Why public education should be scrapped [View all]

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I know I'm probably going to sound like a Republican, but we as a country are wasting hundreds of billions of tax dollars trying to prop up an education system that needs to be totally rebuilt. As a retired teacher, it appears evident to me that we could get the same results in education we are getting now with a fraction of the cost.

First of all, just because the country has become part of the global economy, eliminating the middle-class labor jobs that didn't even need a high school diploma, doesn't mean that teachers can create academic professionals out of all the students. Humans aren't put together that way, and we are not magicians. Modern education purports that students can be entertained to learn anything; this works well in movies, but, in reality, a student with cognitive, family, drug, or a myriad of other problems is not going to do as well as other students when he or she is part of a regular class, whether they are entertained or not. Students need to learn how to learn and gain satisfaction from what they have learned.

The aforementioned brings up the topic of special education. Yes, if the students with problems (behavioral or cognitive) could be trained in a unique or limited curriculum in separate classes, we will be able to help more. However, I was constantly being reminded as a teacher that education has to be more like business, i.e., evaluating teacher performance, merit pay, etc.; that being the case, how do we justify spending extra billions in order to save a few students? If your answer is take the money from someplace else or raise taxes, you are a Democrat. But the fact remains that the money is not there now, and what we are trying to do is throw students of all different abilities into one classroom and tell teachers to prepare daily lesson plans for individual students and their different problems and abilities.

Administrators and legislators like to refer to teachers as professionals when teachers are expected to work hundreds of hours on their own time. But, obviously, when it comes to improving education, it is the legislators who have never even taught, administrators who didn't like teaching and/or haven't taught in a long time, or ivory-tower professionals who also don't teach in public education who are telling actual teachers how to do their jobs. Professionals police their own ranks, and, therefore, teachers are not real professionals. My own experience with principals has been with people who taught music, art, or the gifted -- all teaching situations that encounter very different situations of what core-subject-teachers put up with. No one who actually teaches thinks it's a good idea to mix students of all abilities and problems into one class. What most people forget about teaching is the fact that we also have to manage student behavior besides teaching subject matter, and non-leveled, inclusion classes make teaching a very difficult job, but it is cheaper.

So what is the public getting for its money when it comes to educated students? Let me give you some examples of where I taught. Keep in mind every school district is different, but I'm sure some of the things I experienced are showing up elsewhere, as well as things I didn't encounter or illustrate. In order to keep students moving through the system, I taught in a middle school where students had to fail 2 major subjects to fail the year, and if they went to summer school for one of them, they passed the year. This, for example, enables students to not hand in a single writing assignment in English and pass into high school. Once in high school, teachers are pressured to pass students who missed 30 or more classes during the year while failing all their tests. This pressure is especially applied to teachers with seniors since graduation rates effect the school's report card. And for the students who do fail, fear not; they can pass with a system called Credit Recovery where they can take computer lessons with tests that they keep taking until they get the right answers in the multiple-choice questions. Without exaggeration, I've seen many students getting high school diplomas who could barely read and write; this is what we get for our money.

So the system is broke beyond repair. Parents will demand that a student who had every opportunity to pass be given a passing grade that they didn't deserve, showing how the public demands high standards in education, until their child is failing -- then, it's standards be damned. Parents will blame everyone and everything for their child's failure except their child or themselves. When a school's grade is dependent on graduation rates, does that mean that more educated students are graduating? No, it only means the schools will find more ways to graduate students; and the students have learned this; as a result, curriculum is being dummied down and made ridiculous in attempts to find work that students are WILLING to do. To truly raise academic standards, schools have to be set up as semi-independent entities where the professionals will be able to do something they are proud of.