How to Destroy Public Education
In Four Easy Steps

THREE: Worship False Gods

At a conference some years ago, a superintendent of a small district in upstate New York gave a presentation which included the observation that education was the only institution that looked almost exactly the same as it had a century earlier. Hospitals, factories and offices have been radically transformed, he noted, but classrooms are still more or less the same, and the organization of the school is also little changed. He cited the example of a man born in 1900, before the Wright brothers' first flight, who retired 65 years later as a jet engine mechanic. These observations were supposed to illustrate the premise that schools weren't keeping up with the times, and weren't teaching students what they needed to know to make it in the brave new world we were then entering at the turn of the 21st century. But the argument is based on specious reasoning: a lack of organizational or physical change does not prove that schools de facto are antiquated and therefore inadequate. How exactly are we expected as a society to prepare children for occupations that don't even exist yet and that no one can anticipate, especially during a period in which technological change is much more rapid than it was 100 years ago? Most adults of my generation (those who graduated from high school in the 1960s and 1970s) could barely use a typewriter when we left school, and knew absolutely nothing about computers, but this has not prevented us from adapting en masse to the digital age and learning to use computers all day, every day, in our jobs and our private lives.

This line of reasoning demonstrates a fundamental ignorance about what schools are meant to do. Taken to its logical conclusion, this kind of thinking proves that a high school education is of no value unless it teaches practical skills that students can carry with them into a specific workplace. Apart from sending a decidedly negative message to tens of millions of young people, it is demonstrably untrue. No school at the start of the 20th century could have possibly envisioned as its mission the training of young people to work in high-tech manufacturing, but that obviously didn't stop the United States from developed the most advanced and diverse economy in the world. What the successful students in that era learned was no different from what students in effective schools learn today: not any specific set of marketable skills, but how to use their brains to solve problems. Study after study shows that every successive level of educational attainment — middle school, high school, college — is accompanied by a corresponding increase in lifetime income, regardless of a student's course of study. Anecdotes about dropouts who made it big in hedge funds or internet startups in no way negate the daily reality of the countless millions who while away their lives in tedious, unfulfilling jobs, or who are permanent wards of the state either through the welfare or criminal justice systems, because they never got out of high school.

Instead of focusing on good teaching as the fundamental and indispensable ingredient in successful schools, many so-called experts insist that the problem with schools is that they do not function like businesses, and do not organize their curricula around the needs of capitalist enterprise. This well-worn analogy does not become more apt by repetition. Schools are not businesses. They have no profit motive. They have to produce good results with whatever raw material — i.e., children — they have to work with. Schools do not generate wealth directly, though by educating all children they do, in aggregate, add to the wealth of society as a whole. No nation in history has achieved widespread prosperity until it had universal education. And no prosperous nation's educational system has ever bowed specifically to the dictates of commercial markets. The example of the jet engine mechanic demonstrates not the inadequacy of current instructional programs, but the folly of supposing that we can prepare students for an imaginary future. Furthermore, because the benefits of education do not accrue sufficiently to any one entity (as Adam Smith first argued in "The Wealth of Nations") only the government is in a position to provide it. It is not a hypothetical exercise to imagine a world without free universal public education, because the whole of mankind lived in such a world until about a century and a half ago. When there were no public schools, only the wealthy few were educated, and societies were vastly poorer on the whole than developed nations are today.

Because schools balk at being prodded into behaving as commercial entities, they are regularly accused, in stump speeches and editorial pages, of being sclerotic and unwilling to change, with teachers in particular standing in the way of reform. Teachers, like any other professionals, are indeed wary of changes that could threaten their livelihoods, but there are other very solid reasons why teachers are skeptical of education reform. It is not because they don't want their students to do better — a supposition that is absurd on its face — but more likely because they have seen wave upon wave of so-called reform roil the waters of their schools, only to be jettisoned after a few years with no discernible lasting effect. Consider just a few of the instructional movements and concepts that have overtaken the educational community in succession in recent decades: new math, whole language, phonics, ebonics, group learning, tracking, de-tracking, self-esteem, differentiated instruction, self-contained classes, mainstreaming, inclusion, school-based decision making. Each of these, and many others, has been briefly touted as the latest and greatest development in education since sliced bread — until it was replaced by the next greatest thing. Each time, the promise of fundamental change eventually gave way to just plain good teaching, which every good educator can practice and identify.

A concrete example: In New York State, the traditional high school three-year math sequence of algebra, geometry and trigonometry was replaced some years ago by two courses called Math A and Math B. These one-and-a-half year courses were agglomerations of topics from all three parts of the former sequence, plus some other topics, rearranged in a somewhat arbitrary order. After a decade or so, the state returned to the original sequence. No more plausible explanation of the return was offered than when it was changed the first time. Now, put yourself in the position of a math teacher whose career has spanned both changes, doing his best to teach the curriculum as promulgated by a distant and unresponsive state bureaucracy. What credence can this teacher be expected to give to yet another state commissioner who comes up with yet another arrangement of the sequence for no apparent reason? Is he really expected to embrace this next big thing as the be-all-and-end-all of math education? Does he deserve to be excoriated and called an obstacle to reform, a bad teacher, or a poor "team player", because he can't manage to get excited about the new plan? The average teacher, in the course of a career, will outlast the administrations of several state commissioners and local superintendents, each with his or her own ideas about the brave new world that will be ushered in, if only teachers would get on board with this or that particular program. In the end, the commissioners, superintendents and their pet projects will be long gone, and the teacher will leave his classroom much as he found it on his first day on the job.

