How to Destroy Public Education
In Four Easy Steps

Conclusion

When people talk about reform, what exactly do they mean? When people say, "The schools are failing?" what are they saying? Because few outside of the profession understand anything about inputs, the public debate is focused only on outcomes. Almost none of it is about the most important input — good teaching — except to excoriate teachers as a class, as though teachers were collectively responsible for all perceived shortcomings in the educational system. The debate is dominated by comparisons with schools in other countries, and dropout rates, and the low skill levels of graduates. If our educational system is worse than most other developed nations, and some not-so-developed nations, then why is China so anxious to send its students to study in the United States? You may argue that our universities are the main attraction, not our public high schools, but if you speak to the leaders of China's top secondary schools, they express envy for our teaching methods and results. Moreover, our universities are populated overwhelmingly by the products of America's public schools. There are about 15 million students enrolled in degree-granting institutions of postsecondary education (according to the National Center for Education Statistics) of whom about 700,000 are international students, or 4.5 percent. The other 95.5 percent have diplomas from plain old American high schools, which are allegedly failing.

We talk endlessly about making schools better but spend little time contemplating what it takes to make teachers better. Teachers in Finland, one of those countries to which American schools are frequently and negatively compared, are highly trained, highly paid, highly unionized and highly esteemed. Weakening unions and tenure rules may warm the hearts of some policy makers, but firing a few bad teachers will do nothing to improve the skills of the vast majority of capable teachers. If you truly believe that the entire educational system is failing, that the problems are pervasive and widespread, then you must also believe that most teachers are incompetent, otherwise the problem could not be so serious. And if you really do believe that, then it is hard to imagine how vouchers, charter schools, union-busting and the elimination of tenure will have any effect (as so far they have not). These are structural and institutional issues that have absolutely nothing to do with the practice of teaching.

We all know perfectly well that there are some outstanding teachers working in some of the most appalling inner-city conditions, teachers who are forced to work several jobs and still spend a good part of their meager salaries to provide the supplies that their beleaguered systems cannot afford. Likewise there are some useless teachers counting the days to retirement in many schools that do an excellent job overall. What we are witnessing is policy-making by anecdote. What we are not witnessing is a serious acknowledgement that a complex interplay of societal forces comes to bear on any enterprise as vast as public education, and that there are no simple answers. The mantra since No Child Left Behind, and reinforced by Race to the Top, is: testing, testing and more testing. But as we have seen time and again, increased testing has no proven correlation with improved teaching. If anything, it is an obstacle and a detriment to good teaching. Testing accomplishes only one thing: it generates statistical data by which to rate teacher performance and thereby validate pre-existing biases about schools that are presumed to be failing. As H.L. Mencken wrote, for every complex problem there's a simple solution, and it's wrong.

There's no shortage of writing about teaching itself. Ted Sizer, Jonathan Kozol and many others have written extensively about the subtleties and complexities of the learning environment, using concrete examples explicated at length. Further, there are theoreticians less well known to the general public, from Horace Mann to Lucy Calkins to Madeline Hunter, who, over the course of a century, have promulgated many ideas about the practice of teaching. To what degree these ideas have validity, or to what extent they are embraced by teachers (who tend to be skeptical of findings by those who have spent most or all of their careers in academia) is another matter. The reality is that the work of these and numerous other serious thinkers about education is largely ignored by readers and policymakers, while the latest screed by Charles Murray or Allan Bloom is championed loudly by those politicians and pundits for whom the purported failure of schools fits nicely into a favored narrative of an imagined American purity polluted in young minds through the twin evils of relativism and collectivism.

Most of the public debate revolves around symptoms, not causes. It is assumed that education is only about measurable outcomes — i.e., results — increasingly just test results. It is assumed that undermining the teachers' unions and introducing competition among schools will solve all of these ills, which reveals a great deal more about those who espouse this view than it does about education. What passes as a debate about education in the political sphere is little more than a proxy war between anti-union proponents of free markets and advocates of governmental control.

If we were to introduce competition into public education on the scale on which it has taken over the health professions, at the same time that we are imposing rigid expectations of outcomes and severe reductions in investment, we are creating a perfect storm that is all but guaranteed to make the situation even worse. We can expect results analogous to those we have already witnessed in medicine: lower student outcomes; a diminution of the talent pool as college graduates lose interest in a profession that is losing esteem in the public eye, and promises remuneration even more inadequate than before; the descent of creative teaching into a uniform mediocrity, as teachers see no reward in anything but achieving high test scores; and, quite possibly, higher long-term costs as owners and stockholders rightfully demand returns on their investments in corporate-owned schools.

