores, Clintons and Obamas do not send their kids to those schools. The same applies to big school systems - Chicago public school administrators (around 80% go private) and Chicago public school teachers (around 40% go private). That’s the equivalent of working at a restaurant, claiming it is the best food that you could possible make, and refusing to feed it to your family.
I absolutely understand how people support public financing of education, but I can’t understand why anyone - except people who work there- would want an inferior, overpriced service like we get with sole source unionized public education. It just is not logical. Anyone who has experienced a good private system knows how superior they are to unresponsive, monolithic public systems.
Everything were were told about private education - too snooty, full of spoiled rich brats, poor socialization, full of white kids etc. etc. turned out to be completely false and union propaganda. The parents at every school our kids attended were very, very involved and nice people, there were virtually no behavior problems, there were plenty of people of color, and academic achievement was sky-high. Both teachers and administrators are very responsive because the parents pay the bills. The teachers were paid LESS than at the public schools and were much better. Teacher educational quality was much higher - many had graduate degrees from Ivy’s and public Ivy’s instead of teacher colleges at the PS and had both real world and research experience. They were there because they wanted to teach. Individual teacher contracts were renewed year by year and bad teachers were eliminated without much fanfare.
We had our kids in public schools for a few years - supposedly one of the best systems in our state - but you cannot change a system that has no interest in genuinely improving or changing. Administration was obsessed with PC problems like ‘closing the race gap’ and feel-good initiatives like promoting self-esteem, instead of focusing on excellence.
So from a user perspective people really need to wake up instead of making excuses about failing and mediocre public systems. In this entire thread I have yet to hear any alternative plan for improving educational outcomes, it just is the same old tired system that does not work, always demands more money, and delivers worse results every year.
Talk about propaganda – lots of it in the post above…
@roethlisburger - I invite you to choose any measure of school merit that you desire, in comparing Massachusetts to anywhere else. Options aside from the usual standardized tests include college admissions/attendance, student:teacher ratio, TIMSS and other international math measurements for same-grade students across states and countries (MA requested to be tested as a “country” in order to not be bogged down by the rest of the US on those scores), salaries ten years after graduation, parent subjective rankings of their local schools, quality demanded of competitor private schools to stay in business locally, or anything else you like.
That is not at all comparable to using standardized tests to compare teachers to one another in the same school. The most obvious reason for this is that in the same school, the test scores are almost always different because of aspects of student profile like Honors vs. Regular.
Furthermore, let’s take the example of a Special Education student with severe needs. Maybe this student is capable of learning about half (0.5) of what his peers do in a year. Suppose I’m a fabulous teacher for this kid, and work with him constantly and do everything right - and so he learns 0.8 of what his peers do. And now the standardized test shows that not only did he not achieve a full year’s progress, but that he lost ground relative to his classmates as well. Oh dear; it must be the bad teacher’s fault. (This is one example of “Growth vs. Proficiency” as measures that our good friend DeVos was clueless about.)
@TooOld4School - it’s great that you liked private school for your kids. I used to feel similarly. I began my career (first eight years of teaching) in private school, and my kids attended for various reasons until fairly recently. Here are some of my observations, at least as relevant as yours:
- Special Ed - private schools, if they have SpEd at all, do not do as professional a job handling it. Kids are sometimes dumped onto their home communities' services, leading to all kinds of emotional and logistical difficulties. In other cases, schools "provide" it but charge parents another arm and a leg for inferior services.
- Teacher Training - I was hired right out of grad school (Caltech, before my Ed degree at BC) by a private school. I was nowhere near the quality of, let's just say, MYSELF, by the time a public school would hire me. :) More broadly, private schools typically do not require their teachers to be certified, which means teachers do NOT have to be trained in methodology, education law, student rights, special needs issues, achievement gaps, assessments, curriculum, student development, etc. At one point, I would have said, "oh, I can read a book and go to a seminar and it's just as good." It's NOT just as good. No matter how much Calculus and Chemistry I knew, there was more to learn about teaching kids.
(As an aside, excellent suburban public schools are just as rife with Ivy degrees as excellent private schools, and mediocre schools in both categories are also comparable…it’s possible that in the poorest private religious schools, you might get highly-trained clergy whereas in the poorest urban public schools, you would not.)
I’m the first to admit that some teacher colleges have their issues, and that in the USA. lack of reasonable teacher pay leads to high-achieving students being often funneled into non-education areas. However, now I have the background and experience to tell you first-hand - there is important learning and content provided by teacher training programs.
- Responsiveness to parents - as everyone on CC knows, this is a mixed blessing. But in no way should responsiveness to parents lead to teacher firings, and public school teachers are (once tenured) protected from most of this nonsense. Also, I've been a parent in private school, and the responsiveness varies widely by the size of your wallet. "Oh, yes, well, X has been punching your son, but X's parent is on the Board."
