It’s a little ironic that, in the midst of our national immigration debate, the Wichita school district recently hired 32 Filipino teachers to fill local vacancies in math and science. School officials say they couldn’t find qualified American candidates. If so, that’s sad — and should be a wake-up call for a country struggling to maintain its leadership in engineering and technology.
A large part of the problem is failure to attract and retain teachers — as many as 50 percent of new hires in urban districts quit after the first year. That’s unacceptable, considering the training invested in them and the critical need.
The district’s use of foreign teachers, while resourceful, is at best a short-term, stopgap solution. What are local school and civic leaders doing to address this glaring problem?
It’s time to upgrade pay for math and science teachers to reflect their worth in the market, and to treat all teachers with more respect.
Posted by Randy Scholfield
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33 Comments
Randy,
You hit the nail on the head with this one. It is very important that teachers get better pay especially when they are willing to be experts in areas of math and science. Unfortunately the unions do not want to see any changes in the current way teachers are paid. If it was truly about the children then you would see them be willing to pay higher salaries for those that go the extra mile and work their tails off. But you cannot do that because the teachers union believes that everyone should be paid the same even if they are not doing a good job. We talk about moving into the 21st century but we don’t really mean it when we do not move teachers pay into the 21st century.
It will be interesting to see if the unions scream about the teachers being imported from out of the country. I am willing to bet they will not. You have to ask yourself why anyone would want to be a teacher when all they hear from school districts is that teachers are under paid, over worked, have no supplies available and most of the students are at risk or special education. Who would want to become a teacher with all the bad press? Even with all of the money they got last year they are still telling teachers that there is not enough money for supplies to be used in their classroom. Now how could that be?
It is time for us to reward the teachers that specialize and we should pay teachers a different way. It has been said that some leave because of the better pay in the private sector. The reason for that is because they are able to get raises for a good performance on the job. They do not have to wait for a union to determine if they get a pay increase. Teachers should also have support from the administration. Let’s really focus on the children.
One night I watched a movie about teaching and felt that I want to teach, the next day I went to work at my job as a custodian at the local Middle school. I told several teachers of my interest in becoming a teacher, to the person they all try to talk me out of it! Often saying if they knew then what they know now they never would have taken up teaching. The politics of it all takes over for any real desire to teach, it becomes more about the “Us against them” syndrome.
It is sad that they had to go outside of the U.S. to find teachers that were qualified to teach math and science. But this shows a greater problem in this country that these two subjects have lost there meaning to the country. True technology is being done in other countries while we set back and enjoy their work.
Ruby, what you stated regarding the union is why I ended my membership a few years back. They most certainly are not the voice for all teachers, but only some on many issues. There should be salary scale that rewards excellence in the profession that one cannot move up on without taking extra steps in continuing their education and becoming more qualified in their subject area. It will never happen though. Funny how an institution meant to help and protect all ends up helping only a handful while holding the rest back! But that is just a small issue in an ocean of many that our school system faces. We need to rethink, adapt and change on a lot of issues!
Ruby! You are going to have to get rid of the teachers unions if you want teachers with specialized training to be paid more.
I don’t know if it has anything to do with pay. I believe it is the enviroment. I know a guy that use to teach here in the Wichita Public Schools. He got out because he said he couldn’t teach.
The largest headeache he had was the parents of the children and the children themselves.
The helicopter and cuddling parents of some kids would always complain to the prinicple that he was too hard on the children, that he had too much homework, that he was wrong in the grades he gave to the kids and so on.
It got to the point that the principle told him that he had to treat the kids that had helicopter parents “special”. Meaning that he had to give them good grades regradless if they deserved it or not. Let them pass test and quizzes even if they got a bunch of their answers wrong and so on. While other kids he just applied the normal standard to.
He also said that the kids are so undisiplined, disrespectful, and disruptive that you spend most of your time babysitting than you do teaching.
I suggest that you go to any teacher in the public school system and they will give you the same story.
It is not about pay, but about the job enviroment. Most of all teachers go into teachings because they have the passion to do it, but once there, they start to understand that it isn’t teaching, but babysitting.
Why do you think our kids are so stupid. “Stupid in America”. They aren’t being taught anything.
It was like that when I was in school also. All the way up to senior in high school. So many kids made it such a terrible learning enviroment to be in.
