What's Wrong With Education in New York? Nothing

What's Wrong With Education in New York?  Nothing

--This rant may be about New York's governor and education issues, but the issues are not specific to New York.  Feel free to substitute your state and/or city for almost everything below (there are a couple specific things.)--

Governor Cuomo is at war with the teachers of New York.  He has certain reforms he wants to see put in place, and given his track record of bullying, executive orders, and generally acting as of the legislature is his own personal rubber stamp, he will probably see them enacted.

Cuomo's reforms will have no demonstrable positive impact on the scholastic outcomes in the state of New York.

Maybe we'll see a small temporary uptick that Il Duce will claim is momentous progress.  That seems to be his MO - take credit for anything positive, place blame for anything negative.  That uptick will be temporary at best, but most likely be an illusory gain as ephemeral as the reforms of the Moreland Commission. 

The reforms will not work because the governor is aiming his reforms in the wrong place.  This is the same mistake George Bush made with No Child Left Behind, it's the same mistake Barack Obama and Arne Duncan made with Race to the Top, it's the same mistake made by Bill Gates and the Koch Brothers.  It's the exact same mistake anyone who tries to reform education by reforming the teachers makes:  Teachers are not the problem. 

A recent report by the Horace Mann League and the National Superintendents Roundtable explains my point well - as reported by the Charlotte Observer.

Builders cannot make a high-rise stay up if they use weak iron and poorly mixed concrete.  Brewers can't make good beer if the hops are bad and the wheat is infested with weevils.  Microsoft can't make a good XBox if the plastic is badly mixed and the circuit boards are poorly soldered.  Teachers can't make good students when pupils arrive in the classroom poorly prepared and socially promoted to the point that they are not months but years and years behind their peers.

The vast majority of New York's schools are not failing and are turning out students ready to take on any career, academic or military challenge the world hands them.  The so-called "failing schools" are primarily located in the state's largest cities - in areas where the concentration of poverty is very high, and the opportunity for living-wage jobs for high school graduates is very very low.  Students in these schools start out at a genuine disadvantage.  They enter kindergarten knowing hundreds upon hundreds fewer words, having had fewer cultural experiences, get read to far less, and are surrounded by people who have to hustle and work multiple jobs (if they can find jobs) to eke out livings.  Then, for the next 8 years they get socially promoted through schools where behavior issues are so dire that the curriculum gets largely abandoned for behavioral modification, and academics become secondary to the teacher being able to make it through the day.

By the time an average city student enters 9th grade (whether they've passed 7th or 8th grade or not) they are reading at a 3rd or 4th grade reading level.  They can sound out words, but comprehension is very very low.  Why did these students supposedly do well in the elementary grades for so long?  The answer probably has more to do with the tests, but I honestly do not know.  The supposed "middle-school drop-off" is more often a middle-school reality check as the skills tested become comensurate to the skills that are supposed to be taught.

Students in city schools who are socially promoted to 9th grade hit a wall not because of a failure of the efforts of some very hard-working teachers, but because they are finally socially promoted to a grade where failure is possible.  Students in the suburbs who are socially promoted without passing 8th grade also find failure is possible, but the vast majority of them have enough academic preparedness to make the leap to high school once that realization has kicked in.  More often these students failed academically due to laziness instead of inadequacy.

I spent 15 years teaching in city schools.  I have spent the last year subbing in a variety of suburban schools.  The difference is remarkable.  Conditions in suburban middle schools are generally better than any city middle or high school as far as student attitude, academic achievement, drive and behavior is concerned.  Many suburban 8th graders can write circles around city 11th graders.  Suburban students often have real discussions about their academic work, and can be turned loose on an academic assignment and they will do it without too much need for prodding.  I've seen it.  After 15 years in the city, I was stunned by it.  Stunned.