- Diversity - maybe some private schools have diversity on par with public schools, but not in my own experience so I cannot speak to this. Certainly nationally with big numbers, this is not the case.
- Discipline - varies very widely. Again, depends on who you know in private schools much more than in public schools. But certainly I have seen much better classroom control strategy employed by public school (trained!) teachers than in private schools. Class sizes are often better in private schools, which camouflages discipline/control issues. Massachusetts is one state whose communities have prioritized keeping class sizes smaller to improve student outcomes.
- Funding issues - it's definitely true that some public schools lack money for needed supplies. But it was teaching at a private school that I was told to turn in my used-up markers before getting another one. I said, "I'm a science teacher and I need more than one color at the same time to draw a diagram," to no avail. Meanwhile, they replaced the public areas of the school with fancy stuff with regularity.
- Choice (by teachers etc. of non-local schools) - you're right - and this is why choice across communities, programs like METCO, and some locally-controlled non-profit charter schools have their place. I'm sorry, but for me, Separation of Church/State is too important to permit vouchers for religious school (which is something of a red herring because DeVos would like to jam religion e.g. school prayer down everyone's throat anyway even in public schools, if profiles of her are to be believed - I say this last part because I'm not sure she has any real thoughts or plans about actual educational policies).
- Regarding the achievement gap across race, which you put in scare quotes - this is a huge problem, and though caused by hundreds of years of oppression, is fomented all the way up to today by all kinds of racism large and small. The educational research literature shows time and again that kids experience micro-aggressions and barriers from a very early age. It's incumbent upon all good people to care about this and do what we can to fix it. I'm very lucky that my own career and to some extent, my CC pulpit ;), enable me to speak about the achievement gap and work to close it multiple times daily. But more specifically, we do summer programs, weekly tutoring, education around diversity issues, etc. in my district.
The problem is not bad schools, but semi literate, bad parents! It is an insult to all the hard working teachers in the inner city schools, who try and try, but face a roadblock with parents who do not take responsibility for their children. DC schools are the best funded schools in the nation, but have some of the worst students.
I am willing to set aside my political beliefs for the sake of our children and give the newbie a chance. Mrs. DeVos seems to actually want to take actions to benefit them and not just the unions and the school officials.
@Kajon - did you read any of the preceding twelve pages before making your non sequitur statement?
I think one of the big issues here is that for a lot of private school parents, their personal experience does not match the argument that public schools are better in any measurable sense. I think this is at least partly because public school is the default, and there is usually a reason to choose to make the sacrifice to send your kids to private school. My own kids started at the local catholic school, which was not strong at all, and then moved to a charter that was great. When that school closed its doors, we sent the kids to the local public, because we (primarily my teacher wife) did not think the education in the local catholic school was appreciably better. But then for high school we had access to two really exceptional single sex catholic schools that were far and away better that the local public alternative.
So, in my experience, in the two schools were my kids thrived the most, one charter and then their respective private high schools, the points made by @fretfulmother mother above are almost entirely reversed. In the other two schools, one public and one private, I saw some of the issues @fretfulmother raises. One of the reasons we pulled our kids from the local catholic school, for example, was because that school was largely controlled by a group of parents who got a teacher my wife really liked fired because she had pissed off the wrong people. So that type of stuff really happens. On the other hand, the teachers, and the overall educational environment, in the high schools and the charter were light years ahead of the local public system. In the system where my wife teaches, the high school is stellar, and if we lived in that district we might have made a different decision about where to send the kids for high school.
This is why I think that any real educational improvement needs to get past how schools are denominated, and focus on what makes schools of all stripes successful.
@Ohiodad51 - could your kids have gone to your wife’s school?
@fretfulmother, yeah they could have. But frankly her high school has been on an upward slope since a new administration was put in place three or four years ago. Not sure it was as good at the time our son started, although it was still a great school. Even then, there were personal reasons for choosing the private schools. My wife is a fan of single sex ed for one, my son’s school has an IB program which she really liked for another. Plus we are catholic, so the religious component played a role as well. But absent those kind of specific things, the kids probably would have been as well prepared for college at her public high school as at the schools they attended.
@fretfulmother - Regarding post #1. I am willing to take a risk on someone who is serious about taking action and not simply someone who talks the loudest talks the longest or spends too much time pointing out the flaws of others…all they every accomplish is talking loud, talking too much and leaving a negative trail. I am not ignoring factual or non factual history, but I am in favor of moving forward if there is a potential benefit to our children.
This is about our children, not about us. Are charters the way to go??? I don’t know, but what we have now is certainly not allowing for equal access to a good education and maybe it is time to make some changes.
