A Quick Fix for Dysedutopia

PREFACE:  My public radio station in Dallas repeatedly and earnestly urges me to visit the Internet site, “Edutopia, What Works in Public Education,” that “highlight[s] thousands of success stories in K-12 education.”  The site’s name, derived from Thomas More’s “Utopia” is strikingly, if unintentionally apt for it depicts, like its predecessor, a place that exists only in the authors’ imaginations.  Had they, instead, intended to reflect reality, they would have named their site, “Dysedutopia, What’s broken in Public Education” highlighting its tens of millions of student failures.  Edutopia is, of course, not an isolated example of the educational establishment’s well-financed propaganda machine.  Indeed, the further public education has sunk, the more frequent, the more strident, and the further removed from reality have been its contentions.  The following brief article is a modest attempt at rebuttal. DH

Arne Duncan, the new Secretary of Education, is, by all accounts, an intelligent, open-minded administrator with long experience in his field.  It is reasonable to assume, then, that, on taking office, he has invited comment from diverse sources on how he can best tackle his new responsibilities.  Whereas I was not personally named as one of those sources, I have no doubt that he would welcome any advice such as mine that promised a fast, effective, economical, and far-reaching remedy to what is generally recognized as an underperforming-if not downright dysfunctional-educational system.

American schools were not always in this condition.  On the contrary, no more than seventy years ago they were the envy of the world.  Bringing them down to their present deplorable position required the combined efforts of many players, but one stands out for its disproportionate and particularly aggressive role in the destructive process.  I am speaking, of course, of the National Education Association.  Make no mistake about it; the NEA had the muscle to do the job.  It is the largest labor union in the US with a membership of over 3 million, a staff of over 500, an impressive Washington, DC administration building, and an annual budget of over $300 million.  It piously claims to represent the best interest of its teacher members and their students, but the perception of many less biased observers is that the only interest being served is the remuneration and power of the organization’s leadership.

How did the NEA undermine our educational system?  It did so by populating our schools with a preponderance of bad teachers.  This is no small matter.  As everyone who has stepped foot in a schoolroom knows, everything depends on the ability of its teacher.  Good teachers not only help their students absorb the class’s subject matter, they inspire them to pursue it further.  Good biology teachers create budding med students; good English teachers, budding journalists, and so on.  Bad teachers do just the opposite.  They not only fail to instruct, they inculcate their students with an antipathy toward the material.  Their classrooms become self-contained killing fields strewn with murdered ambitions.

The evisceration of an entire profession did not come about by accident.  It took a series of deliberate policies designed to promote NEA’s welfare at whatever expense to others.  First came the proliferation of teacher’s colleges with low entrance requirements and emphasis on questionable theories of education rather than mastery of particular subjects. Presumably it was thought that ignorance of the material was not an impediment to teaching it as long as one mastered the right pedagogical technique.  There were other avenues, besides the teacher colleges, by which numbers of good, motivated teachers could manage to gain entrance.  But lest their competence was rewarded in any way, the NEA killed every attempt at merit pay while ensuring the indefinite retention of members whose disqualifications were painfully obvious.  As long as she dutifully paid her union dues-up to a thousand dollars a year-her position was secure.  Most destructive of all, the NEA destroyed the morale of teachers, good and bad alike, by stripping them of the authority needed to maintain order in their classrooms, denying them all initiative in how they were to teach, burdening them with endless reports, and pressuring them into a variety of extra chores unrelated to their jobs such as catering to “special” children who had no business in a normal classroom to begin with.  Not surprisingly, the turnover rate in the profession has been inordinately high as hundreds of disappointed teachers have fled their dispiriting jobs.

My focus on the NEA’s persecution of teachers was not meant to suggest that students somehow escaped the organization’s heavy hand.  Far from it.  Whatever experiences teachers suffered have inevitably reverberated throughout the classroom.  Students have been saddled with time-consuming, and largely unnecessary, homework.  They have been subjected to experimental teaching techniques such as whole-word language and untried mathematical concepts that proved disastrous to the learning experience.  They have been forced to drag heavy knapsacks back and forth from school filled with thick, over-expensive, over-illustrated textbooks replete with poor scholarship.

Of all the tragic results of NEA policies, the worst has been, in my estimation, the calamity it has brought to inner city schools.  There the harmful vectors emanating from NEA’s offices have conjoined to bear down most oppressively on those least equipped to resist them, under-privileged minority children.

Naturally, many segments of the educational community have tried to free themselves of the NEA’s tyrannical control by means of school vouchers and charter schools.  However, these attempted defections have been battled tooth and nail by the union every step of the way with the result that school vouchers have virtually disappeared and charter schools are too few in number to significantly alter the education landscape.

 lt hardly need be said that if we are to rescue our schools from the continued ravages of the NEA, drastic action is called for.  So my advice to Mr. Duncan is to brand it as an enemy (I would have no objection to the term “terrorist”) organization based on the abundant evidence linking NEA activities with the coincident economic decline of the US.  Once that designation was made official, the government would then have the authority to initiate a thorough, top-to-bottom house cleaning–that is to say, the dismissal of all its personnel.  If this seems unecessarily harsh, bear in mind that the people, who created and executed the failed policies of the past, simply must be replaced if for no other reason than their continued involvement would inevitably compromise whatever reforms were attempted in the future.  True, not all those ensnared by the sweep would be equally culpable, but, in any event, all were complicit in the enumerated crimes and thus must be made subject to the urgent priorities demanded by the situation.

