Our Nation's Fractured Education System
By Diego Garcia III | Editor of The Brownsville Beacon
This nation's education system is broken. You've heard that thousands of times from thousands of talking heads on television and in the print media. Schools are crumbling, extracurricular programs keep getting cut because of lack of funding, and scores and graduation rates keep getting lower and lower. All of this has caused alternative education institutions to pop up all around the country offering a different (and supposedly) better approach to teaching children.
There are several reasons why our education system is failing, but they all seem to center around one main factor — education is no longer an institution for learning and teaching — education has become a business, and a big business at that. When you speak to someone who is in a position of authority in any educational capacity, you will often times hear them say the same thing over and over again. Talk to a big boss in education and inevitably you'll hear the old adage, "It's all about the children." Unfortunately, this is no longer the case. Maybe once, at its core, education was all about children, but the simple fact is it is no longer about children. Education has evolved into a data-driven, analytic, spreadsheet-reading, report-writing, statistical monster. Heads of school districts and school boards all around the country and state go blind poring over numbers trying to put their schools and school districts at the top of lists ranking them for performance in predetermined metrics that were never looked at in the past.
This is not an editorial about any specific school district or school district administrator. I am not complaining about any one city's school district. These are things that are happening all across the country. This isn't a Brownsville problem, or a Rio Grande Valley, or even a Texas problem. This is a nationwide problem.
One of the core issues is people at the administrative level worry more about looking good than actually being good. As long as they make those numbers so their school district is at the top of the list, everything else falls by the wayside. The questions beg to be asked — who came up with these numbers? Who came up with these metrics? Who decided these were the standards by which schools should measure their success. The answer is also part of the problem. Politicians are usually the people who make these decisions. Let's forget for a minute the U.S. Secretary of Education is someone who was not educated in the public school system — let's focus on our state's head of education. Our Commissioner of Education is Mike Morath. He was appointed by Governor Greg Abbott and confirmed by the Texas Senate in 2017. From the TEA's website, "As Commissioner, he heads the Texas Education Agency, which oversees pre-kindergarten through high school education for more than five million students enrolled in both traditional and charter schools." He served on the school board in the Dallas Independent School District. He has a degree in business and according to his biography on the TEA website, he taught an advanced computer science class at Garland High School for less than a year as a permanent substitute. Herein lies the problem. People with little, to no, educational background are often times tapped to lead departments of education. School boards are filled with people who have no educational background. The educational system is being administered by those who have never set foot inside a classroom as a teacher.
Doctors are subject to medical review boards made up by other doctors and lawyers are subject to the bar that is made up by other lawyers while teachers are subject to the rules and regulations proposed and passed by politicians and people who have never been classroom teachers. I hope you are all able to see the ridiculousness and incongruity of that.
Every child goes to school. Before anybody becomes anything, they are students. I fail to see why we would allow politicians to run the profession. I fail to see why teachers aren't subject to rules and requirements implemented and passed by a board of people who actually know what it is to sit behind a desk and teach children.
It all comes back to the same issue as before. Schools are being run like businesses. Children are not some abstract line on a spreadsheet or report. They are real flesh and blood children each with their own set of issues and challenges. Each student is unique and should be treated as such. But again, we don't worry about the uniqueness. We say we do, and we talk about how each student is different and how each student learns differently, yet the metric of content mastery isn't tailored to each individual student. Each student isn't evaluated by their teachers, they are evaluated based on how good they perform on a one-size-fits-all, cookie-cutter standardized test. A test that is, in most cases, designed by a test factory that isn't even in the state the test is issued in. Here is where the business part of education rolls in. There are hundreds, and thousands, of people who make up this bureaucratic jumble of administrators who all have a strategy or a plan of action to ensure success on a state exam.
