Advancing
the Goal of Ending Education as We Know
It
What Ails Our Schools
Let's
Not Lose The Forest For The Trees
So much of education
reform efforts have focused on the details of operating
school systems that important structural issues have been
neglected. Not enough work has been done to reform the
frameworks under which K-12 education operates. Thus it is
not so much the "cogs" of school system operation that
should be in focus, but rather we should be looking at the
global environments in which they operate. In terms of the
metaphor, we should be concerned more with the
forest
than the trees. The irony is that what turns out to be
best for the forest will often also help the
trees
to thrive.
To understand the ailments of K-12 education it is useful
to review some of the problems. Some relate to what one
might call "incompetence" while others reflect various
types of corruption in the systems.
There Is Corruption And
Incompetence In Our Schools.
Few would deny
that some of the problems in K-12 education relates to
various kinds of incompetence. Teachers, school
administrators, policy makers, government officials often
err in their work as they attempt to carry out their
assigned tasks. Some incompetence is inadvertent while some
of it is the result of corruption. For our purposes, we
think the corruption and the incompetence stemming from it
are more important to understand than the inadvertent
varieties. So we want to study corruption.
Before discussing some examples of corruption within public
school systems, we should define it. We like the Encarta
Dictionary definition of it:
corruption:
dishonesty for
personal gain
Corruption Is
Tolerated Because It's The Tradition
If one looks objectively at the way our
public schools operate, one sees many "traditional"
practices. In doing so, the tradition of it often obscures
the unethical and sometimes criminal activities that go on
within these systems.
We find it convenient to consider five sub-species of
corruption:
1. Willful illegal
activities. Many state
and local education officials knowingly use inflated or
exaggerated student proficiencies to make themselves look
better than they really are. Isn't this fraud on the
parents and students and thus a crime?
2. Marginal illegal
activities wherein the
participants are ignorant of the law and/or see the
activities as the traditional practice- time honored etc.
Such educators generally do not understand the criminality
of their acts- sometimes because they see their practices
as traditional.
3. Violations of
professional ethics where there is no criminal offense. An
example of this is the typical decision of state education
officials to dumb down the curriculum students are taught.
4. Unethical laws
frequently encourage forms of
dishonesty and other abuse that are technically not
criminal. The federal legislation governing the NAEP
examinations, for example, forbid measuring and reporting
student proficiencies at the local level. This encourages
local officials to use their own metrics, which often
grossly inflate or exaggerate student accomplishments.
Asora Education's guidebook projects and other work in
estimating NAEP scale proficiencies at the local level have
been motivated, in part, to address this form of
corruption.
The coercive behavior of teachers' unions is surely
unethical and yet is allowed under labor laws and
regulations. The unions' insistence that tenure and
seniority based compensation be protected harms students by
interfering with school managers' ability to hire and
retain the best instructional staff.
5. The silence of
victims, though not a
direct cause of corruption, is often an enabling
circumstance that fosters its spread. Most parents and
stakeholders of our education system are ignorant of the
corruption. Others are suspicious and yet take no action to
investigate what problems may exist. Some do understand the
corruption and do little to address it- perhaps from a
feeling of powerlessness. Many parents want "lip service"
from the schools in the form of a child's high letter grade
without regard to the student's actual modest
accomplishments. These factors indirectly aid the
corruption within our K-12 education systems.
Examples Of Corruption
And Incompetence.
Before discussing remedies to the various dysfunctions of
K-12 education, it is useful to consider some examples. We
don't claim to have an exhaustive or comprehensive list,
but think some of the following are illustrative of the
serious problems in this industry.
High Dropout Rates and Achievement
Misrepresentations:
We can begin by looking at two problems
that beset nearly all public education systems in the
United States.
Our first area of concern is that of the
high dropout
rates.
Nationwide, within the regular public school systems (not
including charter schools), about 30% of entering 9th
graders never graduate from high school with an academic
diploma.
The second issue is one of accountability.
It is about the misrepresentation of students' achievement
in regards to state administered achievement test scores
where the public systems routinely and grossly inflate the
scores. It is also about the high percentage (over 75%) of
bogus 12th grade diplomas issued to sub-par students.
