Thursday, September 23, 2004

Private School - The Choice of Public School Teachers

An interesting Washington Times article, forwarded to me by PhotoDude, analyzes the phenomenon of public school teachers sending their own kids to private schools. As a teacher, I am not at all surprised by this trend. The report states that, "Teachers, it is reasonable to assume, care about education, are reasonably expert about it and possess quite a lot of information about the schools in which they teach. We can assume that no one knows the condition and quality of public schools better than teachers who work in them every day. They know from personal experience that many of their colleagues make such a choice [for private vs. public schools], and do so for good and sufficient reasons." This is an accurate portrayal of the current perspective of many public school teachers. This goes under the heading “I work at that restaurant and, trust me, you don’t want to eat there.” But why is this the case? There are lots of reasons, but this article will be limited to one area: Stupid Decision Makers and Their Stupid Decisions.

Even though teachers are the ones in the trenches on a daily basis, their opinions about policy, management, curriculum, and school environment are never seriously asked for or listened to. Woe be unto the teacher that steps out of line with a thoughtful critique of any the aforementioned areas. The more control of public education that is usurped by federal entities, the worse the situations in public schools becomes.

See if you can follow the decision making process at the state level. First, some big time politician decides that, in order to give the impression that education is important to him, some new education policy must be created. So he gets some yahoo that hasn’t been in a classroom in 20 years to come up with some absurd plan to increase test scores in reading. He endorses the plan without worrying about whether or not it will work. By the time the plan has failed (and they always do) he will have moved on to greener pastures and the yahoo who devised the scheme will have moved on to another state to implement the plan on another unsuspecting electorate. Now, a whole new yahoo will be changing the school system to yet another new plan and the cycle continues. Meanwhile, the teachers have to implement a plan that was never seriously intended to work anyway.

The second part of the decision-making happens at the near-local level. It is basically the same as the state/national system previously described. It goes like this. A superintendent wants to get publicity so he can go get a higher paying job in another district. By the way, I am not making this stuff up. So he gets a yahoo from the central office to come up with a pinheaded plan to increase reading scores for the district. Of course the plan will not work. But here is the best part. If the school board hates the plan, they fire the super. The unemployed super gets the remainder of his contract paid and immediately gets another job. So he makes money on the failure. If the plan works, that is if he can show some obscure statistic that seems to support his claim of success, he gets hired by another larger school system and gets a pay raise. Meanwhile, the teachers have to implement a plan that was never seriously intended to work anyway.

The third part of the screwed up system is at the most local level. All of the yahoos described above were at one time the principal of a school. As a principal, they wanted to “move up” into higher administration. In order to move up you get must get noticed. And to get noticed you must create and implement interesting and enlightening plans to increase, say, reading scores. You can guess the rest. Meanwhile, the teachers have to implement another plan that was never seriously intended to work anyway.

Private schools are, for the most part, immune from the kind of politics public schools endure. Teachers, while not generally paid as well, do not have to put up with this kind of stupid decision-making process. Private school teachers have more control and input in discipline, management, policy, and environment. This means that their students will not waste time and effort trying to make someone else look good. And that is a good thing. Public school teachers know it, and that is why so many of their kids go to private school.