The NEA Begins To Feel The Heat

Reality is beginning to set in on all parties.

The headline is: Educators Find Themselves Vilified by the States They Serve

The opening paragraphs are:

Teachers and education support professionals recently started a new semester that brought with it new students and ideas, lesson plans, schedules and all the other pieces that go into making a school year. Added to their plates, however, will be a serious and growing concern: the vilification in state after state of teachers and other school employees, as critics seek to silence their voices in the debate on how to improve America’s public schools.

Everyone it seems, whether or not they have teaching experience or an education background, knows how teachers should do their jobs, be evaluated and paid. Some proposals are based on valid research, but increasingly governors and state elected officials are pushing legislation and policies that paint teachers as obstacles that should be removed from decisions involving what goes on in the classroom.

Cast by some politicians as the enemy standing in the way of improving schools, teachers have become the target of choice. These politicians are using the current budget crises as an opportunity to turn public opinion against teachers and other school employees — all in the name of education reform.

The sense of triumph from Fall 2008 has turned into a real sense of fear, following fall 2010. The headline news was the recapture of the US House, fueled by the Tea Party. More significantly, there was a sea change in the state legislatures of the US, toward the conservative end of the Republican Party. These are the people who make the real decisions on where a state will and won't spend money, and very few of that new majority in any state will have the interests of the teachers' union held dear to heart. Many of them ran on the promise to reign the public sector unions in.

As appalled as he is about the situation in our schools, OS doesn't think that it's good to beat teachers up. It's a tough job, and those who do it well are part of the glue that holds a county or city together. However, the US as a culture has done an abysmal job of educating its young for forty years, and we are really feeling the effects of that failure. The militancy of the teachers' unions during that same period has not proven wise. The message has been perceived to be: 'Give us more, and we'll deliver more.' The taxpayer delivered massively more money, a huge bureaucracy was built, and the schools deteriorated.

Very easy to direct one's ire at a convenient target, in this case, the teachers' unions. Very easy to simply vilify, use that broad tar brush. The unions, without a doubt, are part of the problem, and their protests of innocence are aggravating. But they are only a part of the problem.

In the meantime, for those with kids in school: You likely have some good teachers in the building, spitting in the wind of a hostile culture. Offer to help, and offer words of good cheer as you can. Make as sure as you can that your family and your kids are not part of the problems they face every day.

Your state is out of money, and jobs and pensions are going to be reduced. The jobs may come back, but those pension and bennies packages won't. That's just math. Vilifying your local teacher won't solve the math problem.

As members of the union, they'll have to soon sort out what to do about a leadership that has led them over the cliff. Vitriol directed at your local teacher will only harden and strengthen the hand of the hard-core statists now at the helm.

Katherine Birbalsingh Throws Down The Gauntlet, And The Parents Rally Behind Her

It takes some chutzpah for a teacher to stand in front of the world and deliver this kind of speech. Eight minutes of inspirational truth-telling, for which her school administrators attempted to run her out of her job on a rail. They were gathering the feathers, and heating the tar to apply to her insolent uppity backside, when the parents of her students rallied 'round.

Katherine is The Left's nightmare, on both sides of the pond.

She is, well, a she. And, she's strikingly pretty to boot.

She is Oxford-educated, articulate, accomplished, experienced.

She is a person of color.

She has a sense of humor, and knows how to use it.

She abandoned the Marxism of her university days as her experience as a teacher, and her conscience, demonstrated the abject failure of ThePeopleInChargeOfSuchThings and their leftist agenda. She saw children's lives damaged by this ideology, and she decided to speak up.

Within the first thirty seconds, she gets to the point: '...the system is broken, because it keeps poor children poor'. It only gets better from there!

A big-ole heapin' helpin' of Green Shoots Award to this brave woman.

And kudos to Cranmer, for raising unshirted hell about her mistreatment.

Is This University Necessary?: Lambuth University Seeks Purchaser

Via Inside Higher Ed (a great resource, by the way, for families as they peer over the precipice toward university life for their children), news that a small Methodist university in Jackson, Tennessee is about to close its doors.

Lambuth University's president said Friday that the financially struggling private Methodist college's future will be decided next week as school officials continue to seek a buyer.

In a brief statement Friday afternoon, Lambuth President Bill Seymour said: "There's a higher risk of closure if a deal is not done by next Friday, but we are doing everything possible to get a deal in place and things will be decided next week in a (board of trustees) meeting."

Meanwhile, Jackson and community leaders said Friday they were preparing as best they could for Lambuth's future and praying the school survives.