@Kajon - let’s take this point by point:
- "I am willing to take a risk on someone who is serious about taking action" - please justify (1) the claim that DeVos has any kind of action plan, or seriousness about education, or interest in education for the broader public, before her random appointment; and (2) the implied claim that others in this discussion are not willing to ask for leaders who have new and interesting ideas; and (3) the idea that it's your risk to take as opposed to the children who are stuck in "failing" schools and whose parents by and large do not support DeVos.
- "...not simply someone who talks the loudest talks the longest or spends too much time pointing out the flaws of others" - by this do you mean our President, or someone on this thread, or me, or the previous Ed secretary, or what?
- "...all they every [sic] accomplish is talking loud...negative trail" - what are you talking about here?
- "I am not ignoring factual or non factual history" - what are you talking about here?
- "I am in favor of moving forward if there is a potential benefit to our children" - and you believe that anyone on this thread does not agree with this? Conversations are productive if we accept that everyone wants kids to succeed and we can openly exchange ideas and facts. And avoid "non factual" facts. ;)
- "...what we have now is certainly not allowing for equal access to a good education and maybe it is time to make some changes" - Agreed - and that is why we need more funding, more focus on the achievement gap, more DATA-DRIVEN initiatives, and more repetition of successful programs. We certainly do not need the profit-driven "changes" that DeVos's allies would like, much less the curricular changes her allies push for (e.g. Creationism).
Let’s suppose there is a tree with a bark fungus. You hire someone who likes to look at trees on the basis that all the actual tree-professionals are somehow corrupt and in league with other plants. Your new hire has no freaking clue what she’s doing, but has a lot of ideas about cutting down branches that her friends told her. Sure, that would be “change” - but it’s kind of important to specify that you want positive change.
Fretfulmother, what makes you think the problem lies in the schools, rather than the parents? I am so tired of teachers and schools being blamed for the failures of parents.
"Everything were were told about private education - too snooty, full of spoiled rich brats, poor socialization, full of white kids etc. etc. turned out to be completely false and union propaganda. The parents at every school our kids attended were very, very involved and nice people, there were virtually no behavior problems, there were plenty of people of color, and academic achievement was sky-high. "
The problem with this is defining a ‘private school’, there are a variety of private schools out there. There is a difference between a Catholic parochial school, a Catholic prep school, a school run by evangelical Christians,a New England prep school (andover, phillips, et al), a "Jewish Liberal " private school that my son went to in Middle School. The private school my son went in grade school had great teachers, there is a lot of truth that private school teachers often choose to teach there because they have the freedom to teach as they see fit, but there also is a lot of snobbery in private schools, specifically the prep ones. Talk to a poor kid who got a scholarship to one of these places, and they will tell you how isolated they felt, how socially and otherwise it made it awkward. My son’s grade school (which we could pay full freight for, scraping all our resources together, like 20k in 5th grade) had a lot of that, and this place was light years away from what you find at the top level prep schools in terms of family wealth, but believe me it was quite evident (most of the husbands were corporate upper level types, or doctors/lawyers, some blue collar businessmen who had made good, a lot of the wives were second marriage trophy wives), and if you didn’t drive a Mercedes (that was their equivalent of a Toyota Camry), didn’t jet off to Switzerland for a ski vacation during winter break, etc, you were made to feel it (the funny part is a lot of the wives were not to the manor born, many of them were from blue collar backgrounds originally). We went the private school route because we felt the local schools wouldn’t be good for him, I would much rather he went to a public school, but most schools, public and private, in NJ are not great with kids who are out there, they generally teach to the middle.
Likewise the quality of education varies, Catholic parochial schools give a good basic education, but they couldn’t compare to either the public or prep schools where we lived and therein lies one of the problems with vouchers. Catholic Parochial schools are the one example where vouchers may work, simply because the amount of the voucher could cover the tuition. At the higher end private schools, the prep schools, the voucher likely wouldn’t help the poor inner city kids we are talking about, the tuition is too high. In NYC the better qualithy private schools, even the cheapest of them, is over 20k a year, so a 4 or 5k voucher isn’t going to do much for them, they will be limited likely to Catholic parochial schools, and there are questions there, those schools are subsidized by the church with the tuition (4-5 k doesn’t pay anywhere near the expenses), would they be willing to take on a lot of these kids? Would they be willing to take on the issues that may come with these kids, where social ills and the like are a big problem? Will they have the special ed teachers or the ability to handle these issues? Or will they simply dump these kids if such a program exists?
And how much choice would poor inner city parents have, given the limited vouchers we are talking about, would there even be schols they could choose?
When I was in K-12 in what was then a middle income suburb, the nearby private schools were religious ones, and not known to be significantly better than the public schools in non-religion academics. Practical limitations of transportation meant that even if I had theoretical tuition-free choice among all of the nearby public and private schools, I would not have found any significantly better academically than the default public schools.