Our Rose Colored Collapsing Schools

I am writing to you from the U.S. Education apocalypse of which we are all aware. It’s actually quite warm and fuzzy here as apocalypses go and other than the ubiquitous sense of malaise, no one really seems that upset. Everyone seems to know things like…. a third of students don’t graduate high school.....teachers are coming from lower and lower tiers of graduating college students… education quality is falling behind most other developed countries. I blame statistics. Statistics have a lot to answer for, not only for my lack of love-life in College (yes honey, I love you 63% of the time)  but also because of one bizarre statistic in particular. The majority of U.S. parents give the country’s schools system a C but give their local school an A. I find this totally bizarre (a statistic from Tyack and Cuban’s “Tinkering with Utopia”) and largely ignored as a major problem in U.S. education, but I think it is one of the biggest. If you think your child is doing fine the national crisis in education becomes “Someone Else’s Problem” and not worthy of affecting your vote or your taxes. In fact, I think there are really only three problems:

(1) Parents are too happy

                If parents were truly rational and objective, then averaging up all their grades of their local schools should add up to their view of their national average. But if they think their school is and “A school” and everyone else’s is a “C school” then they are wearing rose colored glasses and can’t see straight for problems close to home. Little Johnny or Mary coming home will all A's probably rosy things up a bit. Imagine what would happen if they realized that their little Johnny or Mary was getting a “C education”, I personally think that no politician or union would stand in their way of improving the system. Parents would not tolerate the gradual deteriorating of teacher quality, the schools or state apathy. They would pay the taxes and vote to fix the problems.

(2) People around the most disadvantaged schools don’t vote

                Almost all of the “failing” schools serve disadvantaged communities. This contributes to the one third drop-out rate in U.S. schools. Although a lot of lip-service is given to this problem, there is no real political incentive to fix it. A politician’s job does not depend on it since there is no consequence to ignoring the problem. Why take resources from your voters and give it to communities that don’t vote? Your voters may even punish you for giving resources to non-voters.

(3) The U.S. is happy to have a lot more poor people than most other developed countries.

                The U.S. has a comfort level with wealth disparity which would not be acceptable in many other developed countries. If I told you that a neighborhood had professional involved parents, you would guess (correctly) that it had a good public school. If I told you a neighborhood had economically disadvantaged parents and had all the problems of intergenerational poverty (addiction, crime etc.) then you could guess (correctly) that the neighborhood school was probably not very good. So how much does the actual “school” matter. There are individual heroes and schools that try to tackle these problems but they are hard to scale. Schools like KIPP charter schools uses longer school hours and shorter summers to try to try to compensate for the disadvantaged backgrounds. However, when will it become clear to our leaders that sometimes it’s NOT THE SCHOOL. Intergenerational poverty creates communities that are not excited about education and you end up with apathetic students, apathetic parents which lead to schools destined to fail and need to lower performance standards just to keep teachers working in this difficult environment.

Having just finished a masters in education, I have to say that there is little mystery to fixing the schools problems. The truth is that the people that need to know, know. They know how to fix the problems. They know what other countries are doing better (even countries with highly unionized education). They have done the research and can list off the fixes. There is certainly a lot of will to fix the problem, with research groups, advocacy group etc, there just isn't enough will. People are just not motivated enough. The fixes are long, difficult and expensive, and this country is too happy and rose visioned to do it.