America’s Slo-Mo Public School Train Wreck: A Final Post

Preface

Enduring mysteries this century:  Why the American public education leviathan has acted with such comprehensive self-righteousness, with disregard of its evolving intellectual environment, and dismissal of challenge in the face of corporate reform, that its status is now threatened; as the education wars heated up primarily focused on the theme of replacing public schools with charters, why that solution prevails versus reaching across the aisle and truly reforming public schools; do the peddlers of “school choice” have such wholesale disdain for the intellect of our nation’s citizens that they believe the choice lie will fly; and how have our higher education institutions managed to rationalize tolerating deeply flawed schools of education for now decades?  What thinking, or if not attributable to thinking at all versus ideology or deeply embedded beliefs, foots the motivations for allowing present school dysfunction/underachievement to add to retarding national progress?

Because this is likely the last Edunationredux post, some liberties are being taken with its arguments; they may seem different, but they are deliberate.  The key one, both our composite public system, and its present portfolio of reformers and reforms, have standing.  There are pros and cons on both sides, the details of both frequently ignored in the strident but simplistic arguments lobbed at our public for political points.  As you navigate this post, both sides of the contest are given points when merited, critiqued when deserved.  It can be seen as ambiguity, or properly perceived as a natural effect of a national challenge that simply doesn’t have clear cut lines of resolution.

Cut to the Chase

A first alleged cut at reality, contradicting unthinking assertions by Mr. Trump, and delusional characterizations by Betsy DeVos, that our public schools are somehow a homogeneous mass of incompetent educators, freedom-deprived parents, with curricula that are irrelevant or even injurious to children’s futures, and a public sector scam. Sotto voce, you can also hear the politically inspired muttering, that public schools are installing insidious liberal philosophy in unprotected children, or are bent on conditioning their very thinking to make them Democrat votes. You have to be an oar short to really believe that version of the complex story.

The second real question is the alleged attraction of a charter, if you dismiss the total demagoguery of the “choice” pitch to citizens immune to its unreasonableness.  What, precisely, is that charter’s edge over most of our public schools?

One, presumably as a private sector aligned organization, it is more businesslike?  What that actually means, I doubt DeVos knows. Although our public systems are frequently light on competent management, it can be attributed to the organizational, managerial and economic ignorance of our schools of education rather than our schools in real communities, if they have any competent oversight.

Second, it is free to innovate?  The innovation hinges on high levels of subject matter knowledge, and the high level training that embraces disciplines supporting discovery and research skills.  There are no standards for such leadership in charters.  Any phony or con artist could wind up pushing a charter, for the overriding motivation of sucking up public tax dollars as a scam.

Third, where do its teachers come from?  What education has made them capable?  The education of teachers has been a frequent target of the reform movement, and there’s room for critique, but the broad corruption of teacher qualities offered by charters’ total lack of standards is far worse than the marginal naivety installed by inbred teacher education programs.

Fourth, where does a charter’s raison d'etre, the grist of what is to be learned, originate; it certainly doesn’t come from knowledge pros, it doesn’t come from higher education, parts are there but it doesn’t come from even higher order business thinking.  Is it supposed to come from the couple hundred of history's fictional 'bibles?'

Lastly, where does the board or topside oversight come from?  The learning implied by a valid K-12 level education universe is not something to be linked only to a ‘job,’ or be the simplistic insight that serves only short term issues, but something that prepares all facets of a student for life in a free society. Charters aren’t being held accountable.  Adam Smith’s “invisible hand” is supposed to manage that?  Missed by virtually every right wing ideologue is the reality that there is no such animal as a “free market.”  Once the concept of a market evolved from primitive trade of primitive commodities, the driving force of a market’s players has been to work overtime to avoid competition. The lamest student of economics of any complex society knows this; that our right wing hasn’t grasped that basic truth should send them back to kindergarten.

A Brutally Honest Footnote on Charters

There are a few charter chains that are managed by competent educators, efficiently using the dollars scammed from public school financing.  Applause.

The larger portion of our charters represents some degree of scam, basically economically raping the good faith school taxpayer.  We’ve all experienced scams before; what is more telling is the misrepresentation of present charters as privatization of education.  The presumption has to be that Betsy DeVos has pulled most of her understanding of economics and business theory from a comic book.

You can theorize how a K-12 school might be organized as a profit or not-for-profit business organization, vending a complex service, to a segmented marketplace.  It won’t look like a charter.  And it will require some organizational invention and creativity to ensure its product delivery and compliance with the same tests, societal and financial and legal as any other business delivering a critical service.  Because of natural barriers to entry or replication by market, it will still have monopolistic overtones, closer to our public utilities than conventional markets.