Given the republican conservative jihad on public education, and given the supporters of the kansas board of evangelicals and their desire to fund religious education with tax dollars, and given that connie morris wanta to tell teachers what they may and may not put up in their classrooms…
why WOULD anyone want to teach in kansas?
Everyone is hitting the nails on the heads here.
Mass public education was devised not to train kids to achieve their highest potentials, but to effect a rapid transition from the age of agriculture and craftsman manufacturing to massive industrial production. In the latter, jobs were broken down into simple tasks, so that nearly any adult could be placed in some industrial job. Schools were designed to socialize children less to become “Americans” per se, than to become industrial society members, which we know because the same basic practices were implemented worldwide.
The Industrial Revolution is not humankind’s endpoint, it is only a transitional social evolutionary stage. America is at the forefront of change in ushering in a postindustrial economy. Asian nations are where we were a century ago. Industrial Age schools work well there at this time.
How do we change schools for a new epoch in human history? That’s a deep matter. We see ideas such as shrinking schools, and connecting smaller student bodies and teachers, as Wyandotte County is doing. Education leaders in Los Angeles have visited Kansas City to examine this new model. It may mark a watershed.
We see voucher and charter models. Each of these actually represents a method of localizing or “communitizing” education too. Getting parents, teachers and students to connect.
Home-schooling seems to be working. That’s the ultimate in responsible parenting!
In the conventional ed system, we can’t blame parents too much. Most of them went to public schools. Truancy laws enacted a century ago forced parents to give up their children to the state, and in the process, vital parenting skills were eroded. Moreover, too much of American society has bought into the industrial ethos of hyperconsumption, which in the face of falling real-value wages for the working class over the past 30 years, pushes mothers to work, creating vast numbers of latchkey kids. (Divorce plays a devastating role in millions of cases.)
We have the “boob tube”. Educational shows constitute a tiny minority of TV programming. Wichita could well use a half-dozen Annenburg-type channels, with various subject-concentrations on each channel, such as a math channel, an academic history channel, et al. Eugene Weber’s Western Civilization video course should be required watching for all college-bound students.
We don’t have the capability for middle and high school English teachers to assign weekly 3-5 page essays. They don’t have enough time to read them, correct them and then give individual students sit-down-and-talk guidance.
We’re not willing to invest in children. We are treating childhood and adolescent education as an “overhead” expense, rather than a strategic capital investment. This is misguided.
To treat education as a strategic capital investment would mean making massively larger investments in teacher recruitment and training. We should probably be thinking about investing $200,000 in every undergraduate education-degree student. That’s not much, really. Over the course of an average career, an elementary teacher passes knowledge on to a thousand young children’s minds, while a high school teacher passes knowledge to many thousand adolescents. But, unfortunately, we don’t think of this matter in this way, do we?
On math and science differential salaries, I don’t mean to offend anyone, but it requires a much harder effort for a potential future teacher to learn math and science than most subjects. Try reading a calculus textbook. If you aren’t good in math, it’s impossible. If you are very good in math, it takes 3 hours to get through 10 pages. MIT students only read 25 pages of math PER WEEK. (They could read more, but they have to toil over their problem sets.) Chemistry is somewhat easier: 40 pages a week. In humanities and social science texts, 25 pages can be reasonably well absorbed in an hour or two by subject-interested students.
I home-schooled two students who each read more than 10,000 pages in American history in a year’s time. They got through 600 pages of calculus in a year’s time.
Math and the physical sciences are fundamentally DIFFERENT FROM the humanities and social studies. For example they use unique symbol-based languages. Furthermore, they are best taught using physical objects and materials, as well as reading materials. The former incur expenses, sometimes small, sometimes large. Achieving proficiency in them requires much more effort and time. Schools don’t even credit the difference when hiring new teachers. This represents either ignorance or subconscious antipathy to math and science.
In KC, students now take longer-and-fewer classes each day. This is the correct way to teach. Kids don’t have 45-minute attention spans. They have whatever spans you can figure out what it takes to engage their minds, and work with them to cultivate mental stamina.