If we are looking for practical solutions that would have a systemic effect, allow me to suggest two. First, indemnify schools against lawsuits. Apart from cases of physical harm being done to a child, no principal should have to spend any of his or her time either defending accusations by disgruntled parents over every imagined slight and supposedly lasting trauma to their child, or developing and implementing policies and procedures to prevent such complaints from arising in the first place. If you could spend a single day as a fly on the wall of any principal's office of any public school in America, you would find that a tiny minority of families occupies the overwhelming majority of a principal's time. It is a truism among educators: five percent of the students cause 95 percent of the problems. Let's be clear that, outside of urban schools, where the problems are real and often profound, this concern is not just, or even mainly, about disciplinary or even pedagogical issues. What we are talking about is a parent's perception that a teacher doesn't like his or her child, or that a child's self-esteem has been irreparably damaged by something someone did or said, or that a grade given by a teacher was unfair, or that a child shouldn't be in a class or on the school bus with a particular other child, and so on. (A colleague, beset by over-weaning 'helicopter' parents, was once driven to muse, "My ideal job is principal in an orphanage.")

Trivial issues and bureaucratic ephemera keep principals bogged down in their offices day after day, instead of spending most of their time in classrooms doing the most important job that they were trained and hired to do: observing and evaluating teachers so they can help them become better at their jobs. The threat of lawsuits, with the specter of hearings and depositions and masses of documentation, has generated an entire field of law whose primary object is to devise policies and plans to shield schools and school officials from legal harm. All of this time, effort and money is as wasteful and as far removed from teaching students as the batteries of tests prescribed by doctors to protect themselves from accusations of malpractice are removed from the health of patients. It is not merely a monstrous drain on the system's scarce funding, and not only makes schools unnecessarily risk-averse, but worst of all it withholds from teachers one of the most valuable resources available to them as professionals, namely, the expertise of experienced colleagues. Tort reform in schools is no less urgent a problem than it is in medicine.

One distinct advantage of the tenure system that is largely forgotten is that it frees teachers from the fear of litigation and retaliation, enabling them to experiment and innovate instead of worrying every day about how to defend themselves from unreasonable attacks. What do we imagine schools would be like if we made every teacher an independent contractor, unbound by union contracts and unprotected by tenure? Do we really think that teaching would improve under such conditions? If the state sets the bar for teacher advancement at a certain height, which, regrettably, means basically having students score at designated levels on standardized tests, then what incentive could a teacher possibly have to do anything but teach students to excel on those tests, and nothing else? The absurd over-emphasis on testing is already leading many teachers to abandon everything but the tests. If we also restrict the power of unions and, worse, unravel tenure protections, it will be the death knell for individuality and creativity in the classroom. We will be left with little more than the rote learning we deride in the schools of less enlightened societies. This may please those whose ultimate goal is to make unruly teachers toe the line, but it is not a recipe for the free thinking, inventiveness and entrepreneurship that is supposed to be indelibly woven into our national character. Students in Japan, for example, reputedly work a lot harder and know a lot more math than American students, but how many Nobel Prizes have they won? If we drain the creativity out of teaching, we will be left with a bland, one-size-fits-all system that may be good at teaching kids to add and spell, but not to think for themselves.

A teacher in an urban school interviewed on the PBS NewsHour a few months ago said that she had been observed by a supervisor only twice in five years, and only once had a discussion about what she could be doing to improve her skills. Are we going to blame this teacher alone for her students' less than adequate test scores? New York is now also going to hold principals accountable, at least in part, for their teachers' performance. It sounds like a logical step, but without relieving them of the senseless burden of most of their useless administrative chores, there is little hope that this will have any meaningful impact. Even in the best schools, teachers are usually observed by their supervisors only a handful of times each year. Friends in business often criticize the retention of "bad" teachers, but in their offices, stores or factories, managers observe the work of their employees every day. In many settings, it's obvious to everyone who is pulling his weight and who isn't. For the most part, teachers aren't seen teaching by anyone but their students, who are hardly in a position to know whether their teachers are measuring up to standards that are beyond the comprehension even of their parents. (It has been proposed to have student evaluations of teachers factor into employment decisions, an idea that is as ignorant as it is appalling.)

If we want to include students in the solution to whatever educational ills the nation is allegedly suffering, consider a second proposal: make a high school diploma a legal requirement for employment for anyone over 18 years old. Every job should require a diploma. If we really believe in minimum standards, and in financial incentives, and that every child can learn, let's put our money where our mouth is. Would we not be better off as a society if every single working person could demonstrate minimum competency in reading and math? Isn't that precisely what No Child Left Behind and Race to the Top are supposed to be about? If no one could work even for minimum wage without finishing school, would that not provide a powerful incentive to the many dropouts, who wind up as wards of the state, either as convicted criminals or welfare recipients, to remain in school? Or is our unspoken and unspeakable agenda to keep a certain proportion of our population in a permanent state of ignorance and destitution? Give every student a good reason to finish school, and then we'll see what our teachers really can do.