The bizarre perception of our conservative extremists appears to be, that because our system’s designation invokes the term “public,” the nation has sold out to socialism. Reality is that actually making our public schools private sector fodder would introduce avenues for practices we already condemn in most markets, especially financial markets.  

Fundamental to so structuring a school is freeing it from multiple layers of control. That function, perceived as an asset, is supposed to be controlled by some form of competitive marketplace, and the flex to manipulate internal resources and even customers to achieve profit targets.  Apparently lost on those who refuse to read history, the effects of unrestricted capitalism required our original anti-trust legislation, circa 1890.  Sadly, the origins of those abuses have not diminished, just become more complex and arch with America's 'vulture capitalism' degrading equitable society.

The analysis can go on, but the take away should be that our alleged reformers relying on privatization have not executed their homework to make their case, and appear clueless how a simplistic rendering of a school as a business would cripple educational process.  At least most of our public systems have the right educational missions in their sights, even if the skill sets to fulfill them can be spastic.

All said, is the core battle between an improbable charter takeover of our massive education system, versus initiating a wake up call for a public system with too many heads in the sand; or is it the challenge of pointedly correcting what’s needed in our public systems to not unravel part of a century of still commendable and orderly learning evolution?

The Picture is Bigger...

The challenge to the U.S. public school system (and yes Betsy, it is indeed a system) dubbed “corporate reform” has been visibly gnawing at our public schools for 34 years.  It may have festered far longer, driven by a rerouting of U.S. educational needs by public school bureaucracies to a proliferation of liberal mantras versus core learning needed to accommodate a knowledge explosion.  

But even that attribution is a shabby explanation; where in those years the causes of American educational angst metaphorically resemble the Lernean Hydra of Greek and Roman mythology — possessing many heads, and for every head chopped off the Hydra grew a couple of heads.  So 34 years later, and in spite of the Bush and Obama years of generally literate and well intentioned education mistakes, to the now total stupidity of the Trump/DeVos debacles, our public systems are continuing to glacially degrade.  That is juxtaposed against a science-driven explosion of knowledge along with a digitally driven capacity to log and manipulate that knowledge. 

In short, the talking heads gush with piecemeal claims and counterclaims about why the nation’s primary and secondary learning drags, but with little integration of explanations that might expedite solutions and better policy.  

A Reality Check

Consider:  ‘Balderdash — there’s nothing wrong with America’s public schools.’  Huh?  So millions of observers with better education credentials than these defenders are all wrong?  The leaderships of the largest and successful members of our commercial and industrial universe are simply not capable of assessing the millions of human resources they employ; their experiences of deficits of learning in those resources are just myth, a bad night from some off-color crab cocktail?  I have some dry land in south Florida for sale.

A regular defensive theme:  Our teachers are not the problem.  Oops, our teachers are ‘a’ problem, for many were created by schools of education with retro educators, lacking insights about either the state of current knowledge, or how those prospective teachers need to be educated and trained to serve. Simultaneously, there are superb, educated human resources who grace our public classrooms, some of whom have even started to grasp first vestiges of education science finally emerging from neural science in the last decades (versus the phony and superficial methods gambits created out of air and smoke by educators passed off as strategists and tacticians).

Next, no our schools' ‘management’ isn’t the issue.  Sorry Throckmorton, it is a major problem.  The vast majority of America’s schools of education can’t spell either management or organizational behavior much less offer enough insights to equip an upwardly mobile education status seeker to manage a school.  Combined with self-service and pathetic vetting by BOE, some serious fraction of our ‘superintendents’ should be booted from education, or sent back to the classroom. Simultaneously, there are ones who could qualify for CEO status in excellent private sector firms.

If not critically any of the above, what?  BOE that are ignorant of education, ignorant of their responsibilities as sworn board members, wrapped in ego and self-seeking?  Frequently the case, along with electoral processes that are a mockery of democratic process.  A century old system of choosing oversight of public systems is corrupted by the low level of intellectual achievement required to serve.   Simplistic populism has been substituted for critical thinking and rational oversight for a century, compounded by 50 states’ disparate requirements to be on a BOE, along with refusal to change them.

Things we don’t discuss:  Grade bands that go back to Andrew Carnegie, who was likely clueless what those arbitrary categorizations of learning progress would induce in future learning.  They were motivated by another extremist ideological view, that the human rabble (from his perspective) had to reflect some discipline to create enough literacy to buy products made from his steel. Nobility in action?

What’s left?  The U.S. Department of Education, once before Presidents Reagan and Bush, at least a center for research and assessment, has been gutted.  Now it has become the podium for  ideologically twisted initiatives, trying to destroy the public system, but arguably lacking rational thought why that is good for the nation.

