At Almost Diamonds, a clear explication of why Bill Gates alone cannot save education:
If you want to improve education in the U.S., fund it properly. Fund the education and salaries of teachers. Fund the building and maintenance of schools. Fund supplies. Fund libraries. Fund good textbooks and other materials. Fund early education. Fund student nutrition and health. Fund community social services that keep parents rooted in one place longer.
In short, fund those things it takes to produce small classes of students undistracted by other problems, taught by experienced teachers who aren’t constantly overworked. Is it a sexy solution? Does it put somebody’s name in lights? No, but it works.
Putting your name on some education initiative somewhere is grand. Nifty, even. The problem is that it really isn’t all that innovative when it comes right down to it. There is plenty of history of experimentation in education. Much of it even produced promising results.
Then it fell by the wayside because the implementation cost money. All the promise in the world can’t produce results if no one is willing to pay the cost. No, if someone really wants to do something new and different in the field of education, they need to implement those solutions that have already been proven.
More good stuff there at Almost Diamonds, keying off an article in The Atlantic by Chrystia Freeland on the “new elite.”
Millard Fillmore's Bathtub 
Hi Nick!
No, you’re not being dickish in the least. You’re speaking the truth.
I don’t make excuses for her, except to say that she’s in her mid-80’s and constantly listens to right wing Christian radio, when she is not watching Fox News. Then, there’s what she hears from the pulpit.(And believe it or not, the church is LESS militant and fundamentalist than when I was a lad!)
But I don’t hold her quite as accountable as my siblings and their spouses, they can’t claim being addled or suffering from hardening of the arteries. They’ve been exposed to some things “facty” (as the half-term Governor of Alaska might put it) in college.
We have told Mom, and the siblings, that we’re sold on Plainfield public schools. So far, the reaction is best described as that look someone gives when it’s clear parties unknown just broke wind…a mix of pity, embarassment and just a touch of nausea.
You know that, look, Nick! That, “Oh…well…I’ll pray for you” expression? Of course, in my experience, it doesn’t actually MEAN that. I’d welcome their prayers, of course. No, what it means is, “Oh, I’m so sorry you’ve strayed from the one true path. I’ll miss you when we’re in Heaven and you’re burning in Hell.”
Of course Nick, they could be onto something. Perhaps that might explain that sulfurous odor. Hey, at least flatulence is not my issue…damnation is! ;-)
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Jim writes:
My fundamentalist family is beside itself over this. We absolutely MUST home-school or at least, find a good “Bible-believing” Christian school to send our daughter to. In my mother’s words, “If you don’t, she may end up a homosexual, a drug addict or in the occult.” (You know. The occult…like the Episcopal Church or The Disciples of Christ…oh my, Ed, but you and I are fried for sure.)
Kind of wish I could meet your mother as I somehow suspect that this public school educated person could school the children from the school she favors. Do tell your mother that I didn’t end up drug addicted or a homosexual or in some cult. Also tell her that by definition Christianity is part of the “occult.” And that I would very much appreciate it if she didn’t engage in the bearing of false witness by painting all public schools the same. Does she think God is going to reward her for her lies? Yes, I’m being a bit dickish I suppose.
As your child(children) is yours and not hers it isn’t her choice where you send them. Just like my mom would have told the local archbishop to go hang himself if he had somehow tried enforcing his declaration that all catholic children must attend catholic parochial school back during the late 70’s early 80’s.
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Ed and Nick,
You know, I am sure, that I completely agree with you both. I make the point, half-sarcastically and half as devil’s advocate. It’s been on my mind a lot lately.
As you know, I come from a family of extreme fundamentalist Christians who are only more extreme about their enthusiasm for Anarcho-Libertarianism in the guise of “Republican” politics. Yes, I even have the crazy brother in law who buys gold almost every time Glenn Beck tells him to; who watches Hal Lindsey on religious television and awaits doomsday with delight; and who has stockpiled weapons and ammunition because, as he predicted when President Obama was elected, “It won’t be long before the ‘blackies’ (his word) come looking for reparations”. Lovely, eh?
Well, we are moving. At present, we do have our daughter enrolled in a private, Christian school. This owes, not at all, to our professed Christianity and entirely to the fact that our public school district is half urban/half rural; half black/half white. And guess where nearly all the money goes? Not to the schools our daughter would attend. We’re fortunate to be able to afford something decent.
Yet we’re hardly happy with this school. There is much required Bible memorization (hardly a bad thing) about the most spurious subjects. Satan, hell, judgment, demons and damnation…LOTS of damnation. As bad, I think — maybe worse — are the blacked out portions of science and history textbooks. Did you know Indiana never had an ice age? Oh, it’s true! You see, it’s not mentioned in the Bible. Therefore…
You see what I am getting at. And candidly? These Missouri Synod Lutheran teachers are a pretty loving and caring bunch. I shudder to think of what we’d be dealing with if our little one were in some independent, fundamental, King James, soul-winning Baptist school. So…we’ll be moving this summer. To Illinois, where our taxes will be at least 15 times higher than they are here in Tea Party heaven. And we’re ecstatic about the public schools in Plainfield. They even have a “special needs PTA”! They tax heavily…and it pays. The schools are among the best in America.