School officials said Thursday there was no viable purchasing deal ready and that they would not be able to make payroll on time for May. Seymour said then that negotiations with potential management companies will continue and the school has until May 28 to cement a deal and submit it to the Southern Association of College and Schools, which accredits Lambuth.

Not knowing the details, OS hesitates to comment directly about it. But a few thoughts come to mind:

Some (probably many) institutions have a shelf-life, especially in the United States, where change is our only constant. As Lambuth is inspected one last time for signs of life, perhaps it's better to dispense with sentiment, and ask: Is this university necessary? Has its shelf-life expired? Is it doing anything uniquely valuable that isn't being better done by someone else in this part of the world?

Unless there is a compellingly good answer to that question, it's probably time to wind the institution down in an orderly fashion. Liquidate what will turn to cash, turn the archives over to worthy hands for safekeeping, distribute the parts of the library that can find a good home elsewhere, make sure the pensions of the oldest and most loyal employees (especially the custodial staff, groundskeepers, cooks, and the like) are safely in place, and walk away. Leave the buildings and grounds in saleable condition, and if there's any cash, use it to prevent physical deterioration.

Once everyone knows the patient indeed is dead, some clever soul or souls can look at it with fresh eyes, and think of a worthy use for it. It's happened before, and will again, if allowed to happen.

Secondly, it's a good time ask: What are the common traits of the institutions that haven't gone extinct, like Harvard, Yale, Duke, Princeton?

How did they do that? How do they re-invent themselves while remaining deeply connected with a strong tradition?

More importantly, how do we do that, here in our more humble circumstances?

Teaching Science, Scientifically

Inside Higher Ed shares a ray of hope about the education system.

A Nobel-winning physicist has been appointed to help shape the teaching of sciences in the US.

The best approach to teaching science is to understand not education, but the scientific method, according to Carl Wieman. In a speech on this idea Friday night, he began with a hypothesis: “We should approach teaching like a scientist,” he said. The outcome will rely on data, not anecdote. “Teaching can be rigorous just like doing physics research."

He contends, with some authority, that the 'lecture/notes/test' system is flawed, because students don't retain what the teachers attempt to teach. He proposes an approach that improves retention, and teaches students how to think using the scientific process.

[The] problem with the current structure of science education is that teachers try to get students to learn “key concepts” from physics. “We think that physics has a few ideas that can be widely applied,” he said. “So people test for those few ideas.” Wieman says that students really only retain about 30 percent of those key concepts, so this approach simply does not work.

This is the approach of 'teach-to-the-test' now so prevalent in schools. Principals and faculties need those good scores, which are published, on upon which reputations are based. The temptation is huge to simply program children to perform for those standardized tests.

Here's wishing him well.


We need scientists, and lay people who understand what they do and how they do it. 

Who knows, we may eventually be able to lower the temperature at local school board meetings when the teaching of sciences is discussed.

Kansas City To Shutter 28 Schools

This probably won't make it to the top of the culture's radar this week, but the Kansas City School Board voted yesterday to close twenty-eight schools.

(After all, really important news like the sentencing of rap star Lil Wayne is breaking...)

Well, anyway... 

(CNN) -- Superintendent John Covington called for the closing or consolidation of almost half of the schools in the Kansas City, Missouri, school district, and a school board voted Wednesday to approve the downsizing.

Covington said the closures were the first phase of "right-sizing" a district where enrollments have plummeted from more than 35,000 in the 1999-2000 school year to about 17,000 in 2009-10.

"Closing schools is hard, and it is tough on the community," Covington said recently in remarks posted on the superintendent's Web site.

"Closing schools and making the remaining schools much stronger academically is unquestionably the right thing to do for kids," he said. "Keeping all of the schools open with too few children in them is draining the resources we need to improve the education of all students."

[end quote]

Notice the bit highlighted in the second paragraph, especially if you don't live in the US.  This is what is happening, not just in Kansas City.  The Great Recession has been the final tipping point, the creator of the inescapable crisis, in this situation. But the deterioration has been underway for a long, long time.

Those who had the means to leave the public schools departed, to private schools and into home education, both of which have grown dramatically in the past forty years or so.  The population has aged, and there are fewer children born, especially to the educated and upwardly mobile. OS has a number of friends who are 40+ who simply never married and started families. A few were homosexual, but only a few. Most just never 'nested'. He sees well-educated, beautiful young women friends who are eminently marriageable, but struggling to locate men who are equally marriageable, stable enough to nest.