Fill in the blanks.  Profit-seeking lacking either integrity or propriety in our testing companies, and textbook firms that have been irresponsible in creating product validity and excellence?  Or politically rotten and extremist organizations like ALEC, never subject to any public sector oversight, that are the right wing’s metaphorical assault team.  Lastly, 50 states’ education bureaucracies that reflect the myriad ideologies among our states, and diverse intellectual and values capabilities, given life and protection by our Founders’ misguided belief that 'education’ could be trusted to our states?

What is Real?

Reality is that America’s ’school system’ is far more complex than “public schools” versus "charter schools.”  It is in the mass of the numbers describing just the counts that some understanding surfaces.  But it is in the conceptual model of interconnections of infrastructure and influences that recognition of public schools’ change challenge comes home.

You can theorize up from the trenches, or you can view our systems top down. Both likely expedite understanding.  You have the U.S. Department of Education with a few mandates that can be imposed because education was left in the Constitution to our states.   States ‘control’ education but only to the extent that legislatures pass relevant statutes, including those licensing school human resources, and affect strategy by state funding.  Widely ballyhooed ‘local control’ is diffused with state law, Federal mandates, and the vagaries of local BOE ranging from potentially representative of a community, to incompetent, to corrupt.

Stack on top of the above, union influences, textbook manipulation from the private sector, and the current testing overlays; we have a multilayered and multivariate system, and operationally all of the organizational negatives of bureaucratic thinking that confront the teacher and school administrator that may have integrity.

Consider the numbers, but do so with caution.  In spite of the massiveness and universality of education in the U.S., its numbers are anything but comparable, one of the overall failings of U.S. education.  We know more about toilets by housing segments in America than the stratified structure of America’s public schools, and particularly virtually nothing about their performances by function and over time.

We spend about $626B on public systems.  There are about 13,515 school districts.  There are about 98,817 ‘schools’ versus districts, about 6,400 charters, about 33,619 private and 6,841 Catholic schools. Public school enrollment is about 50,094,000, with about 2,514,000 in charter schools, about 5,628,000 in private schools, about 2,088,000 in Catholic schools, and about 1,773,000 home schooled.  There are about 3,109,000 public school teachers, and an unknown number of superintendents because the number is hidden (but one can assume at least one for each district). Unknown, how many bodies are employed by charters, or their qualifications for being there. Last numbers put our public schools’ funding sourcing at: Federal - 12.7%; State - 43.5%; and local - 43.8%.

All of the components of our public systems are in multiple ways hooked to each other; simultaneously our Federal Census/Survey function has never been employed to account for our school systems’ infrastructures, or operations, or performances.  Maybe three-quarters of a trillion dollars are sloshing around in America’s school systems with virtually no genuine oversight of how their deployment impacts their core mission of turning out an educated citizenry. Only one direct field study of public school students was ever conducted, by educator extraordinaire, Dr. John Goodlad.  Few public school educators have ever heard of it much less read the resultant book.

Change the system, innovate, increase learning productivity, advance learning rather than sports, create contemporary school organization, install competent school management, and transition to a fully digitally driven system?

Pray, how do you do that without first understanding what a century of moving target public educational thinking, bumbled schools of education, and refusal to reform both schools’ human resource sourcing and oversight, have wrought?  

The answers are not killing the beast to get rid of the fleas and the mange; not mangling an already complex and barely understood public system by substituting “charters” with even less credence, with distorted values, and with little oversight; and not simply dismissing the legitimate scholars who did foster part of a century of normalization of public education.  

The answers are not tasking your local BOE to provide motivation and guidance and expecting results; not petitioning your state’s education bureaucracy, with typically less knowledge and objectivity than some BOE, to lead; not expecting a citizen generation equipped by a sputtering education system to create better standards of performance for their systems; not expecting not infrequently incompetent to self-serving and integrity deficient superintendents to innovate; and not by expecting a total public to suddenly become critical thinkers.

A final bit of reality, that circumscribes what can be changed in a public school system, and with what speed, is the political platform.  The vast majority of our states are currently Republican dominated courtesy of gerrymandering, along with their legislatures.  As any true change in how our schools can be operated hinges on the states being in the middle of the initiatives, finding any reforms that can reflect the views of 50 states’ education bureaucracies may be a binding constraint?  Education’s version of “the medium is the message?"