Classroom teachers only make up a fraction of the staff hired at a school district. There are administrators, specialists, facilitators, instructional leaders, more administrators, bosses, assistant bosses, and every other type of manager imaginable. They are all put in place to try and get everybody to perform well on these state exams. There are textbook companies, companies that create supplemental material, and companies that create software programs that are used to help the students pass these state exams. Teaching children content so they can become functioning members of society almost seems like an afterthought. Entire curricula are created centered around trying to pass the state exam. These companies have evolved into multi-billion dollar moneymakers.
These companies are raking in the money while public schools are losing their funding. In the State of Texas, the lion's share of school funding comes from local taxes. Some districts are wealthy because property values are through the roof, while others lack basic necessities because their property values are low. At the end of everything, it always has to do with money. The large education companies are content with making money hand over fist, draining the budget of many of these cash-poor school districts.
The solution is simple — we need a return to normalcy in our educational system. We need to scale back the multi-level system that we've allowed to exist. We need to let teachers teach and we need to let them be the judge of their students' success. We need to stop perpetuating the myth that success is inevitably linked to going to college. We need to bring back classes like civics; classes that teach people how to function properly in society. We need to bring back strong vocational/technology programs. There is absolutely nothing wrong with teaching students a marketable trade that will make them successful. We need to stop trying to get children to finish with school faster than they should. Politicians and the state education agency want middle school students to start getting credit for high school classes and they want high school students to graduate with their high school diploma and an associates degree from a local college or university. Getting early credit for classes does not serve the student. Going through grade school is critical to a child's development. Adding additional responsibilities to a child who has not fully developed is not a good idea.
Our country's public education system is like a house that has had additions built on to it. However, the homeowners did not secure the proper permits to add on to the house. Instead of doing it the right way, the homeowner just kept adding, and adding, and adding to the house. The house isn't level, the foundation is cracked, and it is beginning to fall apart. We need to strip the house down to its original form and return to a traditional, simpler way of teaching students.
Sometimes more isn't better...it's just more.
This nation's education system is broken. You've heard that thousands of times from thousands of talking heads on television and in the print media. Schools are crumbling, extracurricular programs keep getting cut because of lack of funding, and scores and graduation rates keep getting lower and lower. All of this has caused alternative education institutions to pop up all around the country offering a different (and supposedly) better approach to teaching children.
There are several reasons why our education system is failing, but they all seem to center around one main factor — education is no longer an institution for learning and teaching — education has become a business, and a big business at that. When you speak to someone who is in a position of authority in any educational capacity, you will often times hear them say the same thing over and over again. Talk to a big boss in education and inevitably you'll hear the old adage, "It's all about the children." Unfortunately, this is no longer the case. Maybe once, at its core, education was all about children, but the simple fact is it is no longer about children. Education has evolved into a data-driven, analytic, spreadsheet-reading, report-writing, statistical monster. Heads of school districts and school boards all around the country and state go blind poring over numbers trying to put their schools and school districts at the top of lists ranking them for performance in predetermined metrics that were never looked at in the past.
This is not an editorial about any specific school district or school district administrator. I am not complaining about any one city's school district. These are things that are happening all across the country. This isn't a Brownsville problem, or a Rio Grande Valley, or even a Texas problem. This is a nationwide problem.
One of the core issues is people at the administrative level worry more about looking good than actually being good. As long as they make those numbers so their school district is at the top of the list, everything else falls by the wayside. The questions beg to be asked — who came up with these numbers? Who came up with these metrics? Who decided these were the standards by which schools should measure their success. The answer is also part of the problem. Politicians are usually the people who make these decisions. Let's forget for a minute the U.S. Secretary of Education is someone who was not educated in the public school system — let's focus on our state's head of education. Our Commissioner of Education is Mike Morath. He was appointed by Governor Greg Abbott and confirmed by the Texas Senate in 2017. From the TEA's website, "As Commissioner, he heads the Texas Education Agency, which oversees pre-kindergarten through high school education for more than five million students enrolled in both traditional and charter schools." He served on the school board in the Dallas Independent School District. He has a degree in business and according to his biography on the TEA website, he taught an advanced computer science class at Garland High School for less than a year as a permanent substitute. Herein lies the problem. People with little, to no, educational background are often times tapped to lead departments of education. School boards are filled with people who have no educational background. The educational system is being administered by those who have never set foot inside a classroom as a teacher.