My fundamentalist family is beside itself over this. We absolutely MUST home-school or at least, find a good “Bible-believing” Christian school to send our daughter to. In my mother’s words, “If you don’t, she may end up a homosexual, a drug addict or in the occult.” (You know. The occult…like the Episcopal Church or The Disciples of Christ…oh my, Ed, but you and I are fried for sure.)
So please know — I’m with you. Charter schools here in Indiana are an utter catastrophe. In fact the boosters keep talking about the success of some Charter School in D.C. One of our local educators shut them up but good when he asked, “Why don’t you brag about the success of the charters here? Oh, that’s right. Because they are all at the bottom in terms of test scores, graduation rates and other measures of success.” Heh.
I do think homeschooling is a viable choice for a few people. Not us. Homework is taxing enough with a special needs child and we’re so excited about her being in the hands of trained, experienced professionals. The one HS example I can think of involved a heavily-traveled husband, wife and lone child. Both parents had Phds. Mom, in fact, was an educator; Dad, a musician. They were superb. And quite the outlier.
In my decades working in Christian radio, I had the chance to meet and interview dozens of home-schooling families. The picture is not pretty. “I ain’t done read me a book since High School”. That’s a direct quote from one Dad. Mom said, “the only book we need to read is the Bible”, though she admitted that Dr. James Dobson had written some good ones too. (And yes, I did just throw up in my mouth a little.)
Anyway, keep fighting the good fight, you two. Our kids are worth it.
Jim
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Libertarianism is very much like communism.
It works fine on paper.
In reality its a different story.
Or to be a bit more blunt, libertarian’s are engaging in mankind’s age old quest to come up with the moral justification for the mantra “I got mine. **** you.”
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Lets not forget the financial shenanigans that charter and private schools have a tendancy to get themselves in…..
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If I end up in the same afterlife with Milton Friedman, I’m going to punch him in his nose.
In education, “the market” has only created problems and screwed things up. Private education failed to do the job in the U.S., and so locally-controlled, government education saved our bacon. Private education did better at the tertiary level, but only got really good when pushed by public universities — the Land Grant Colleges act made U.S. college education the envy of the world, and still does.
Home schooling? It failed in America in the 18th century, in the 19th century, and in the 20th century. Can it work now? How, and why? Show me the results — how many Nobel winners? How many physicians? How many presidents?
Charter schools? In Dallas, almost all of the schools at the bottom of the barrel have performed better than all but a tiny few charter schools over the last five years. Charter schools cannot survive a free market — they are all sheltered, getting their money given to them by a state government who steals it from the public school systems. Let charter schools compete straight up with public schools, public schools win almost every time. In Duncanville, Texas, charter school and home school refugees have created enormous planning problems for each of the last five years — parents pull their kids out of those experimental systems and plunk them into public schools without warning the schools in advance. They do it because the public schools, average suburban schools, do almost everything better for a good student than a charter school can.
Is there any system on Earth where home schools and charter schools outperform public schools? I know of none, and Milton Friedman couldn’t name any, either. His advocacy for “competition” was a mysterious confusion of what he saw in private business.
Fie on his untested and unworkable schemes.
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Nick, Ed…
You are both forgetting something. Free market, Libertarian fairy dust. One we completely defund “gubmint schools” and either eliminate or privatize the Department of Education, the Tea Party fairies will sprinkle their magic, “the market solves everything” potion over all our schools.
Our children will finally receive the ejumacation they deserve.
On a serious note, the mantra here in Indiana these days is that homeschooling and private charter schools are the miracle panacea we have been waiting for. I’d laugh, if it wasn’t so abjectly sad. On the positive side, I’m sure there will be lots more memorization of carefully-chosen Bible passages. I suppose *that’s* a kind of literacy…
And on it goes…
Jim
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And perhaps, Brendan, you can explain how providing less money will help these schools in Minnesota:
In Willmar, students share and check out textbooks instead of bringing them home.
In Rochester, some school areas are cleaned only once a week and some staffers bring blankets because of low thermostats.
In Two Harbors, the school week was cut to four days, staff took two-year salary freezes and leaders put off replacing buses that rack up 450,000 miles a year in the state’s most spread-out district.
In Perham, a roof leaks directly onto the school secretary’s desk.
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So, Brendan, if we cut your salary you’ll work harder and in the end have better results, right?
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Entrepreneurship and volunteerism didn’t cut it for the first 150 years of this nation — the public school system did.
There is no system, kindergarten to college graduation, that works as well as ours — but if you think you have one that does nearly as good a job more cheaply, I’d like to hear about it and see the figures.
For more than 30 years we’ve tried to “reform” education on the cheap. We need to do what Finland does, celebrate teachers, get the best and pay them accordingly. They get better success in almost all categories, but it’s not cheaper. Who is as good, and as cheap?
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This website is supposedly dedicated to smashing popular myths, and here you are basing this entire article on the assumption that education in the united states is underfunded.
If you think Education in the United States is underfunded, then education in every country is also underfunded. We spend more money per student and get less for it.
Education doesn’t need more funding, in fact I venture to say that it needs less.
“If you want to make money work, that’s a job for government” – If you want to make money fail, that’s a job for institutionalized violence [“Government”]. If you want to make money succeed, for America’s students and for everyone, you need 1) Entrepreneurship and more importantly 2) Voluntaryism
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