In what field is an 83% success rate considered failure? Maybe we should look more closely at the victim.

This is a rant. I am so completely, utterly and totally tired of hearing people refer to our "failed education system" that I am stringing together totally redundant words in my preview statement!

I used to buy into this opinion until one night when my wife and I were at a party at a neighbor's house. The male host of the party made a statement along the lines of how the education system was bleeding us dry by driving up our property taxes. I figured this was a euphemism for saying that teachers make too much money, since I've heard that one more than once, so I replied with something along the lines of: "I never got into teaching to get rich. But two people who have committed themselves to public education should be able to raise a family on their combined salaries." The neighbor quickly replied that he actually thought teachers should probably make much more than they do. I was a bit surprised by that, and I asked him how that might work. It was getting a little uncomfortable. I said, "Actually, I honestly don't want more money. I signed a contract to do my job until I retire, and the terms of that contract allowed me to predict where my family would be financially in 20 years. I just want to keep the benefits that were promised in that contract." My wife was attentively listening in. She is a guidance counselor at a nearby high school. The neighbor then became visibly frustrated, as he wanted to grind on our chosen fields but was too polite to do so, so he summed things up by saying, "Well, the system is just broken." I'm pretty sure he thought the conversation was done at that moment, because, well, everyone knows the education system is broken right? But that's when my wife leaned in and asked, "How exactly is the system broken?" And that was where the conversation officially ended, because the neighbor realized he was in way over his head, trying to make dismissive statements about an area with which he new next to nothing. And so it goes just about everywhere the topic seems to come up.

For some reason we are not supposed to criticize most public employees, like the police, but teachers are certainly fair game!

Education is one of the few fields where the general public seems to think they know enough about it to completely dismiss it or criticize it without any facts to back up their statements. The general population in the United States has been utterly brainwashed to be anti tax (in a similar way to being brainwashed to be anti jury duty, but that's a different post), and thus has very little understanding, or interest in understanding, exactly what public education represents, and how it functions. Everything takes money. The big question is simply whether or not a society values public education, and the knee-jerk, anti-tax, the-system-has-failed mindset is the result of a highly effective campaign to destroy one of the most important pillars of democracy: equal access to education.

We need honestly about our shared investment in public education, not euphemisms and unfounded attacks. In the spirit of honesty, I will be clear that public education is, at its foundation, a socialist concept with a primary purpose of maintaining access to vital education by relatively poor people. It is no wonder that, in my personal experience, a person's willingness to criticize the entire education system usually seems to correlate with the amount of disposable income they enjoy. Let's be real, a rich person is easily offended by the idea of paying property taxes that maintain access to education by poor people. To continue the honestly theme, I wish more people would stop saying euphemistic things like "the failed education system" and instead say, "I don't support the idea of free education for poor people."

I understand that socialism is a hot button word for a lot of people, but really, we as a nation have enjoyed all sorts or socialist institutions for decades; public and volunteer fire departments, public libraries, public hospitals, etc. But again, public education is certainly a socialist concept, and it has everything to do with redistributing wealth. I, along with millions of other people, believe it a good, if not essential application of socialism.

But what about failure?

Surely I am not going to try to write an entire post about this topic without acknowledging some level of failure, right? Schools fail. But here's the kicker: all institutions fail, both public and private. The last time I researched this, there still wasn't a single institution on Earth that has been designed, launched or staffed by aliens from another planet. Humans have created every institution in existence, and humans, as we know, generally suck at things. I mean, we all try, to different degrees, but if there is one thing anthropologists from Mars will be able to say about us someday its that we certainly had a way of demonstrating incompetence. And before you go thinking this is something reserved for the public sector, lets just pause and remember the mortgage crisis and ensuing decade long recession caused by the private banking industry. But then again, the rich people in that scenario were bailed out by the socialist President so that the only ones who really suffered were poor people who never got their homes or jobs back. Yup, pretty screwed up system.

But back to schools. What exactly has failed?

The best description I have heard recently was based on a person's experience of the soul-crushing boredom his high school presented as education. I can relate to that completely. I wasn't all that smart, but I was too smart, or maybe curious is the word, for what my high school provided. But that was the 80's, and I was one of the people who decided to try to do it better. My two kids are in elementary school now, and it is plainly obvious that times have changed, and school has evolved. I am not going to say it's fixed, or perfect, but it's a human institution and it is run by caring people who want to improve it.

