THINKING OUTSIDE THE BOX ABOUT PUBLIC EDUCATION

        Think New Mexico deserves qualified credit for prompting incremental improvements in the state’s K-12 public education system.  Qualified because they defer the problems and their unpleasantness but continue their growing costs.  According to its Executive Director Fred Nathan, “There’s still much more that can be done to improve our ranking for education quality.”  Regrettably, Nathan’s desire “to improve [the state’s] ranking” misdirects the focus of improvement from “education quality” to a superficial metric.

 

Actually, TNM’s goal to improve the state’s ranking—New Mexico is again last in the nation—, is easily reached.  All it takes is for the Public Education Department to fudge the figures (like teachers inflating grades), and New Mexico can rise as high in the rankings as it wants.  The national media will report the New Mexico miracle in public education.  Of course, I jest.

 

TNM’s 25^th anniversary’s annual report again addresses the tiresome issue of public education in New Mexico.  The story is the same: the problem, as TNM defines it, low rankings, is the same; the proposed solutions are the same; and the results are the same.  The Governor and Legislators prefer to address education problems by throwing money at them.  They have increased teachers’ compensation to make New Mexico competitive with other states for teachers as it tries to get a warm body into every classroom.  Yet doing so has done nothing to improve student academic performance.  They have spent many millions on early childhood education, which at best sends students to elementary schools, the teachers in which have, according to proficiency scores in reading and math, proven themselves abject failures.

 

TNM proposes smaller class sizes, which would need more teachers, staff (when New Mexico is short about 750 of each), and money; new required courses for graduation; more training for school board members; disclosure of their campaign contributions; and a teaching residency in the last year of a college of education program.  A TNM survey showed that most of the 403 registered voters, including 183 parents of previous or current students, favor these improvements.  TNM thinks that these numbers are impressive and a reliable guide to policy decisions.  Despite such support, none of TNM’s proposed improvements can improve student academic performance because none addresses the essential elements of education.

 

Take smaller classrooms.  They mean more, not necessarily better, teachers.  For a smaller classroom does not enable a bad teacher to do a better job than he or she would do in a larger classroom.  A bad teacher is a bad teacher—period.  One result of more teachers for smaller classes: a larger constituency of teachers who, through the political power of their unions, would continue to impede meaningful reforms, some requiring higher academic standards, more work to achieve them, and more selectivity.

 

New Mexico and TNM have a choice.  They can repeat the same-old, same-old; stay focused on the same-old, same-old; and keep getting less than mediocre results.  Einstein famously said, “Insanity is doing the same thing over and over again and expecting different results.”  Or they can try something different to get better results.  Of course, the problem is political.  Neither the Governor nor State Legislators have the wit to think or the will to act outside the box—which makes improvement in education nearly impossible.  And TNM, with its political spectrum of directors and donors, has to work within the confines of conventional wisdom.  So everyone should expect pious platitudes, bigger busts (e.g., early childhood education), and nothing to show for bigger bucks.

 

But if lightning were to strike, three alternatives to improving public education might lead to better student academic performance, even a higher national ranking.

 

1.    Reconstruct academic curriculums to be comprehensive, properly sequenced, and challenging.  Do not attempt to revitalize Common Core curriculums.  The curriculum requirements should be stated as knowledge and skills to be taught—teachers would first have to master them—and learned, not defined by student performances.

Note: Common Core, at least in English, is a joke.  It does not stipulate a single work of literature to be known in common by public school students.  Its guidance in grammar demonstrates the multi-dimensional mindlessness of PED experts.

2.    Require for certification that all prospective teachers or transfers from other states, demonstrate competence on independently developed and graded tests in academic areas to be taught (95% or better, with one chance every 3 years).  Certification would be open to all (e.g., military retirees) regardless of formal classes in education.

Note: With the advent of feminism, talented women previously limited to jobs as teachers, nurses, or librarians left or never took those jobs.  Those teaching today are the untalented.  Accustomed to letting “psychic benefits” supplement low pay—education on the cheap—, school boards never adjusted to these facts.

3.    Require state schools of education to prepare its enrollees to achieve competency (see above) in state-defined curriculums in those courses which they expect to teach before the schools graduate them.

Note: These schools, though funded by state funds, serve, not the state’s interests, but their own.  They focus, not on the academic preparation of their enrollees, but on trendy social issues and, of course, methods.  Greatly exaggerated is the need for courses in teaching methods, educational psychology, and educational philosophy.

 

I know that these brief statements of alternatives and the associated notes are stated broadly and require refinements.  Of course, there are exceptions to my generalities, but they prove them.  So I invite comments either by email or by website comments; my blog appears at <https://firstimpressionssecondthoughts.blogspot.com>.  Since my discussion will irritate some and perhaps prompt them to impugn me as ignorant of education or inexperienced in the classroom, I offer a brief bio of relevant background to deter them or to deflect them to something pertinent.  I have an M.Ed. (Cornell U) in secondary education (English); permanent certification in New York; a Ph.D. in English and a Distinguished Teaching Fellow Award (U of Michigan, where I designed and directed a training program for teaching fellows); 45 years intermittently teaching in public and private high schools, community colleges, and colleges and universities in nine states and D.C. in a variety of demographic environments; and 15 years county-level PTA work on merit pay, curriculum, computers, and other issues.