Doctors are subject to medical review boards made up by other doctors and lawyers are subject to the bar that is made up by other lawyers while teachers are subject to the rules and regulations proposed and passed by politicians and people who have never been classroom teachers. I hope you are all able to see the ridiculousness and incongruity of that.
Every child goes to school. Before anybody becomes anything, they are students. I fail to see why we would allow politicians to run the profession. I fail to see why teachers aren't subject to rules and requirements implemented and passed by a board of people who actually know what it is to sit behind a desk and teach children.
It all comes back to the same issue as before. Schools are being run like businesses. Children are not some abstract line on a spreadsheet or report. They are real flesh and blood children each with their own set of issues and challenges. Each student is unique and should be treated as such. But again, we don't worry about the uniqueness. We say we do, and we talk about how each student is different and how each student learns differently, yet the metric of content mastery isn't tailored to each individual student. Each student isn't evaluated by their teachers, they are evaluated based on how good they perform on a one-size-fits-all, cookie-cutter standardized test. A test that is, in most cases, designed by a test factory that isn't even in the state the test is issued in. Here is where the business part of education rolls in. There are hundreds, and thousands, of people who make up this bureaucratic jumble of administrators who all have a strategy or a plan of action to ensure success on a state exam.
Classroom teachers only make up a fraction of the staff hired at a school district. There are administrators, specialists, facilitators, instructional leaders, more administrators, bosses, assistant bosses, and every other type of manager imaginable. They are all put in place to try and get everybody to perform well on these state exams. There are textbook companies, companies that create supplemental material, and companies that create software programs that are used to help the students pass these state exams. Teaching children content so they can become functioning members of society almost seems like an afterthought. Entire curricula are created centered around trying to pass the state exam. These companies have evolved into multi-billion dollar moneymakers.
These companies are raking in the money while public schools are losing their funding. In the State of Texas, the lion's share of school funding comes from local taxes. Some districts are wealthy because property values are through the roof, while others lack basic necessities because their property values are low. At the end of everything, it always has to do with money. The large education companies are content with making money hand over fist, draining the budget of many of these cash-poor school districts.
The solution is simple — we need a return to normalcy in our educational system. We need to scale back the multi-level system that we've allowed to exist. We need to let teachers teach and we need to let them be the judge of their students' success. We need to stop perpetuating the myth that success is inevitably linked to going to college. We need to bring back classes like civics; classes that teach people how to function properly in society. We need to bring back strong vocational/technology programs. There is absolutely nothing wrong with teaching students a marketable trade that will make them successful. We need to stop trying to get children to finish with school faster than they should. Politicians and the state education agency want middle school students to start getting credit for high school classes and they want high school students to graduate with their high school diploma and an associates degree from a local college or university. Getting early credit for classes does not serve the student. Going through grade school is critical to a child's development. Adding additional responsibilities to a child who has not fully developed is not a good idea.
Our country's public education system is like a house that has had additions built on to it. However, the homeowners did not secure the proper permits to add on to the house. Instead of doing it the right way, the homeowner just kept adding, and adding, and adding to the house. The house isn't level, the foundation is cracked, and it is beginning to fall apart. We need to strip the house down to its original form and return to a traditional, simpler way of teaching students.
Sometimes more isn't better...it's just more.
What about parents who are not really involved in the education of their children? Child abuse at its core!
ReplyDeleteYou are absolutely right about that. However, that isn't something that can be controlled from the educational institution side. I do agree with you, several parents display apathy when it comes to their children, and it is a very sad thing, indeed. I find it unbelievably disheartening when there is a school event like an open house and the parents who really need to go and talk to the teachers are the ones who don't show up. There are definitely failures on both sides of the equation, but that doesn't excuse the shortcomings of the educational institutions. Maybe if the schools did better, the parents would do better. It has to start somewhere.
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