The Children Have to Go to School

I've been having a bit of a head-to-head with Skeptical as regards public education and the teacher's unions. I am continuing it here because the comment buttons are getting a little pokey loading up (Blogger's having code issues), and I think I want a higher word count. Morat wanted to know why conservatives abhor teacher's unions. I gave a couple of answers: a) their ever-willingness to embrace the new-and-hyphenated over the tried-and-true, b) their resistance to reforms such as school-choice, and c) they're mostly liberal and give a great deal of cash to the DNC.


He then asked me "Who would be a better choice to judge teaching methods than teachers and educators?" A reasonable question, but he also said that "Private schools have massively inflated success rates already (it's nice when you can have selective enrollment), and that tends to lead to laymen reaching stupid conclusions." This is a subject near-and-dear to my heart, both because I am a private school teacher and because I regard the Catholic schools I went to after 7th grade as having saved me from the hitherto miserable existence in the public warehouses. I was therefore overwhelmed with subjectivity, and shot back a bit snottily. I will say that anyone who thinks "selective enrollment" means we don't take in troubled kids or poor kids is very much mistaken, but I will then let it go.


My retort to Morat's question became "How about employers and the rest of society, who must deal with the end-product of education? Education serves a purpose to society at large, and that purpose is not to provide English majors with employment." Ho ho for me. Morat claimed this to be "non-responsive", and then addressed my first "conservative objection" to teacher's unions, asking "What's bad about educators pushing new methods of education?" That largely brings us up to speed.


First off, there's nothing wrong with new educational methods, in and of themselves. I am sometimes skeptical of the pace with which these methods are studied and adopted, but that is but a function of a free market in information. I also suspect an establishment of educational theorists and bureaucrats who need to justify their jobs, but I don't regard them as quite so malignant as most conservatives do, and not everything they do is re-inventing the wheel.


But a moment on my "non-responsive" response, as I think there may be something here. I think another reason conservatives mistrust the teacher's unions is because they detect more than a whiff of smug condescension in their public statements, on the order of only-we-know-what-is-good-for-the-children. The suggestion that the rest of society has valid input on how and what children should be taught is often met with disdain and mockery, or dismissed as irrelevant. As an example, we have the perennial go-round on the place of God in the classroom. In public schools, God's name is not mentioned, more out of litigation safety than hostility to Him. The idea that Christianity, being one of our central cultural monologues, should at least have mention in our schools is dismissed out of hand. That isn't their job, and they won't be burdened with it, and what kind of fanatic agenda do you have in mind? In fairness, more than a few religious fundamentalists are trying to turn the clock back to pre-Copernican days. But that's not the aim of all, and it's mere mental laziness to behave otherwise. Society deciding what it's children shall learn is not fascism, and educators are not freedom fighters. We cannot undo the past in 5th grade.


Culture wars aside, there is a deeper problem conservatives have with the teacher's unions that I did not previously mention, because it's not a problem of the teacher's unions so much as a problem with education overall, as practiced in modern America. Morat believes that standards should be set on a national level, but solutions should be left to local communities and schools. I agree with him, and so do most conservatives (inasmuch as they are willing to accede to any national role in education at all). The problem is that solutions will be national so long as funding is national (sound familiar?). Federal dollars are used as carrots and sticks to ensure acceptance of national standards. Layers upon layers of bureaucracy are required to oversee this system, and hoops upon hoops set for teachers and administrators to jump through. The process is overcomplicated, and will remain so as long as education money is funneled through Washington.


The problem isn't really private schools or public schools or charter schools or busing to schools. The problem isn't what gets taught in schools; the curriculum varies only in small ways, and generally over cosmetic issues. It's a problem of there not being enough schools, of schools designed to serve too many kids. Middle schools of 1,000 students devolve into hormonal warehouses, high schools of more than that number become gang and pregnancy farms. Children require adult supervision, and for input to be rationed out. We need to build more schools, so that every community has one.


This is going to cost a lot of money, and it isn't a silver bullet. Standards are going to have to be kept and maintained. But each community knows what its children need better than the Department of Education does. Each community should have the chance to set a school up to do that. That means each community should have the funds to do that, and that means letting them keep it.