Private schools are not much better-where nationally about
55% of their diplomas are similarly unearned. This is all
done with relative impunity- despite the corruption
involved (types 1 and 2). (You can verify this by reviewing
U.S. Department of Education statistics. See, for
example, www.schooldatadirect.org
where you can compare the
performance statistics.) We are also working in this
area. For more details please consider our
Reports on Reform
section where you can
download some further information on dealing with test
score inflation.
On this latter point, it is clear that the practice of
social promotion, that is endemic in both public and
private schools, is the essential cause of the low
proficiencies. Asora's Stellar Schools are designed to
structurally prevent social promotion.
One might ask, what allows or motivates state education
officials to lie about student proficiencies? Many of them
don't see such misrepresentations as criminal (type 1
corruption) but rather are ignorant of the implied fraud or
think "everyones doing it" (type 2 corruption). The
structure of the federal legislation that established the
NAEP examinations forbid the use of them for reporting at
the local level. This, unfortunately, gives states the
option to apply different standards. (type 4 corruption).
The educators choosing the lax standards were
professionally corrupt (type 3 corruption) and the many
parents and other stakeholders who didn't complain about
the exaggerations were really the victims of them (type 5
corruption).
Aspects Of These
Problems Are Worldwide:
A recent
study from the American Institutes for Research
suggests that European and
Asian public school systems also suffer under the
"weight" of social promotion- though not quite as
severely as in the United States. When, as the study
indicates, the best public education systems in the
world have only half of their children at proficient
levels it suggests that the problems of social promotion
and their remedies should be considered on the global
stage. Asora Education, therefore, seeks foreign
collaborations in the development of its schools or ones
similar to those we espouse.
High School
Graduation Rates:
A currently
"popular" issue among educators is that of "high school
graduation rates" and how they might be increased. We think
this is a mistaken approach to measuring high school
success. Public schools systems can (and do) award diplomas
that reflect low and inconsistent standards such that
graduation rates become an almost meaningless statistic.
Better measures consider the student's actual performance
upon leaving school. They are discussed next.
Students often receive diplomas that not only reflect a
lack of NAEP proficiency, they also reflect a lack of
proficiency against the more lax state standards. This
seems to have an aspect of fraud (type1 corruption) and one
would think of some of the other types as well.
High School Failure
Rates:
By combining
the analyses of dropout rates and student proficiencies, we
have defined something we call the "high school failure
rate" (sometimes called the "real dropout rate") that reveals what
percentage of entering 9th graders fail to have 12th grade
proficient skills four years later. The national average
"high school failure rate" is about 84%. This is discussed
in quantitative terms and in more detail in our
downloadable short report: Real Public High School
Dropout Rates.
High School Success
Rates:
A related
measure is the "high school success rate," which is the
percentage of entering 9th graders who actually have 12th
grade proficient skills when they graduate from high
school. Nationally, this percentage is about 16%.
K-12 Education's
Abuse of Children:
A broader issue related to the foregoing
is about the extent to which public and private education
authorities are culpable for the demonstrable harm their
schools are doing to students and the surrounding society?
We delve into that question in another downloadable short
report: Are K-12 Schools Engaged in
Child Abuse? School Reform News also published an
essay we wrote on this subject in its April 2007 issue,
"Integrity Is Remedy for Harms Caused by Social
Promotion."
Private School
Mediocrity:
It is generally presumed that when public
schools are failing that there will be nearby private
schools where children can be sent to get a good education.
However, there are indications- at least in suburban areas-
that non-profit private schools, while almost always better
than their public school counterparts, are not all that
much better. It is generally believed that non-profit
private schools primarily compete with the public schools
and therefore they need not be markedly better to succeed-
they simply must be "enough better" to fill their seats. This tendency
towards private school mediocrity does not seem to extend
to those few private schools that are for-profit. This
latter observation has led us to explore what kind of
for-profit educational enterprises might work best to
provide children a superior K-12 education at reasonable
cost. Our best description of some of these issues is found
in one of our earliest downloadable reports and its
downloadable appendices: Profitable Education in
Stellar Schools. We also have additional background
information about public schools in our
downloadable Business
Plan.