Finally, on grade inflation, there are many reasons for it. But it’s wrong. According to ACT.org the average 22-scoring student on the ACT-Math exam has taken Algebra I, Algebra II, geometry and another math course, with a B grade average in math. What does a 22 mean for college placement? The student needs to take remedial algebra, i.e. a fast-paced version of high school algebra. Don’t believe me, look at the ACT.org annual score reports, and math-placement formulae shown on KU and KSU’s websites.
One more thing: Did you know that in the Antebellum South, laws were passed to criminalize the teaching of reading and writing to blacks? The problem slaveholders encountered was that TOO MANY of them were LEARNING TO READ AND WRITE, and EXPRESS THEMSELVES AS LEARNED HUMAN BEINGS. Which made them less tractable.
Heartlander,
Homeschooling should be outlawed as too many parents are racist, anti-government types. The homeschooling movement is rife with racist, anti-Semitic scum like ian santiago. You seem trustworthy, Heartlander, but most homeschoolers are not!
Government schools are needed to teach children tolerance for different races and alternative lifestyles. Racism, xenophobia, homophobia, anti-Semitism and the like are still prominent in America and government schools are necessary to help combat that.
Shalom.
Marvin,
I am so glad to see that you are on board with using the government to force children into your particular set of beliefs.
I just wanted to congratulate you on being a bigot of a different color.
So where are we heading? If this country is going through a transition from industrial to ? I heard it said that Wal.mart is the employer of the future. Are we to become a nation of consumers? I jokingly made a fake call between a telemarketer for Rollocs windows and a telemarketer for Sears siding. But was that a joke or a view of our future?
The term “Book learning” has some basics in truth, more then once I have seen where a teacher was assign to teach a class that they had no personal knowledge about. But would simply follow the teacher’s text book on the subject. They would not be qualified to answer any question outside what was covered in the foot notes of the text. Children have an ability to think outside the box at times and on something that is on subject but not in the book. Damnable human mind and all, so the answer would be stick to the text.
If the direction this nation is head is that of a glottis, fat consumer that produces nothing. Then we face the fate of all glottis, fat consumers…a heart attack
Joe Williams: You seem to be critical of public schools and I believe you favor paying parents to send their kids to private schools. So my question is, did you attend a Wichita public high school or did you attend a private or Catholic high school?
You made some statements that I agree with, that is, most teachers go into the field because they have a passion for teaching young people. And often they do find it tough to get young people to open up their brains to learn.
But then you go on to say something to the effect that our Wichita students are stupid because they aren’t learning anything. In logic, that would be considered an “allness” statement. But it might be partially true … those who don’t make any attempt to learn, are probably going to be “stupid” in some areas.
So, anyway, I’m curious what kind of school you attended?
Marvin,
Home-education has been the childhood education standard for humankind’s history. The industrial age’s state compulsory scheme is a blip on the human timeline. It was an invention, well-devised, for a purpose that is evaporating.
Home-education was first experimentally resurrected in some hippie communes, and some of the hippies became fundamentalist Christians, and effectively promulgated this model. Most of the major home-study publishers have Christian roots and agendas.
But the emerging reality shows strong growth in secular home education. For example, Stanford, Johns Hopkins, and other universities, as well as public education agencies, offer home-study courses. (Stanford and Hopkins also offer cooperative-education courses to enable kids in schools that have limited academic resources to take one or two online courses, while otherwise taking schools classes.)
My kids are in a private secular university. This entails substantial financial sacrifice, but we think it’s worth it. They relish being actively involved in their community, including doing community service to help the less fortunate. We expect that they will eventually earn Ph.D.’s or professional degrees.
This type of difficult academic pathway is beyond the reckoning of most public educators, as was made clear a few years ago when the USD 259 BOE, under the Superintendent’s recommendation, rejected a WSU-faculty proposal to create a math and science middle-and-high school academy.
There are a few hundred Wichita kids in every grade who merit a rigorous academic education. The proposed academy would have served as a resource to help the regular schools improve their math and science teaching. It probably would have attracted new businesses whose owners and managers LOOK AT SCHOOLS as a major factor in making their business-startup and relocation choices.
Alas, Wichita’s education leaders don’t think in these terms. They think, “We will do A to achieve outcome 1. They don’t think complexly, ala, “If we do A, we should get outcomes 1, 2, and 3, and possibly 4, 5, 6, and 7.” They don’t do multifactorial analysis. Nobody ever taught them how. But in complex systems, single inputs generate complex outputs.