And then, there is the government, at many levels, who in the 1960's began to view the schools not as institutions of learning and conveyance of the cultural inheritance, but as laboratories for social work and utopian ideas. With that came the enormous disruption in the 1970's of the forced desegregation of each city's schools, mandated by the Federal courts, in which children from one neighborhood were placed on school buses and transported across town to other neighborhood schools, all in the name of 'fairness'. The exodus began, with entire families turning away from public schools. Their children were placed in the private schools, and their children did the same, or went further into home-schooling life. The political support for taxes to support the public schools walked out the door with them, as families also began abandoning the neighborhoods for the suburbs.

This has been a long time coming, and we are on the front end of The Great Reckoning precipitated by The Great Recession.  There is no amount of money that can be printed and borrowed to funnel to the Kansas City public school system that will fix this problem, so long as families refuse to participate. The invaluable element of trust has been eroded, and if everything goes well in KC from this day forward, that trust will be fully restored by about the year 2030.

Attempts to ban home schooling and close private schools, in order to force children into the state system would be met with violence. South Boston and Louisville were just two cities that exploded in the 1970's when families were told they would have to begin putting their children on buses in the name of 'fairness', in the middle of a grinding recession. OS was in Louisville when the riots broke out in 1974. It was seriously ugly. The protestors had CB radios (Citizen Band), and their crowds outflanked the police during protests, directed by protestors sitting on top of their pickup trucks. The police had to respond with with equipment that jammed transmission across that part of the radio spectrum. Imagine the scene now, with bluetooth phones, and literally millions more guns (and rounds of ammo) in the hands of the households.

OS does NOT NOT NOT endorse violence, but keeps plugging away every morning, hoping a few of his words stick to the cultural wall, and will help head off these sorts of tragedies. He wishes the school systems well. In the meantime, he's got to get back to work, building his business so he has money to put away for his unborn grandchildren's private or home-school education.

And, ironically, he drives to the courthouse today to pay his property taxes, which mainly go to underwrite the local school system.

The culture shapes the economy.

All birds come home to roost.

Running On Fumes And Goodwill

'Dean Dad' at Inside Higher Ed is a community college dean, happy to have found his place in the world in a role he never expected to play. He has a sense of humor and humanity, as one commenter notes.  OS enjoys his posts, because they are as likely to be about the joys of marriage and parenthood as they are about his challenges on campus, which are many.  Dean Dad doesn't whine, and he doesn't participate in that arrogant elitism that infects so many campuses.

So, his account of a recent budget meeting deserves consideration.

He concludes here:

I try to stay positive in public, since part of my job involves setting a tone, and campus morale is a real, if fuzzy, issue. So I'll use pseudonymity here to tell the truth. We simply can't keep doing what we're doing. We're running on fumes and goodwill, and you can't do that forever. The funding increases necessary just to get to 'sustainable' -- let alone 'exemplary' -- are unimaginable. Several areas of the college are still functioning only because a dwindling number of staffers are doing heroic work, and you just can't keep doing that. When heroism becomes the budgetary baseline, even getting to 'sanity' takes substantial increases. In many of the 'support' areas of the college, that's the dilemma now.

As so many, especially Mish, have noted before, the various infusions of federal cash (borrowed from the Fed or the Chinese) have only delayed the inevitable day of reckoning, and Dean Dad acknowledges that fact. The tough days yet lie ahead for his world, as the taxpayer pot has run dry. A state legislature cannot spend what does not exist, and can't print money, although California has attempted to at times.


So, in these years of running on fumes, perhaps it is time to concentrate on building good will. Last week's angry marches by undergraduates demanding non-existent money are counterproductive, because they are viewed by people with high-school or vo-tech educations paddling as hard as they can to keep their own little micro-businesses above water and their families intact, while paying taxes on everything they earn or consume. Wimmen's Studies majors smashing store windows and blocking highways don't build good will with the public. College students tutoring young kids in reading and math in every county school do.

OS is an optimist, who thinks that real solutions will be worked out by good people like Dean Dad and his team, one corner of the culture at a time. The process will be accelerated if the Federal government allows it to happen, by turning off the spigot of funny money, and by the students who see free higher education as an entitlement spending their time in the library.

Or tutoring young kids in reading and math.

Connecting The Educational Dots

Here's an interesting chart from Doug Ross.

He correlates per-capita-pupil spending by state with standardized test results.

Unsurprisingly, Washington D.C. burns through more cash per pupil than anyone, and produces miserable results.  New York and New Jersey fare pretty well. 

But, look down the list.  Several states, like Idaho, spend relatively little, and obtain impressive results.

Hmmm...