Trials and Tribulations of Public Education - My Mostly Informed Opinions

My job is working with public school teachers here in New York City. I'm managing 95 educators as they attempt (with varied success) to implement service-learning lessons and service projects into their classrooms. This, alas, is more challenging to pull off than it may sound like. Happily, I don't want to talk about my job. Instead, I want to talk about public education. Because despite everything, I really do think that public education can work. Sorry, let me rephrase that. I think that we have an obligation to make certain that public education works.




I'm a result of public education tracking. What that means is that my high school set up three 'tracks' for students entering its doors. There were the college bound kids, the community college bound kids, and everyone else. I got placed into the first group based off of my grades, invested family members, and the recommendation of former teachers. I was lucky. I got all the resources my school had the offer, while 80% of the students had to make due without basic supplies, materials, and educators who didn't give a damn about their success.

Once I got the vocabulary to understand exactly why this was so fucked up, I began to have a real interest in education and education policy, but no easy way to access the information about it. (Reading Johnathan Kozol certainly helped, though.)

Then I got this AmeriCorps position and started working intimately with the New York City education system, and now I'd say that I have a better (although far from perfect) understanding of how public education works here in the city. After watching "Waiting for Superman" last night, I've become inspired to rant about the things in public education that I think need to be changed - or at least that I think are pretty messed up. Please, feel no pressure to read all this nonsense, but if you want to argue with me, please do so. I'll probably become far more informed as a result! 


1) I think the fundamental problem with public education is that we need better ways to measure academic success. I’ll get into the many reasons why as the list continues on, but let’s talk about the primary way success is measured now – via test scores and graduation rates. While I don’t think that these should be totally disregarded (especially graduation rates), I also believe that leaving these as the sole indication of achievement is bound to lead to system-wide failure for schools, teachers, and students. 

So what should replace this primary indicator? Good fucking question. Student happiness? Not quantifiable. Acceptances into colleges? Not all students will go – or want to go – to college. School culture? Teacher success? Publicity? Tracking? What the hell does academic success even mean? Is it preparing kids for the ‘real world’? Preparing them for college? Keeping them out of the correctional system/'the streets'?

The frustrating thing is that test scores are probably the best way to measure student achievement, and they’re also totally inadequate. Test scores don’t take into account how much students will remember, learning disabilities, quality of overall education, real world skills, and so on. But they’re also the only standard we have to figure out how students are doing. Regardless of how happy kids may be, by the time they leave school they should be able to read and do math at a certain level, and expecting schools to meet these marks doesn’t seem unreasonable. But when you have an entire system that cares only about test scores, that means that the students who need the most help, the ones who won’t be able to meet the required scores without intensive assistance, are ignored. Education becomes a factory system creating ‘products’ that will provide the most in returns, rather than about actual learning and development, and many people get left behind as a result. 

2)  Teacher unions aren't inherently bad, but they certainly aren't helping, especially the whole concept of teacher tenure. Don't get me wrong - being a public school teacher is without a doubt one of the hardest jobs to be had. If you don't believe me, have a conversation with a teacher in a struggling school. I'm working with a hundred or so of them, and they are all overworked, underpaid, deeply invested in their students, and very much worried about their positions in this tenuous system. Every teacher, even a lot of the bad ones, are working very hard to do their job, and they deserve recognition for that. 

All that being established, in (almost) any other profession, if you're doing poorly, you will be fired. Most public school teachers get tenure after their first two years of work, which then makes it virtually impossible for a school district to fire them. This is messed up for a multitude of reasons (not the least of which is the fact that becoming a good teacher probably takes a great deal more than two years), and means that unqualified people remain in a bad system and keep students from learning as much as they could.

This is complicated even further when we acknowledge the fact that teachers are evaluated primarily on test scores, and get many systematic perks through their students preforming well. Which means that they become much more invested in teaching to the test, skewing the scores as needed, and otherwise depriving students of a good education and lying about how well they're actually doing. Which means that many students who aren't ready to move on from a particular grade do so anyway. So a student who can't read beyond the third grade level will be pushed through the system until they're in high school and still not able to read. Which not only skews their ninth grade teacher's performance review, but had done the same for six other teachers for the past six years. Students aren't created brand new each year, but are inherited from one teacher to the next, and one bad educator can upset a student's entire educational track along with fellow teachers careers.