A fatal flaw of public education is an inherent incongruity, between the fundamental principle established by our Founding Fathers that the government’s sole legitimate purpose is to serve the interests of citizens, and the notion that government can force child-citizens to receive a prolonged indoctrination regimen that is ANTITHETICAL to their own interests.
For example, despite the hoopla a century ago about child factory-labor horrors, which provided a strong argument for relocating children to “safe” schools, there were large numbers of children who worked in their parents’ small businesses, were attached to master craftsmen as apprentices, and worked on their family farms. They were learning to be productive and self-organized. There was no legitimate reason to force them to attend school for 6 hours a day, 9 months per year. It was not in their interests, and letting them work was a benefit to other American citizens, not a detriment. Reason did not prevail, simplistic demagoguery and extremism did.
Compulsory state-provided education was widely objected to on many grounds by millions of parents, which resulted in a half-century-long campaign to implement it in every state. Kansas was an early adopter. Why? Because most Kansas settlers were foreign-born. The argument was made that these settlers’ children, if left in their parents’ hands, would never become “Americans”. They would be Germans and Slavs living in America. How could they learn to even speak English?
That was a fine excuse, but there was more to it than that. The industrial barons who created Kansas, but chose not to live in Kansas, were well aware that farm families had many children, and that as they reached adulthood, they could constitute a huge mass of obedient low-cost industrial laborers. They wanted cheap bodies.
John Ise’s “Sod and Stubble” told the truth: Kansas rural schools were not designed to educate children to think clearly, to become literate, enjoy reading and writing, nor to behave civilly, but rather they were designed to train children to fear and obey authority.
The fallacy of this, here in the United States, was that in most European nations, and their colonies and Japan, which adopted the western mass-education model in the 1870’s, people were subjects of the crown, not free citizens. American government never had the legal authority to impose compulsory education, while most other nations did have this authority.
A vision to create order prevailed, and getting control of children was effective in producing orderly, i.e. obedient adults.
This scheme’s success is why most Americans today are employed by somebody else who gives them orders; they arrive to work, take breaks, and leave for home according to timetables set by their “superiors”.
It is difficult for Kansans whose progenitors came from medieval societies, where obedience to superiors was required, to understand the problem of this ethos. They are willing to be surrender their autonomy to others, and do their jobs. That would be fine, except the corporate capitalists today want to return to the era of cheap labor. They’re finding it in the Third World. They don’t need “overpriced” American labor.
It may also be true that if Kansas farmers could make a decent living as self-employed proprietors, and if rural productivity could be raised to enable more people to stay on the land, rather than move to cities and take totem-pole positions, a lot of rural Kansans would prefer the former proposition over the latter.
If rural schools were very different, it might be possible for children to develop methods to make rural living a long-term sustainable proposition. But rural schools demonstrate urban-imposed myopia. “The kids are going to have to leave the land, so we must prepare them for”modern” urban employment.” Why is this true? “Because this is what we have observed for the past 130 years.”
This is utterly unsound thinking. When public education was invented, the designers didn’t extend a 130-year-old system, they created a BRAND NEW system. It was A COMPLETELY NOVEL SOCIAL EXPERIMENT. It didn’t just involve putting up schoolhouses and inviting educated men and women to come to teach children. It devised a completely new experimental system to train teachers (originally 14-16 year old girls), called normal schools. It included the creation of special districts, and new tax programs. Rather than utilize existing city government to manage schools, school boards and principals were invented, following the industrial-governance model of boards of directors and CEOs.
We need new education experiments. I don’t mean “new and improved” methods of class instruction. I mean completely new systems. If nations could do it in the 19th century, we should be able to design new systems today. We sent men to the moon under the visions of Presidents Kennedy, Johnson and Nixon. They’re all dead. Today we can watch videos of Mars’ landscape. We’re keeping people alive with artificial hearts and molecularly-engineered drugs that were simply inconceivable a mere 50 years ago. Ordinary citizens can communicate instantaneously around the globe. One hundred and thirty years ago only professionals and wealthy hobbyists took photographs (B&W). Today middle-class Americans brilliant-color vacation pictures in Australia, and their friends back home can see them the same day (actually a day earlier by the calendar). One hundred and thirty years ago a trip from Germany to America took weeks. Now it takes hours.