We are coming out of the era of standardized testing, thank God. Many, many children benefited from the push for standardized testing, especially in rural areas where they were previously falling through cracks due to a general lack of attention. Standardized testing as a means of improving overall success has proven to be a failed paradigm, but it wasn't completely without merit. These things are extremely complicated, and sweeping criticisms are rarely based on empirical evidence or facts. That was hard for thinking people like me to get at first. I was someone who was critical from the outset of No Child Left Behind, but a single conversation with a relative from West Virginia made me see some of the complexity. If we try to help one group, we end up stifling another. This is called trial and error, learning from our mistakes. It's called evolution.

There are many other specific examples of how public education and private education have failed. But to take the time to analyze and critique specific examples is completely different than a sweeping statement like, "the system has failed." The former is how we learn and make constant improvements. The other is how lobbyists, both professional and amateur, seek to destroy an entire institution because is conflicts with their political beliefs.

Again, to repeat some honesty: the debate is about whether or not we, as a nation, value the idea of providing free education to people who cannot afford a private option.

If we had more economic parity in America, we might not need publicly funded education, but then again, do we really believe that entrepreneurs and profit seekers would create the best curricula for our kids? That's a entirely different can of worms.

Look, schools need constant work. Boards of Education are inherently flawed by the nature of being elected, but I personally can't think of a better system for governing school districts. The system is democratic, so at some point we have to let it function the way all democratic systems do. We influence in the way we can, and then hope for the best. School Principals are people, and some will always be better at their jobs than others. Same with every other position in a school. Teachers are human. We do need better ways of helping less effective teachers grow to be better teachers. Tenure is problematic, but as a foundational way to assure that enough people would actually be crazy enough to commit to a life of teaching, it is essential. If you have ever criticized the concept of tenure, think about this: would you be willing to go to college to become a teacher, and then commit to a lifetime of very modest paychecks, knowing you will never be anything more than middle class, if there was no guarantee of future employment? Who in their right mind would accept that? The general public that criticizes things like tenure seem to think that a solution is to fill our schools with nitwits that are mentally incapable of seeing a really bad deal before agreeing to it. Taking the average teacher salary without tenure (or medical insurance) would be a very bad deal.

And before I get into specific things we can logically criticize and try to improve, I need to state clearly that the whole premise of "failed education system" is basically fallacy. So, how many kids graduate from high school and go off the succeed in college as a result every year? What total percentage of kids in the US graduate when they are 18? Let's look at this report by NPR, The High School Graduation Rate Reaches A Record High — Again. According to the report, in 2015 the country reached an all-time record high graduation rate of 83%. I am not sure if there are any private industries that wouldn't celebrate a record high, or a 83% success rate, but for some reason, according to most politicians and the general public, this is proof that public education has failed. Do we need to do better? Should we hit 90% consistently? Well, maybe. But maybe not, and that leads to my next point.

Who do we blame?

This is where things get tricky. If we stop trying to flush the entire failed education system down the toilet, then we have to turn our criticism to something more productive, right? If we consider that graduation rate of 83%, what types of initiatives might get the number to increase? Well, for one, we do know from research on private enterprise that simply measuring something usually leads to improvement. That is what led to the onslaught of customer satisfaction surveys we now must endure as consumers. And that is why standardized testing is probably at least partly, if not mostly, responsible for the record high graduation rate in 2015. But what else can we do?

I have heard all sorts of stories of attempts by schools to improve their own graduation rates, and I will tell you that many are quite dubious. Here's the deal, at 83%, we are probably graduating most or even more than the number of kids who actually WANT to graduate. I have been teaching at a community college for 30 years, and the graduation rate has been terrible since the school's inception. But that is not because we fail as an institution. It is because the majority of our students who enter really don't want the degree. Some are only there to take a couple of courses that they will transfer to another school, but they get counted in our "failure" rate. But most are just young people who had no idea what they were getting into, often coddled by their high school teachers to get them to graduation in any way possible, so that they were ultimately unprepared for college level work. And there is something to critique!

High schools today that have endured lower than average graduation rates are being pressured to increase those rates by any means necessary. They are not literally being told to pass kids that have no business graduating, but that is what ends up happening. At one school, I have heard reports of kids being offered "credit recovery" after missing weeks of school. The same district has no truancy officers, parents often have no idea their kids are cutting, and then the principle just makes deals with the kids when they decide life might be hard without a high school diploma. Then the next wave of delinquent kids learns that they can make deals, and it just goes on. The point is, maybe 83% is completely realistic.