Even in the private school environment, we think there is a
lack of professional ethics (type 3 corruption) when their
aim is to be somewhat better than the public schools as
opposed to reaching for a higher standard (say equivalent
to the NAEP).
And Who Should We
Blame?
Parents?
Typically, children spend
more time with their parents than in school and thus are in
a position to learn more at home than at school. This
suggests that parents who do not help their children learn
at home are part of the problem.
Parents are also the managers of where and how their
children learn outside of the home. Many rely on the
misleading information disseminated by the schools and the
media. This leads some parents to mistakenly believe they
are making informed choices about their children's
education.
Teachers?
Both common sense and
research studies tell us that having a good teacher is a
very important ingredient in a child's learning. Not all
teachers teach well. A significant minority of teachers are
ineffective.
Then we have the fact that a majority of teachers, in
nearly every public school system, have voted for unions
that block reforms and best educational practices. This
suggests that most, but not all, teachers bear significant
blame and responsibility for the dysfunctional public
schools attended by most American children.
School
Administrators? Those
who run the schools and school districts tend to be in the
employ of elected officials and thus do not have much
control or discretion to implement reforms. Nevertheless,
school administrators can work at the margins to push the
systems towards being more consumer friendly.
Teachers'
Unions? Teachers'
unions not only work to protect their members jobs, they
also participate politically in efforts to influence laws,
policies and personnel who manage the school systems. Thus
we find most school boards in the United States are
controlled or heavily influenced by teachers' unions. By
doing this they prevent school boards from acting in the
best interests of school children.
School Boards?
Members of school boards,
whether or not they are friends of the teachers' unions,
have an obligation to primarily operate the schools to
benefit the children attending them, while putting teacher
interests at a lower priority. Most school board members in
the United States neglect this duty.
Law Makers?
Our elected representatives
at the state level, but also at the local and federal
levels, have considerable power to change the environment
in which schools operate. They make many laws that affect
schools, school children and other players involved in K-12
education. Examples, include laws on collective bargaining,
charter schools, vouchers, assessments and curricula.
Business
Organizations? Organizations, such as the Chambers of
Commerce, often complain about the skills of high school
graduates and yet seem to do little to help schools
improve. These Chambers often have as members the very
school officials responsible for the schools' poor
performance. It seems that out of courtesy to their fellow
members, they often refrain from criticizing them.
All Of The
Above?
We believe the persistence of these kinds of incompetence
and corruption is exacerbated by the failed marketplace of
K-12 education. The next section addresses the role market
failure plays in the degradation of our K-12 schools.
Market Failure
Most
Americans regard K-12 schools as special institutions that
are not part of our competitive free market economy. For
that reason, most observers shy away from applying the
lessons of economics on this important sector of our
economy. Because of this neglect, the healthy incentives
usually associated with a free market of competing
enterprises are not present- and dysfunction has taken its
place instead.
Our approach to
improving schools is thus aimed at restructuring the local
marketplace in which schools operate, rather than in
micro-managing the instructional systems and strategies
employed in the schools. We believe the problem is
macroscopic and one in which a healthy competitive
marketplace has not developed.
Problems in this marketplace were understood by an early
giant of economics, Adam Smith, and by a recent one, the
late Milton Friedman. Consistent with their writings in
this area we see at least two dysfunctional characteristics
of the education marketplace:
1. Erroneous consumer information about student and school
performance.
2. The distorting effects of the subsidized public monopoly
in government schools.
By changing these two factors in a beneficial direction, we
believe many reforms would follow with demonstrable
benefits to the school children within the improved
systems. Transparency and choice
are the solutions we envisage
for these problems.
Reform
The Framework,
Not The Cogs
From
the standpoint of economics, providing consumers with bad
information about the products and services in a
marketplace will lead them to make poor decisions. In the
case of the education marketplace this would include the
passive acceptance of their children's enrollment in an
inferior local public school (that falsely boasts about its
excellence that is based, in part, on the school system
propaganda).