In light of these accomplishments, redesigning our educational system is feasible. It isn’t even close to rocket science. The largest obstacle would be human inertia caused by adults’ disinclination to think intelligently, and realize that schools don’t exist to serve today’s economy, much less yesteryear’s economy, but the economy of the future. Adults who will be educators will have to be lifelong learners.
Heartlander,This is ground breaking stuff. Awesome post. The trouble is it wont play in Kansas, unfortunatly. There is little, if any, forward thinking here. If “outside the box” doesn’t contain religious overtones, it won’t even be looked at, which is totally opposite of what you propose.
We really need to vote in KBOE members who arn’t afraid to upset the status quo. Finding them will be a problem.
Heartlander: I agree with JMW, your post giving a historical perspective to the American education experience is thought provoking. I particularly enjoyed your somewhat critical references to reasons for founding our country schools. However, I would have to think about that. I have always assumed country schools tended to be founded by German farmers in middle America perhaps on a model imported from the old country.
I might remind you and all readers that you can view our Wichita graduating seniors at their best tonight (Tuesday evening), and Wednesday and Thursday at their gaduation ceremonies at Century II at, I believe, 7 PM. I think it kind of comes together when you see our students at their best.
Regarding the Kansas Board of Education, a blog thread is definitely needed on this subject so we can discuss who will be candidates and in which part of Kansas do they reside. Who is our Wichita candidate? Does anyone know any potential candidates?
SUPPORT TIM CRUZ!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!
Unless you really DONT like hispanics. He is a LEGAL citizen, unlike the smear connie morris used. She called him a wetback and then had to retract and apologize.
The mayor of garden city, a legal citizen, and morris smears him with the “wetback” term? Yeah, tell me this isnt ALL about race.
Tim has an admirable record as mayor. He is a hardworking public servant. And connie morris, who lied and falsified travel vouchers, who stole state money and then had to repay it? SHE is the darling of the VALUES crowd?
Heheh. And WHO deserves our vote here?
SUPPORT TIM CRUZ!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!
Wink, I think your boy, Steve “abstinence only” Abrams, isnt up for election for two more years.
Next time you see him, ask how that “abstinence only” sex education worked for his son, his unmarried girlfriend, and the baby they produced!
I bet he still has a cigar for you…
JWink, Germany established compulsory education before the U.S., and as a result German immigrants accepted it. (In fact, public education pioneers Horace Mann and John Dewey went to Germany to study that nation’s system, which they championed.) But, the in the U.S. system, the state superintendents of public instruction, the normal school principals and faculty, and the young teachers, were Anglo-American protestants. Just being Catholic in the pre-WWI era disqualified candidates on “moral unfitness” grounds. This, of note, spurred the creation and promulgation of parochial education, which was strongly opposed by the public educators, albeit unsuccessfully.
Great posts KFG!
heartlander, I totally agree our educational system needs some serious retooling. But is it like our taxation system – so ingrained (inbred?) that it becomes difficult if not impossible to move us off the status quo? I find far too many people who seem to choose the “incumbent” way over a possible better way simply because they fear the risk and/or are willing to settle for what they know. Sigh.
A quick response to above posts: KS FARM G — I suspect when you refer to Steve Abrams as “your boy,” you are referring to the fact he represents Arkansas City and surrounding area. Here in Wichita, I presume we are represented by Ms. ________, whose name I can’t think of right now.
I’m not necessarily against conservative candidates, but I don’t like any proposal that would water down our public school systems such as vouchers or state operated charter schools. (Remember the term charter school is often misused and here in our area might be a regular school that receives some federal funds for a special project.)
I haven’t paid enough attention to the Kansas Board of Education members to know what each stands for so I am looking for that kind of information here.
HEARTLANDER: Since you are well informed, you probably know that Kansas once had a State Superintendent of Public Instruction plus counties had County Superintendents of Public Instruction. Chase County had a County Superintendent back in the early days of this century named Anna E. Arnold. During her terms, she wrote two textbooks, “A History of Kansas” and “Civics and Citizenship.” Anna never married and lived in Cottonwood Falls for most of her life. But she was said to have a special friend, Mr. Strong, a high ranking official of the Santa Fe Railroad and whom Strong City was named after. Perhaps she was able to obtain some free trips to the Kansas Historical Society in Topeka back in 1910 or so to obtain information for her books!