Public Education’s Black Hole

Conspicuously missing from these observations is assessment of our public schools’ financial management.  The reason, despite voluminous press reports of school financial mismanagement, is the scope of this element of school performance, and the serious absence of comparable data and studies of their assessments and audits.  The comprehensive lack of transparency of public school financial performances is in itself a condemnation of much state oversight of its schools, and has enabled cover ups of schools' misapplication of resources, and lack of proper understanding of those assets' productivity. This topic should be a prime target of public school reform.

One Concept for Innovation

The already complex combination of K-12 school markets/environments served x varied qualities of oversight x 50 states’ bureaucracies x n communities’ cultures, complicates the vision of creating acceptable homogeneous reforms across multiple school functions and goals.  Even from the spare description above it seems clear there is no single track for public education’s improvement if the notion is timely change.  It took public schools over a half century to start failing some of their missions; changing that is formidable.

Federal action can’t do the task without Constitutional amendment.  State venues short of a major conceptual model change seem mission impossible. The large quality variances of local systems at least impede some local but viral movement taking off.  Lastly, the myriad and layered controls on and dictates to local systems are an impossible barrier even to an evolutionary shift in public standards of performance for their management or academic/learning performance.

Communities themselves are also formidable barriers to productive change. In the rural site of this blog, a long history of inbred influence, bigotry against outside views, a basically marginally educated electorate, and an anti-democratic culture have corrupted and intellectually cheated its local system. But as illustrated for decades, even poorly educated communities have still regularly seen the need for the nation's “public schools” to get better even if that is just vague and intuitive, but also inevitably think their own system is just fine.  Joining hands to defend a local school  — because it’s tribal and ours — has a damning effect on improvement.

One still unimproved idea for major public system reform cuts through some serious barriers.  It is:  The national — by agreement among the states — disconnection of all public systems from the most dysfunctional and self-serving restraints on change, by essentially privatizing all public schools, but controlled by a public-private model in which the states, as their systems’ owners, sign on to a national model for learning.  The 50 states keep control of education within the Constitution, with the 50 states governing their schools operations, but also serving as part of a consortium or governing body, becoming a unified legislative oversight and joint research/policy function, replacing the Federal education function.  Perhaps closer to the Federal Reserve, with separate status from detailed control by Congress or the executive function.

The conceptual argument is that products of a century of acculturation, built by almost uncountable agreements and accommodations among higher education, vendors, unions, advocates, need to be eviscerated without killing the host.  There must be a second layer to this concept, built around local representation, but creating local oversight requiring more standards than simple electoral installation.  That might be combined with local election, if the standards for serving came closer, for example, to how local judicial leadership is provided.  In any event, that oversight by local board or ‘visitor’ participation would entail training and certification, giving local oversight both some teeth and the knowledge to go with the power.

The concept for reform execution could take advantage ideally of redirected funding by some of our education billionaires, 'with conversion,' to create 50 sets (states) of demonstration K-12 system models, seeking to create viral reform signals to a state’s local systems.  While this appears hazy, reality is that nudging our locally entrenched schools is not going to be easy or perhaps even feasible by grand design and definitive legislation.  Seeking some tighter alliance of local schools with more enlightened future higher education assets, may be a better vehicle of reform than dictation or legislation. 

By chance today’s WP “The Answer Sheet” featured the story of Bill Gates’ latest attempt to regroup and take another swing at improving our public schools.  Two of its core ideas along with his ‘conversion,’ from prior genuflection to bully reform to a more thoughtful model, fit some of the above.  Unfortunately, it also suggests that premature grandstanding with $1.7B, before genuine critical thought and strategizing are in place, throws up a caution flag for sole dependence on this latest Gates’ play? 

There clearly may be other theoretical models for reformulating the public system, but as the arguments above imply, solutions are spare, the task the equivalent of rebuilding a nation.  The latter has happened in world history, but the most prominent descriptor seems to be ‘very painful.'

                                                                 Finis

Edunationredux is being mothballed for now, perhaps in perpetuity.  All the words that can be said have pretty much been said.  Whether they have come from this blog, from the class act The Washington Post's "The Answer Sheet" and Valerie Strauss, from legitimate education gurus like Drs. Diane Ravitch and Marion Brady, or from dozens of other writings by competent educational theorists, the assessments and ideas are far superior to those emanating from our various governmental layers.  

In this last act of this blog, the most insidious and negative feature of the last seven years of posts, is that our society, and our public education bureaucracies, and our alleged educators appear to have either forgotten, or never truly understood -- or the most pejorative -- have rejected the need to read for effect, to look forward instead of via the rear view mirror, and critically to entertain any views other than their own. 

Worth reflection in a public education universe where, in spite of the need for this capacity to drive learning sought for America's primary and secondary students, its advocates and critics can only see the points of view from their reflection in a mirror.

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