Hence, evaluation via test scores/graduation rate is stupid. 

3) Charter schools can work, but usually don't. And even then they freak me out a little. A study came out a few weeks ago (note to self - start bookmarking these things so it doesn't look like you're talking out of your ass) that showed that NYC public schools were actually graduating more students who were 'ready' for college (based on test scores in reading and math, of course) than charter schools were. Keep in mind that the study didn't have details on which type of school students had gone to prior to high school (see point two for why that could be an issue) and that public schools weren't necessarily doing fabulously (39% of students were ready for college! Yay?), but still. Charter schools are getting a lot of hype for little cause. While there are a few notable school models that are working wonderfully and that should get a ton of recognition for what they've been able to accomplish (a lot of this probably has to do with the fact that teachers who are employed at charter schools (at least in NYC) are not allowed to join teacher's unions), that doesn't mean that they're a solution to public education. Rather, they are an alternative to it. 

Charter schools have a unique position of operating within the public system (and therefore being free for students to attend) without being restricted by a lot of its requirements. For example, most charter schools don't provide special education options, some don't have ESL programs (English as a second language - which in New York is just idiotic), they are allowed to extend their school days (up to including weekend hours and summer terms), and they usually have an incredibly small student body. This gives them a lot of leeway and advantages when it comes to teaching their students and getting good test scores. On the flip side, depending upon who runs the charter school, the 'sponsor' could have a lot of personalized demands that must be met. Things like having students show up for corporate events, staff qualifications/requirements, commercial appearances, and so on.

Seen in the right light, a lot of the above is not only fine, but downright beneficial. New York City already has a separate school district just for special ed students (along with another for juvenile correctional schools), and arguments could be made that those schools are more effective for those students than being a part of a more diverse school population. Theoretically, charter schools could be specialized in the same way, even to include ESL only schools, etc. And Lord knows that more school time usually reaps positive results. Regardless of these benefits, it is the second set of concerns that truly worries me. In our corporate, brand-drive culture, the idea of 'selling' education is not appealing to me. For public education to become a corporate contest rather than a public right is a depressing notion, one that is already beginning to take shape throughout the nation. 

And while I do think that successful charter schools should be around, I don't think they're fixing public education. They're simply joining the elite group of good public schools (that most students will not get into due to lack of investment, information, or - worst and most common of all - just dumb luck) while side-stepping many of the problems that need to be fixed in the system they're operating in.

NYC Specific

4) NYC has over 1500 public schools, making it the biggest school district in the nation. NYC's schools operate under mayoral control, which essentially means that Mayor Bloomberg is in charge with all public education policy for the city. Theoretically, there is a board of advisers for the DOE which can overturn any of his mandates, but they are elected by... You guessed it. The mayor. This leads to a great deal of stupidity, no inherent system of checks and balances, and a lot of schools getting the short end of the stick.

5) If education standards are going to improve, there has to be a consistent rubric for schools to be measured by. At present, every NYC school goes through a quality review every year. Every year, the things this quality review is grading are changed drastically. Out of the 25 schools I'm working with this year, seven of them went from a grade of an A on their Quality review to a grade of a C - and I can guarantee that the cultures of those schools haven't changed all that much in the past 12 months. What has changed? The standards they are being measured by. Now this is bad enough for the schools that are doing well, but what about the schools that are doing poorly? How can a school that received a D last year make efforts to improve their score if the things they are being graded on are constantly being changed?

6) There's an application process for students to get into high schools here. Granted, it's not a terribly intense process, but it still leads to student tracking right from the get-go. Schools can reject students who don't have high enough GPAs, and the top 8 (or 12?) schools in the city require applicants to take an additional test to gain admission. The students who don't get in anywhere, or who don't go through the application process, are placed in whichever school nearest to them that has an open space. Many of these students don't get the best of grades, which means that the schools tend not to score well, which means they get no extra money from the state or federal government. What's more, these schools tend to be a lot larger than their counterparts, tend to have more unwieldy systems with worse (or newer) teachers, and have the worst administrators (because most good administrators wouldn't want to work there, and they get to choose). And people then wonder why 'drop-out factories' exist....

There are many more issues with public education than the ones I listed above, and my opinions aren't necessarily the right ones, and more importantly opinions, alas, don't change anything. That doesn't mean they shouldn't be shared!