We need to start with small experiments. I strongly believe that the previously proposed math and science academy needs to be reconsidered.
We could start an elementary school that taught reading, writing and mathematics in the morning, and provided enrichment electives in the afternoon ranging from athletics to art classes. What’s wrong with giving children–and teachers– choices?
We could open a contract-based charter school. “Being admitted to this school is a special privilege. We have an honor code. Students who demonstrate disrespect to other students and/or teachers will be transferred to a regular school. Teachers who demonstrate disrespect to students will be terminated. We assign a lot of homework. Students who do not complete their assignments will be transferred to a regular school. Intensive help will be given to enable students to learn how to do their homework well.”
Start small, have a commitment to excellence, learn lessons about what works well, and what doesn’t, and go from there.
Here are a couple of interesting links:
http://www.johntaylorgatto.com/
http://www.ditd.org/?NavID=15_0
John Taylor Gatto was a New York teacher who earned his masters at Teachers College, the institution for which “teachers colleges” across America were generically named, which was by far the largest producer of school of education administrators and superintendents during the first half of the twentieth century. He won city and state Teacher of the Year Awards, turning disinterested adolescents into passionate-for-learning students. But he had to work around the system, and eventually it ground him down.
Jaime Escalante (”Stand and Deliver”) took mostly Latino general-math students and turned them into calculus aces. They sacrificed summer-job income to attend summer school with him. They did 2-3 hours of homework every night. They attended an early morning class, before school officially opened, so that they received 2 hours of daily classtime. Kids who “should” have gotten Wal-Mart and McDonald’s jobs went to universities, and became professionals.
Unfortunately, these extraordinary teachers could not convince others to learn from their efforts, at least immediately. But their influence is gradually enlarging.
Heartlander, Ks Farm G, J.M. Walker, et al, who are interested in improving Kansas education.
When I first started sub-teaching about four years ago, I was flabbergasted that even students who seemed to have backgrounds that should be conducive to education weren’t really absorbing math, science, history, writing, etc. Biology is almost out of the question for many.
I started looking for reasons. As I have mentioned before, at first I suspected dental X-rays, junk food, lack of sleep and food, and other similar short-term factors.
Then, as I asked around of long time teachers, most seemed to agree that parenting skills and factors related to parenting are lacking in many cases. I kind of settled on this and do feel this is important. Perhaps somehow parents should be educated along with students.
But then why do Asian students seem to excel even when they are visiting U.S. for an education, away from their parents?
SO, NOW I HAVE COME UP WITH ANOTHER FACTOR WHICH MIGHT BE THE MOST IMPORTANT OF ALL. In one word, it is —- LACK OF TIME! Perhaps I should stop there and let you furnish anecdotes about trying to do too much in too little time. Essentially, I believe young people are trying to do too much. Study, work at a part-time jobs say at McDonalds or Pizza Hut, play sports, volunteer in their church or less honorable activities, etc. etc. We all do this but I now believe this impacts our students to the point that many cannot learn adequately.
Does anyone agree or disagree? Please shoot the message here, not the messenger!!
JWink, lack of time is really important. This is why I suggested required morning classes followed by after-lunch open electives. No one can justify a preset 6 hour school day. NO ONE.How long does it take an above-average-intelligence child to learn basic phonetic “decoding” using modern technology? In my experience, 8 WEEKS.
Schools, and too many parents are trying to encourage multi-tasking. “Become mediocre in a lot of things.” This is a fallacious approach. Find out what kids have SPECIAL GIFTS in, and CULTIVATE THESE GIFTS. You cannot standardize children, without UNDERMINING, and in all too many cases, RUINING their special gifts.
JWink, lack of time is really important. This is why I suggested required morning classes followed by after-lunch open electives. No one can justify a preset 6 hour school day. NO ONE.How long does it take an above-average-intelligence child to learn basic phonetic “decoding” using modern technology? In my experience, 8 WEEKS.
Schools, and too many parents are trying to encourage multi-tasking. “Become mediocre in a lot of things.” This is a fallacious approach. Find out what kids have SPECIAL GIFTS in, and CULTIVATE THESE GIFTS. You cannot standardize children, without UNDERMINING, and in all too many cases, RUINING their special gifts.