As a direct consequence of the action being recommended, two issues arise.  One, where could qualified replacements be found for the vacated union positions?  And, two, what alternative employment would be suitable for the discredited NEAers.  Fortunately, there is a single, ready, efficient, and economical solution to both problems.  Let me begin with the first.

To my mind, the educational process should be looked at as a branch of communications.  After all, it is primarily the conveyance of information from an authoritative source (teachers, textbooks, etc) to a willing audience (students).  Viewed in this light, it would make sense to fill the ranks of an emptied NEA with people possessed of the best communication skills available.  And, though the suggestion might at first sound a bit off the wall, there is no group of individuals better at retail communications than the folk presently engaged in pornography.  If the reader has any doubts on the matter, let him consider the undeniably successful track record of the porn merchants.  In the time span of a decade or so, they have taken an obscure, marginally profitable publishing activity and turned it into an electronic powerhouse all the while improving the quality of their product and reducing its cost.

No doubt the great majority of the readers of this essay will readily concede the logic and eminent practicality of my proposal, but even among these there may be a few who would question its propriety.  “Do we really want our children modeling their characters on an authoritarian figure whose background is steeped in depravity?” they might ask.  Well, there is depravity and then there’s depravity.  Personally, I would rank NEA leadership at a solid ten on the scale, and pornographers, judged by the same criteria, at 0.3.  In any case, the importance of educational excellence to the future of the country far outweighs whatever objections might arise in this regard.

As a thought experiment, picture that my recommended exchange is actually instituted; the old hidebound NEA employees are shipped out, and the new energized entrepreneurs take over.  On their very first day on the job, the new crew discovers, to their chagrin, the full extent of the deterioration that has befallen the educational system.  Students are dropping out of high school at an alarming rate and those staying behind might as well have fled with their more adventuresome comrades for all the good their additional schooling does them.  Teacher morale is dismal and the administration, moribund.  Most students are essentially illiterate in math and science and their reading proficiency is abysmal.

Retaining the enterprising spirit developed in their previous occupation, the new NEAers spring into action on their second day on the job.  Their cursory review of educational systems worldwide reveals that Finland has, arguably, the finest educational system in the world.  Thereupon they dispatch a fact-finding mission to that country the very next day.

Within a week, the mission returns a startling report.  Instead of being sidetracked by powerful teachers’ unions, the practical Finns devote themselves to producing powerful teachers.  The prestige afforded teachers in this enlightened land encourages some fifteen percent of all college applicants to apply for teacher training.  However, high scholastic standards permit only ten percent of this group to be accepted.  The successful applicants must then spend five or six years earning their requisite masters’ degrees during which time they are grounded in the fundamentals of math and science in addition to pedagogy.  Many specialize in a particular teaching area such as chemistry or biology.  After graduation and gaining employment in the public schools, they are regarded as professionals and, as such, are highly respected by the community.  In their classrooms they are given the freedom to select their own textbooks, conduct as many (or as few) exams as they wish, and assess their students as they see fit.  Stress is placed on warm, informal relationships with their students, small class sizes, and individualized instruction.  Avoided are excessive homework, burdensome paperwork, and standardized national testing.  In short, the new educators are informed that the Finnish program, in all its key provisions, is the diametrical opposite of that so doggedly and so ineffectually pursued in the US.

Needless to add, the new staff, long habituated to being on the cutting edge of their field, immediately begin implementing the proven Finnish plan in the US.  Over the succeeding years, there would then be every expectation that young Americans emerging from this superior educational environment would, once again, be qualified to compete in the international arena and thereby rescue the country from its disastrous descent into the status of a banana republic.

But what of the army of those left jobless?  Recall that my proposal called for a two part solution-the second being finding suitable employment for former NEA employees.  Given that they had been deprived of their monopoly over public education, it would seem only fair to compensate them for their loss with another monopoly more accommodative to their talents-that is to say, government authorized control over the production and distribution of porn.  Bolstered by this award, the ex-NEAers would, I am confident, willingly discard their uncomfortable masks of hypocrisy and assume their new honest careers.  Previously idled experts would promptly burden their new activity with an extensive series of authoritative investigations culminating in voluminous reports and interminable study groups.  Ex-staffers, eager to make a name for themselves in their new profession, would collaborate in the invention of “new porn”-an innovation that would reliably have the same amelioratory impact in pornography as new math had in mathematics.  Meanwhile, in overstaffed offices, administrators would keep themselves and their minions constructively employed by busily promulgating regulations and processing reports to and from the field.  The sum total of these endeavors could thus be counted on to reduce quality and increase cost in roughly equal measure-a sure road to greatly reduced consumption and a much tidier Internet.  In sum, the societal benefit gained by this transfer of erstwhile pedagogical skills to the porn industry would be second only to that achieved by the earlier half of the exchange.

Naturally, I cannot predict how Mr. Duncan will receive this recommendation, but given its evident win-win nature, I am sure he will give it serious consideration.  Should he elect to use it, he is assuredly under no obligation to attribute to its true source.  My intention is the reform of our educational system, not personal recognition.  Indeed, I would be more than content to hear him commend his able staff for the idea or, as is the wont of loyal civil servants, credit it to his boss.