Educational Stupidity...

OK, this morning I was listening to Rush Limbaugh in a rant about education, and that being one of the topics guaranteed to make me fume, I decided to speak my piece here.

As I live in California, ranked 49th in quality of public education, I have seen much that is offensive in public education. A few of the key items include:

• a (world) geography class after completion of which my daughter was unable to identify for me the location of any European countries, nor the most general information about countries in our own hemisphere, such as capitals, major products, etc.
• the use of a "weighted GPA" such that her current real GPA, which is about 3.7, is reported as 4.0
• relentless inclusion of left-wing political content in classes, even those in which it is difficult in the extreme to imagine a justification for such messages
• the use of highly selective and out-of-context data in AP Statistics, where she ought to be learning, among other things, the ease with which such stats may be misunderstood, or worse, intentionally distorted
• a driver's education class that includes exactly zero practical instruction, the entire course being merely a presentation of written material, and tests on same
  

The nominal educational professionals persist in their claim that the core problems are too many students in the classroom, and too little money available for the schools. Yet California labors under the problem that its current fiscal embarrassment persists in part because there are so many legislated spending requirements on the books that it is impossible to cut back in any significant way to approach a balanced budget. And education accounts for a minimum of some 40%+ of the state budget. Consider:

Imagine if my kids had a constitutional right to a weekly allowance that was 5 percent of my total income every year and that they could never receive less money than the year before plus a cost-of-living increase. If I made $30,000, my kids would get a generous allowance of $25 dollars a week. However, if I made $50,000 my kids would get $45 dollars a week and if I made $100,000 my kids would get $90 a week. If I lost my $100,000 a year salary, I still must pay my kids $90 a week plus a cost-of-living increase. This is how we finance schools in California, and this is why school districts have no incentive to ever reduce spending. The Constitution guarantees that education spending will always go up by at least a small amount, even during economic downturns.
-- from reason.org

In spite of an expenditure reported by the California Board of Education as "$9,811 per pupil in 2004-05", my daughter's school routinely campaigns for donations from parents in support of all manner of things, from calculator batteries (mandatory, though my daughter has her own TI-89) and "materials fees" to monies and labor to reduce budgetary expenditures on building projects.

The analysis by Reason offers further insight:

According to the National Center for Education Statistics, instructional spending in California is only 54 percent of per-pupil spending. For example, the Los Angeles Unified School District spends only $84 per pupil on textbooks (or 90 percent of the state average) but spends $107 dollars per student on Supervisors' salaries (which is 191 percent of the state average and does not include principals or other school level administrators).
(emphasis added)

The report also asserts that "To best serve California’s students, the first and most significant problem to address is fund allocation." Makes good sense to me. The part that's hard to understand is how the media allows the perpetual rant about insufficient educational funding, when clearly, the funds are not being as well used as most parents might hope.

It's not only a matter of funding, however. In spite of disappointing, even shameful, performance, the teachers are concerned that the pressure on students for performance is excessive. They would like to gain freedom from the rather light demands of the No Child Left Behind Act, and to abandon any sort of real metric on student performance. Well of course they would! If we had no available metric, we would have no means of assessing the root cause of little Jane and Johhny's inability to read or do sums. And in the absence of any means of determining who is responsible, no teacher would be liable to be dismissed for non-performance. But in most states, it appears impossible to fire a teacher -- once tenured -- for any cause less than murder or rape of a student. And in those rare cases where termination has been possible, the time and money spent on the process have been staggering.

Friends, the lunatics are running the asylum.

Nothing less than wholesale rework of the system will offer any significant improvement. The main things I would like to see happen are these:

• disenfranchise the teachers' unions, which currently have a stranglehold on all facets of the process of education
• suspend the requirement for teacher certification, and allow for competition for teaching jobs, not only among union members, but among competent and educated adults
• require the publication on a school's web site, and by mailing once a year, a single page summary of the percentages of the budget allocated to teachers' salaries, admin salaries, textbooks, maintenance of facilities, and so on
• require each school to publish on its web site the location where the full budget for the individual school may be found

Accountability is lacking, and sorely needed.