May 10, 2010 07:16 PM UTC

Public Education Reform

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• by: Steve Harvey

Many people not in education (or the public sector) apparently have no idea the degree to which petty local politics dominate decision-making. Until that problem is addressed, making teachers more vulnerable only serves to exacerbate one problem rather than solving the other one toward which it is addressed.

I have no problem with a hypothetical public education system devoid of teacher tenure; in fact, the ideal system would not include teacher tenure. But, as I’ve always argued, the order of reforms matters. And the impetus for reform matters.

The reforms in accountability have to be from the top down rather than from the bottom up. Otherwise, you have those lower on the ladder accountable to those higher up making dysfunctional and unfair decisions due to gaps in the latter’s accountability.

Many people are under the mistaken impression that, thanks to teacher tenure, teachers have cushy jobs. Not only the personal accounts of people like me who have seen that it is otherwise, but also the raw statistics themselves, tell a completely different story: 50% of all new teachers leave the profession within their first five years.

Some people falsely assume that this is due to the inherent difficulties of working with kids day in and day out. In my experience, that’s not the case: Incoming teachers generally love working with kids. The problem is that there are too many structurally oppressive aspects to being a teacher, which, rather than being addressed by administrators, tend more often to be exacerbated by administrators.

It’s not that most principals are local tyrants: In my experience, most are wonderful people. It’s that some are local tryants, and most new teachers, during the shuffles of their first years, end up under one at some point or another. And those administrators so disposed, with too much locally unchecked authority do what psychologists have long known tends to happen when local autocrats are embued with too much locally unchecked authority: They make the lives of those under them a living hell.

Contributing to this are the problems higher up. Some superintendants are wonderful people truly committed to the students’ welfare. Some are egomaniacs committed only to their own self-glorification. The latter type, in many ways (including a penchant for cronyism), create an atmosphere conducive to belligerence and incompetence, and hostile to many of the best teachers (and principals). I don’t know how common this pattern is, but it is abundantly evidenced in Colorado’s largest school district (which isn’t DPS).

And above those superintendants are school boards, which suffer from a variety of weaknesses and self-interests that I won’t go into here.

After the children themselves, who do you think is most vulnerable to this cestpool of political and egocentric maneuvering?

There’s really only one way, ultimately, to address this set of problems, and it is the same requirement of all defects in a democratic system: We need to cultivate a more knowledgeable and involved public. The way to do that with schools and school districts is to reorganize them as coordinators of a community enterprise, with teachers not only teaching in the classroom, but guiding volunteers in tutoring and mentoring programs, and guiding parents in how to best augment and facilitate their children’s education. This is the butterfly whose wings have to flap, to create the storm of reform we are all eager to see.