The vast majority of children do not want to be at school. Period.
When we examine problems in our schools, we must remember not to look at the problem through our older, hopefully wiser eyes but through the eyes of a child, from their perspective. Children react to being engaged, whether it’s a mother making faces to her newborn or a toddler chasing his father around the house.
I could not even begin to list the number of teachers I had whose chief goal was clearly to hear themselves speak.
I’m quite sure that whatever they were delivering in their Ferris Bueller-esque monotone manner was highly important, but for a boy that just wanted to be running around, it may as well have been sleep medicine. I remember having to watch Carl Sagan’s "Cosmos" in class. Today, I would find it interesting to some degree, but we were in middle school. And with all due respect to Mr. Sagan, he’s doesn’t exactly come across like a Dixie Band leader. It was boring, at best, and sleep-inducing, at worst.
Recently, Bill Gates released a statement regarding a three-year study, the Measures of Effective Teaching (MET) project designed to determine how to best identify and promote great teaching. What the study found was it is possible to develop reliable measures that identify great teaching.
According to Tom Kane, Professor of Education and Economics at Harvard’s Graduate School of Education and leader of the MET project, “If we want students to learn more, teachers must become students of their own teaching. They need to see their own teaching in a new light. Public school systems across the country have been re-thinking how they describe instructional excellence and let teachers know when they’ve achieved it. This is not about accountability. It’s about providing the feedback every professional needs to strive towards excellence.”
This is vital. Great teachers are a must -- not good, but great. We have to be able to move forward with teachers that can create a positive classroom experience and move out those that can not. This leads directly to the second issue of -- how do you pay for it?
With more and more of our country’s upper middle class and above children migrating to private schools, combined with the greater influence these affluent socio-economic classes have on politics, it is not out of the question to foresee school funding become a hot topic in the very near future. Why would anyone want to pay more for something that they are not even going to use? When you throw in that many of these people will be footing the tax bill, it becomes increasingly understandable.
I can not and do not blame anyone for sending their child to a private school. If I had a child, coupled with the state of our public schools in this country, I would definitely look at this option. The problem is the more people that can and do choose this path, the more likely it will be that the gap between public schools and private schools will widen.
We can talk all day long about equality of education and so forth, but at the end of the day we will end up with a segregated school system, but by class and not ethnicity. With the vast majority of people in the country not being able to afford a private school, we must redirect our efforts in our country’s public school system.
This does not necessarily mean more money, at least in the traditional sense. The Department of Education and all of the bureaucracy that goes with it is insane. The fact that some of our “school administrators” are pulling down triple what our best teachers make in a year has to be dealt with.
We must pay our best teachers much, much more. There is no question about it. Maybe we need to look at professional sports for a payroll model. In professional sports, the talent gets paid. Oh, good coaches make some money and are in high demand, but the money is on the field. Maybe if we kept the money in the classroom, then our more highly qualified personnel would stay in the classroom.
While I am not here to argue the value of administrators, I will only say this: Teachers are the most vital part of our school systems. Think of the demand for a well-qualified, proven teacher on a free-agent-type market.
Maybe that’s what we already have in the private school world. Having been a product of a solid public system in Richmond, I believe what has separated this country throughout the last half of the last century was our free, public school system.
However, we have dropped the ball. Whether it's children who are not properly disciplined or properly prepared at home, poor teachers, poor conditions, bad administration or all of the above, I do know what I see coming out of our schools today can not be our best effort. If it is our best effort, then we are in worse shape than I ever suspected.
Hopefully, some real headway can be made in the very near future. With studies such as the MET, we have plausible evidence of what can work. Movies such as “Waiting for Superman” (sidenote: this is a fantastic look at our educational system) have put our nation’s educational issues in the spotlight and now it is our time to either fumble away our youth’s future or pick it up and do the right thing.
Richard Clark is the universal desk chief for Halifax ENC. You can reach him at 910-219-8452 or at Richard.Clark@jdnews.com. Follow him on Twitter at kpaws22.