Alternatively, we think that an educational marketplace
with honest information about student proficiencies would
tend to increase the competition among schools (public and
private). That, in turn, would lead to performance
improvements that would be much less likely in the highly
propagandized environment in which we actually live.
We at Asora Education are making an attempt to replace this
pervasive propaganda with more realistic estimates of local
school proficiencies. If we can get the attention of
education consumers (parents and other stakeholders) we may
be able to harness their rage and encourage them to make
better choices for their children. Thus our guidebook
projects may help provide a cure to this disease of lying-
from so many state departments of education. Their remedy
is clear: use testing standards consistent with the
Nation's Report Card.
Thus we think that the widespread reporting of realistic
(honest) measures of student proficiency will give
education consumers a "wake up call," which might encourage
their more active participation in finding and negotiating
a better learning environment for their
children.
Transparency
Reform
As Arne
Duncan, U. S. Secretary of Education, has said and many
others have acknowledged, our school systems often
misrepresent or hide the failures of our public schools.
Additionally, private schools often withhold information
about their students’ proficiencies, making
comparisons with public schools very difficult- even for
those well-grounded in statistics.
The public systems conduct their own assessments that
generally exaggerate the numbers of children performing at
grade level. This exaggeration, on average, grossly
inflates the percentages of children deemed to be at or
above grade level as compared to the measurements reported
by the Nation's Report Card. Typically, this inflation
doubles the number of students said to be proficient. Only
Massachusetts and South Carolina (in 2009 testing) did not
markedly misrepresent student skill levels in this way.
Moreover, at the classroom level, teacher administered
assessments and grading are generally too easy. Report
cards often show skill levels significantly above actual
student proficiencies. The grade inflation in report cards
not only exaggerates against the Nation's Report Card
criteria, but they also exaggerate with respect to the
relatively lax state proficiency criteria.
Of the solutions to the two dysfunctional characteristics
cited above, the one of improving the assessment
information available to the stakeholders of K-12 education
is more easily addressed. School authorities generally have
it within their circumscribed powers the freedom to manage
how student testing is done within each course of study. We
understand that the present arrangements in which schools
administer such tests presents a conflict of interest
wherein each school reports on its own successes and
failures. To alleviate such conflicts of interest and to
establish a more objective testing process, we recommend
contracting with independent testing organizations to
measure student skills in each subject area- including all
tests used as input to students’ course grades.
Subsidy
Reform
We don't
disagree with the concept that there is a community or
public responsibility to ensure that all children have
access to a good K-12 eduction. Thus we agree that
government has a responsibility to subsidize K-12
schooling. But if subsidies are not administered in a
market friendly manner, bad things can and do happen.
Rather than subsidize only the public schools with
universal (full tuition) support to all of their students,
we think subsidies
should follow the child. By doing so, parents are empowered to
make "consumer" choices in the selection of schools. The
market distorting effect of restricting the subsidies to
just public schools goes away when parents are given the
choices to direct their children to alternative schools.
Thus we advocate for public and privately funded vouchers,
scholarships, tax credits, etc that provide the means to
empower these choices.
The marketplace for education is further improved if we can
limit the amount of government subsidy by asking parents to
use private funds to supplement the government
contribution. In fact, we think means testing is a good way
to award vouchers. We like the model used at the college
level wherein Pell Grants (tuition scholarships) are means
tested. Children of low income families would have larger
grants (or subsidies) while those of middle and high income
families would have increasingly smaller (or no) stipends
as family affluence increased.
Choice Engenders
Competition Which Fosters Successful Reforms
In any
system of schools it is difficult to foreordain what
reforms would best increase student performance. But in a
competitive environment, trial and error, together with
other experience will guide schools toward solutions that
best match local circumstances. What works best will not
always be the same in different schools and different
communities. Rather, the best practices will evolve as
local situations change. As in other industries,
competitive forces will tend to grow the more successful
enterprises while thwarting the expansion of the laggard
performers.
Return to What's New.
Return
to Home.