Monday, January 16, 2006
Small rant
In this state if the students in a school have a long consistent history of failure in standardized tests the school is taken from the control of the local school district and converted to a charter school. This has happened only a few times since the legislation was passed.
The implicit assumption is that the students in that school are not keeping up with students in similar schools because the school administration is not up to the job or because the administration is so hamstrung by procedures, rules and contracts that it doesn't have the tools to improve the situation. The solution is to remove the school from district mismanagement; union contract rules remove the administration and start over.
Over at http://www.joannejacobs.com/ there is a link to a sad/funny story about a teacher who flips out when a stapler goes missing and in the process teaches a lesson to her class. The comments to the blog are revealing; a litany of complaints about mindless bureaucratic nonsense inflicted by school and district administrators.
There are other horror stories, school districts with a non-teacher for every two teachers, twenty thousand non-teachers in the New York system. Scary but not surprising stories; this is inevitably what happens when a protected state monopoly is allowed to flourish.
There are not many good solutions. Forget about gradual reform; has that ever worked in this kind of situation? You can rip the whole structure up and start over (to grow again) but that sends a huge dislocation through the vital K-12 system. Or you can put up a competitive alternative - which is the thinking behind the forced charter school conversion.
This gets back to my previous blog. Teachers do not care for the administration nightmare "downtown". Many don't like the knuckleheads running their own school (in fairness: there are some great principals out there; soon to be promoted out of the job).
Yet teachers for the most part will not accept any solutions that involve change and risk on their own part. They are looking for the magic dust solution. I say "No pain, no gain". If teachers want improvements they need to become agents of change and not reactionaries against anything that might affect them personally.
Competition is not a cure-all but it is a viable solution for some problems and that is better than endless complaints over mac & cheese in the faculty lounge.
The implicit assumption is that the students in that school are not keeping up with students in similar schools because the school administration is not up to the job or because the administration is so hamstrung by procedures, rules and contracts that it doesn't have the tools to improve the situation. The solution is to remove the school from district mismanagement; union contract rules remove the administration and start over.
Over at http://www.joannejacobs.com/ there is a link to a sad/funny story about a teacher who flips out when a stapler goes missing and in the process teaches a lesson to her class. The comments to the blog are revealing; a litany of complaints about mindless bureaucratic nonsense inflicted by school and district administrators.
There are other horror stories, school districts with a non-teacher for every two teachers, twenty thousand non-teachers in the New York system. Scary but not surprising stories; this is inevitably what happens when a protected state monopoly is allowed to flourish.
There are not many good solutions. Forget about gradual reform; has that ever worked in this kind of situation? You can rip the whole structure up and start over (to grow again) but that sends a huge dislocation through the vital K-12 system. Or you can put up a competitive alternative - which is the thinking behind the forced charter school conversion.
This gets back to my previous blog. Teachers do not care for the administration nightmare "downtown". Many don't like the knuckleheads running their own school (in fairness: there are some great principals out there; soon to be promoted out of the job).
Yet teachers for the most part will not accept any solutions that involve change and risk on their own part. They are looking for the magic dust solution. I say "No pain, no gain". If teachers want improvements they need to become agents of change and not reactionaries against anything that might affect them personally.
Competition is not a cure-all but it is a viable solution for some problems and that is better than endless complaints over mac & cheese in the faculty lounge.
// posted by Old Math @ 9:14 AM 