The various posts in this thread have raised some serious questions, and topics that have gone beyond the original point about math and science teachers.
Schools are afflicted with a problem facing any bureaucracy, private or public: it’s hard to change. Here’s one way that schools must change: pay for performance and market demand. Teacher compensation should be based on two factors. One is the individual’s performance. Another is how many options he has in other jobs. Right now, though, schools are trapped in the union-scale model of industrial production.
Given the slow pace of change in public schools, it’s time to foster the development of charter public schools, the use of private schools, a variety of options in instructional methods, and so forth. But schooling, for the most part, is trapped in old approaches that sometimes work, and often do not
JLP — How do you define “charter schools”?
I recently asked a principal in an outlying school district this question. He said in his district’s case, their charter school had received some federal grant money for a special project for a period of three years, as I recall.
In Wichita/USD 259, it seems like a charter school was a school run by a private company to use some expertise they had. But this Wichita charter school didn’t work.
The Kansas Board of Education, from what I have seen, would like to somehow switch some local schools from various school districts in Kansas to the KBOE’s jurisdiction. They would call these “charter” schools. Purpose is to try some of their theories on these student.
I object to this because:
1) This would add a new bureaucracy to Kansas with the additional expense passed onto our taxpayers.
2) I don’t see any members of the KsBOE including their relatively new director who have relevant education and/or experience to undertake this task.
But, back to my question, how do you define “charter” schools?
Jwink,
Yes, charter school applicants do receive three years of grants from the U.S. government. That’s for start-up costs, but not, as I understand it, capital costs. A challenge that charter schools face in general is that they don’t get those funds, anywhere.
You said that a particular charter school was tried in Wichita, and it did not work out. That’s by design: a charter school must live up to financial and academic expectations or else it will close. Think of it as operating with a sunset provision. Your usual public school, by contrast, does not have this built-in discipline.
As for the definition of a charter school, the essential concept is that it is a public school that operates with a contract. It may be run by a local school district, a group of teachers, a for-profit contractor, a non-profit organization, and so forth. And you’re right: people are trying a number of different approaches in charter schools. One reason is to account for the differences in how children respond to teaching methods. Some charter schools are focused on language, others on science, others on classical education, and the list goes on. Though by design a charter school admits any student, some are geared for former drop-outs, others are for talented and gifted, and so forth. The move away from “one size fits all” is one of the exciting possibilities of charter schools.
Just as there is variety in what we call “college” – think of WSU, Friends University, and Wichita Area Technical College, for starters – there is variety in charter schools. Arizona, for example, lets local school districts, the state board of education, or a state board for charter schools grant a charter. A private company or a public organization may start a charter school. In Minnesota, public colleges can grant a charter, and “one or more licensed teachers” may apply to start a school.
You said that as you understand it, the SBOE would like “to somehow switch some local schools from various school districts in Kansas to the KBOE’s jurisdiction.” Right now, the SBOE does have jurisdiction, but the local district must give its approval first. So if the We’re for Children organization wanted to start a charter within the boundaries of USD 259, the Wichita district would have to give its approval. Not surprisingly, there are not many charter schools in Kansas.
One idea for reform is to change the “local and state approval” requirement for a new charter to “local or state approval.” It’s not the only way of doing things. The Education Commission of the States has a lot of interesting information on charter schools, and the various ways that govern these schools. See http://mb2.ecs.org/reports/Report.aspx?id=65 for state-by-state profiles.
Changing the law to allow for approval of the SBOE (or, say, KU) without the local district’s approval would not necessarily mean an increase of bureaucracy. As I’ve said, the SBOE is already involved in the charter school process. And I hate bureaucracy as much as the next person, but given the fact that K-12 education is a several billion dollar a year enterprise, even duplicating the size of the Department of Education—something far beyond what would be required for oversight—would be a comparatively modest cost.
When my daughter-in-law graduated from Michigan State with a masters in music ed, she was told never to apply for a job in Kansas because of the salaries and politics. She went to Houston Texas, and started at a higher salary than a friend of mine with a doctorate and twenty years in the Wichita system makes!
Most Kansans don’t value high-level formal education. That’s because they’ve never received it. Unless they wake up, the global economy is going to leave them stupified and bereft.