And here is the really risky part. Everyone who works inside a school knows that the critical element of success is . . .

Parent engagement

Holy shit! Wait! Did he just blame the victim???

Image Source: Flickr

No, I did not. A victim is someone who is doing everything they can to get by or succeed, but fails because the system is rigged against them. Most human beings value the ethic of hard work and determination (even socialists!) Ready for some more honesty? Some parents support their children, and their children's educational success, and some do not. But wait, I sense a slippery slope here. "You're still blaming the victim because lots of poor parents are forced to work multiple jobs, and single moms, and only 24 hours in a day!" All that is true, and yet as teachers we know that engagement doesn't mean killing yourself as a parent. Parenting is hard. My wife and I are lucky enough to make enough money to keep us well above the poverty line, and enough to have a financial cushion of several months which has a massive effect on our general stress levels, but it still takes work to consistently support our kids in their schooling. There is one thing that assures a kid will fail to succeed in school -- a lack of parent involvement and support. This is true for kids of all socioeconomic levels. The difference is that if a rich kid fails, there are multiple aspects of the larger social system that will keep him out of poverty, whereas if the poor kid fails, well, they are basically screwed.

And still more honesty. Lots of people should never have become parents. Here we could look at all sorts of social ills and things we could focus on to improve about our society, and that could take us into all sorts of wonderful political debates. But the point of this post is whether or not its the education system's fault that kids fail. With an 83% success rate, we have to look at the kids who represent the 17% who do not succeed. Why are they not benefiting from schools filled with well-intentioned people working so hard to get 83% of their students to the goal? I am certain that among that 17% there are kids who can succeed, and I guarantee that most schools are trying to locate those kids, and provide them with specialized attention, and sometimes additional services, to get them what they need. I have heard about such initiatives directly from the people working on them and providing them. I can also guarantee that some of the approaches are problematic, as I mentioned earlier. The graduation rate will likely rise, and that will mean that some kids got the extra help they needed, and they will likely have a good footing to succeed in college or the workplace. But it will also mean some kids got a free pass and will struggle after high school as a result. Life is hard.

The anonymous parent claiming the system failed
Image Source: Flickr

But even if we accept that "those" parents are victims of the system, what can we do to help them too?

Here is the irony of all of this. If the system is failing, even in a smaller, more specific way than the statement usually implies, then let's consider what could help. If a parent truly is unable to support her kids in school, what kind of program might help those kids? I will wait while you consider this one a little.

Perhaps, maybe, extracurricular activities?

When politicians succeeded in getting the general public to turn on public education, one of the immediate results was cutting school budgets. The first thing to go were usually nurses and guidance counselors. Believe it or not, in a lot of districts, those positions were decreased before the next big wave of cuts to arts and athletic programs. Today we have massive urban school districts, like Philadelphia, where there are barely any music or athletic programs left. These were the things that provided additional support, in the form of keeping them at school longer and providing different levels of contact with caring adults. Extracurricular activities provide numerous educational benefits, whether its learning music as an additional language, or learning to be part of different types of organizations and teams, or how to manage conflict in different contexts, etc. But perhaps most important, it allows more one-on-one attention for kids that need that most, because they are not getting much at home. So the one additional program that might do the most to get kids to graduation was slashed from coast to coast, because the general public hates paying taxes.

I get it, everything costs money, and we absolutely have to be very careful about budgets and the impact taxes have on other facets of society. But regardless of where you stand on that issue, please stop referring to the "failed education system." The truth is, we have failed education. The system is ours, and dismantling it and getting rid of it is certainly one choice, but I really don't thin that is what most people want. The system is actually quit effective and successful, and what we really need to make it even better is an engaged public that it totally invested, financially and emotionally, in making it work.

This last image is from 1915. I included it because I think it is a great reminder of just how complicated of an enterprise it is to sustain an educated populace.

If you made it this far I really want to thank you for taking the time. I would love to hear any thoughts at all in the comments. I could have spent a few days raking over this before posting, but I am really wondering how often anyone actually reads an entire post anyway! Let me know if you did, and feel free to critique anything, as I am sure I will soon enough.

Image Source: Wikimedia Commons