Among the most common and ill-conceived efforts at school "reform" are attempts to turn elementary and secondary schools into a marketplace in which competition will supposedly drive down costs and improve quality. This takes two forms: charter schools and vouchers. The former are state-financed schools usually operated by private entities, some of which are not-for-profit while others are for-profit companies. They are typically exempted from some of the regulations by which public schools are bound. For all intents and purposes, these are private schools paid for with taxpayer dollars, something that at one time in this country would have been an illegal gift of public funds, but no longer. Unlike the public schools, they are not accountable directly to voters in the communities where they operate.

Vouchers consist of lump sums given to students, which they can use to pay tuition wherever they wish, though in practice it mainly enables students in public schools to attend private or parochial schools, also with taxpayer funding.

The motivation for both vouchers and charter schools is fundamentally admirable: to provide families whose local public school happens to be awful with an option to send their children somewhere better. Who could object to better opportunities for kids? But the practice, particularly the method of funding, can only lead one to conclude that this is not the sole motivation behind these reforms. In most states, both charter schools and vouchers are paid for by siphoning funds from public schools. In Indiana, for example, which has one of the more widespread voucher systems, vouchers are worth about $8,000, far too little to pay for a public school education in most districts, but sufficient for many private or parochial schools where teacher pay is notoriously low. The vast majority of students who use vouchers are reportedly from low-income families, which is a good thing. But the governor admits that vouchers will never cover more than a small number of students, which compels one to ask: what is supposed to happen to all of the other children for whom there simply aren't enough vouchers to go around? Why doesn't the state simply give every student in the state a voucher, regardless of where they attend school? Or why don't they turn every public school into a charter school, operating equally under the same lightened regulatory framework, thereby creating a thoroughly level field of competition?

The answer, of course, is that it would break the budget, and give existing public schools a chance to prove definitively that they are the equal or better of charter schools. Ironically, charter schools and vouchers are creating a system that is more, not less, elitist that the one it is supposedly attempting to replace. Charter schools and vouchers are very helpful to a relatively small number of students, but a detriment to everyone else. In New York, whose charter school funding mechanism is fairly typical, funding for each student who leaves a public school is drawn from that school and given to the charter school. This may sound logical, but consider: if the state transfers $15,000 from a local middle school so that an eighth-grade student can enroll at a charter school, the public school's expenses aren't lowered by $15,000 as a result of this one student's departure. Having one less student in social studies or French or physical education doesn't reduce the number of teachers needed to teach these classes, nor the overhead of maintaining the building, nor any of the myriad other programs that the school provides for its hundreds of other eighth graders. Only a wholesale exodus from the public schools would yield meaningful savings, and this has not happened in any of the thousands of places in the country where charter schools have been founded. It is hard for local school officials not to feel that this draining of resources is a form of punishment, deliberately aimed at weakening them in favor of charter schools.

Moreover, the philosophical rationale for charter schools is undermined by the states' failure to reduce the regulatory burden on public schools. If all of the unfunded mandates, about which local school boards perennially complain to their state representatives, are too expensive and onerous for charter schools to bear, why are they acceptable in any schools? What kind of competitive environment are we creating when the playing field has not been made level for all competitors? If a charter school can pick and choose from prospective students while public schools cannot turn anyone away; if class size guidelines in special education are waived in one school but maintained in the other; if employment, accounting, testing and reporting requirements are eased or eliminated for charter schools, but not only kept in place but made more burdensome by the year for public schools, how free is this marketplace exactly? It would seem that political leaders are more concerned with demonstrating their reformist, anti-union bona fides at charter school photo ops than with any attempt to fix the enormous problem of decaying, underperforming urban schools.

Another manifestation of this double standard concerns compensation for teachers and administrators. Politicians talk a good game when it comes to rewarding good teachers, but if they were actually successful in provoking a widespread abandonment of the public schools by parents, they would effectively lower the already inadequate compensation of most teachers substantially by promoting low-paying private and religious schools over relatively higher paying public schools. It would seem that the application of business principles applies to every aspect of schooling except compensation for educators. At the same time that New York's governor has floated the idea of capping the salaries of public school administrators, the head of the Harlem Children's Zone, for example, whose charter school has garnered a great deal of media attention despite any solid evidence of improved student performance, earns more than $400,000 per year, according to published reports. This is a higher salary than any superintendent in the state, higher even than the presidents of the state's public colleges and universities. Perhaps he deserves what he earns, but is his job really so much more difficult than that a superintendent of any large, urban K-12 school district? The main difference between the heads of charter schools and public school administrators is that the former are employed by entities that are nominally private — even though they receive funding from the state's taxpayers. Why is it normal business procedure for a chief executive to be paid anything the market will bear, and for schools to be lambasted for not being run more like businesses, but for these same market forces to be set aside altogether in the public schools — unless those forces happen to encourage students to take flight from those schools?

In an interview a few months ago, Diane Ravitch said that the proper role of the federal government is not to promote methodologies, but to level the playing field. Head Start, remedial programs, free and reduced meals and many other programs to help the disadvantaged are intended to reduce the gap between wealthy and poor schools. If these efforts have proven inadequate, this cannot possibly be the fault of local schools or their teachers. Many of the same politicians who eschew the idea of guaranteeing outcomes in economics, arguing forcefully that the government shouldn't be "choosing sides" among the competition in private industry, apply the opposite standard in education. The government, whether at the federal or state level, should allocate resources equitably to ensure equal opportunity. If charter schools or vouchers prove an effective method of improving the life prospects of poor, inner-city children, by all means let us fund them fully. However, if the real intent of "competition" is not to improve student performance across the entire system, by creating genuine and transparent choices between public and other kinds of schools, but merely to undermine the public schools and diminish the political influence of teachers and their unions, it would explain why the rest of the public school system has been largely abandoned to its own fate.