How to Fix Education

We visited with some family this weekend joining them Saturday night for an evening of relaxing, watching the Sox and then a Sunday filled with great food and an energetic WII contest. It was for all a very good time. Over dinner as we are often wont to do we discussed many subjects including the crisis in education and how to fix it. My wife, being a teacher and a great one at that, has fairly strong opinions on this subject.

The problem with the subject is there are no easy answers but there are lots of simplistic assumptions. And as I tell my children those who look for simple answers had better look for simple problems. On the surface holding teachers" accountable" for their students performance sounds like a logical idea. We all know there are bad teachers out there and yet the tenure systems props them up. There is no doubt this is true. However when we say accountable we must decide what we are measuring and how. In my wife's school it is without doubt that that students needing the most help go to the teachers who are the best at what they do. The teachers who perform poorly or at least not as well get the students that need the least help. Is this correct? I am not sure but what I do know is that if you make teachers accountable only to test scores why would a teacher want to help a troubled student.

I do not have the answers. I am not sure there are answers to solve America's issue in education. The answers in some cases may not be politically correct.

My observations might be wrong but here they are

If measuring teachers you cannot measure test scores but in some cases you could measure improvement. Kids are not in a vacuum before they come to a teacher and certainly not when they go home at night. Any system that will punish teachers for taking on higher risk students so as to keep a stronger test score is a system that will not work.

If our concern is that tenure protects bad teachers we are to some extent correct. However if we remove tenure we must realize that as education is an easy target in budget trouble times now so too will be the experienced teachers who make a higher salary in troubled times. In short would you like to work 15 years and then be let go so that two lesser teachers who make much less than you can be hired. Now we know this is what happens in the real world outside of education but we do not see this as a good thing. What this is a result of is that unions have lost much of their power to protect, let us not begrudge this group who has been smart enough to hold their union together. We all should have done so.

Testing is great but my children spend at least 6 to 8 weeks a year on testing. This seems excessive. And again if we tell teachers they will be judged on tests only they will teach only to the test. Do you know how much history is on that test? Not much. Yet the same people screaming on Fox News that children do not know their countries history or what the state capital of Michigan is ( this is a big deal to me) are the people screaming that teachers have to be held accountable. The two paths do not meet. If you over emphasize testing you will not have children learning as wide a range of information. Incidentally we as parents are guilty of this too. When we see our children only searching for the answers to a question in a book they were to to read rather than reading the whole book we are endorsing No Child Left Behind. In short only the test mattes not what you really absorbed.

Of the students that go to college for education now 80 percent of those students are in the bottom 20 percent of students who go to college in test scores. We are not attracting the best people to teach our students. What this means is that you have some wonderful teachers and thank God for them and then you have alot of placeholders. There are not a lot of ok teachers. You are great because you have a passion that means more than the money you could make elsewhere or you are there because the pay is solid and you get summers off. We need to encourage our best and brightest and that means money.

We all can remember teachers who made a positive or negative influence on me. These people are some of the most important people in our children's lives. We would do well to do all we can to support them,