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Five overlooked truths about education

By Erik Palmer

It’s back to school time. And naturally, there have been several articles, columns and letters to the editor about schools, school problems, and how to fix them.

Generally, they rehash the same arguments, but I think there are five truths that are always missed.

No teacher ever got into the teaching business for money. No, not one. It is not a profession populated by people who put money first.

I have to mention this because our conservative media have done an excellent job of portraying teachers and their associations as greedy money-grubbers out only for themselves.

In fact, few professions have members who are less committed to money. If someone tells you that teachers are only worried about their compensation, they are wrong.

Any teacher with five years’ experience knows more about children and teaching than all the radio talk show hosts, newspaper columnists and letter writers put together.

Teachers don’t resist ideas that benefit children. When good ideas come along, they embrace them. If the teachers don’t embrace an idea, it is almost certainly because the idea will not benefit children, and they are experts in teaching children.

It is not the case that extremely qualified teachers are lined up waiting for the dead weight to go away. It is not true that failing schools will miraculously turn around if we can fire all the bad teachers there and bring in the incredible replacements just jumping at the chance to go in. Rather, it is a miracle that anyone is willing to teach in some schools.

After decades of teacher-bashing, few of our best and brightest college students are seeking careers in education. The percentage of males in education is at a 40-year low, for example.
For those who do go into teaching, the dropout rate is staggering. Fifty percent leave the profession in the first five years.

And here is a corollary to truth three: It is not true that anyone can step in and be a great teacher. Having a math degree will not mean you can successfully teach math; having a degree in engineering does not mean you will be successful at motivating science students.

There is no simple solution. It would be easy to host a radio talk show and spew the party line of vouchers and privatization. It is difficult, however, to manage a school of diverse students in a public school that takes all kids.

My district spends millions on children with severe handicaps — special busing, an aide for each student, special facilities, and so on. A private school could reject these kids and use the voucher money on the elite children, leaving the public schools with all the rejected kids.
In the world of private enterprise, if a supplier sends defective materials to the factory, the factory rejects those materials and finds another supplier. Should schools reject all but the highest quality materials? Private schools do.

Since there are no mentally retarded or autistic or behavior-disordered or emotionally disturbed or special-education kids at them, should exclusive schools get public money? Do you really believe private enterprise has some magic solution to get the autistic child to pass calculus?

Schools aren’t able to do as much as you think. Schools function in an atmosphere that limits the schools’ effectiveness. The average child spends 13 percent of his or her waking life in school. It is not the case that a school has the power to overcome all that goes on in the other 87 percent of a child’s life.

Schools cannot trump parenting or culture or economics.

For example, year after year we look at CSAP data that shows a near perfect correlation between school performance and income level (high income equals high performance). At best, a school can tweak some things to mitigate that problem.

I am not saying nothing can be done to improve schools. I am saying that expecting schools to solve all the issues responsible for subpar student performance is unrealistic.

We have work to do to continue to produce quality education for all children. Looking for simple answers and scapegoats will not help us in that work.

Erik Palmer is a middle school teacher with 22 years’ experience. He is a resident of Aurora.




— Erik Palmer,
Rocky Mountain News
2007-09-03


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