This difference is NOT a result of superior teachers.  In fact, at least at the middle and high school level, city teachers are probably better prepared and more creative with their lessons than suburban teachers seem to be.  I have seen more than a few lessons in the suburbs that would go wildly off the rails in the city simply due to the intense boredom generated by a lecture or a failure to provide enough work to fill the class time.  Suburban kids endure these lessons because they know they will get decent jobs when they are done (with college, anyway.)  City kids would not let their teachers get away with lessons as "traditional" as the lectures and rote memorization I've seen, and if there's ever down time in the classsroom, city students will fill it with chaos and noise.  It is NOT the teachers who are to blame for the outcomes of the city schools.

If teachers had their way, social promotion would be a thing of the past, and students would get promoted solely on merit, and if that meant there was a special elementary school with 18-year-old third graders, then so be it.

I honestly believe most administrators don't actually want to socially promote students either.  It makes discipline harder for them to maintain.  Administrators, however, have very few metrics to be measured by, and suspension rates and passing rates are those metrics.  The suppression of one and inflation of the other is completely at odds with what's good for anyone else in the district, but they do it for the same reason most people do crap they don't want to at their job: they want to keep their job.

Should we blame the parents?  No.  In general, they are a direct result of trends and forces well beyond their control.  Jobs with wages too low to support a family, social programs that actually punish marriage, a legal system seemingly designed to send as many black men to prison for as long as possible, all these and more are factors that tend to keep parents who want to do a good job from being able to follow through on that desire.

If the governor really wants to improve public schools, if he's genuinely interested in that outcome, then the solution is NOT to go after the hard-working besieged teachers in the few difficult schools.  The solution is so much harder and more wholistic than that.  Living wage jobs, a justice system that actually dispenses justice instead of oppression, social programs designed to keep families intact and in fact promote that end - those are reforms that would be much more effective at helping school children succeed.  They are also difficult, long-term reforms that will take years to bear significant fruit.  Unfortunately, our political system, like our media and business systems require immediate results, regardless of the long-term consequences.

Why does Il Duce Cuomo hate public schools and teachers so?  Ask the hundreds of thousands of dollars that have flown into his campaign coffers fromcharter school proponents and companies.  Charter schools sound like a good idea.  Planted firmly between private and public schools, charter schools offer parents an option to send their children to schools that supposedly have higher standards for behavior and academics; producing results that, depending on the metric and the measurer, are anywhere from equivalent to better than public schools.  However, these comparisons are relatively invalid, and charter schools actually hurt the public schools.

Charter schools, by virtue of their size and funding, do not have to accept special ed students (well, they do, but they don't have to provide the support structures of small classes, one-to-one aides and the like, so few special ed students even try.)  This leads to test scores skewed by falsely equivalent  students.  Public schools are forced to provide needed support structures for spec ed, regardless of cost or assessment outcomes.  Charter schools also can expel difficult students back to public school.  I know this for a fact, as I have received those students in the past.  The removal of disruptive students and the example that sets for other students has a tremendous impact on the behavior in charter schools, while at the same time dumping problem-causing children back into the public schools.  Comparing public and charter schools is about as valid as comparing two glasses of water, one from a fresh artesian well and one from a stagnant pond.

The push for ever more charter schools at the expense of public schools also has a significantly deleterious impact on the teachers' unions and pay for teachers.  A not insignificant factor considering Il Duce's antipathy towards loci of power and strength not named Andrew Cuomo.  Get enough charter schools going, and the public schools will nothing more than holding pens for the worst behavior problems and the special ed kids.

Fine, you say.  The problems are real and systemic and they're not going to be easily fixed and it's not the teachers' fault.  How do we deal with these problems?  The answer, of course, is to deal with the poverty.  Rochester is the poorest city in New York and third most impoverished in all the nation (among cities of its size.) The single best poverty program has always been and always will be living wage jobs for even those who have an inadequate education.  New York can have that again if we stop being the most taxed state in the nation.  And forget about "tax incentives" for industry to move here.  We've been doing that forever.  If that were going to work, we'd have been out of this mess 15 years ago.  No, the state government needs to do the hard work of rolling back decades of accretion of taxes and fees and let people and business feel that they will be allowed to thrive and not serve as ATMs for the state.  But, again, that's hard work, and our state doesn't know how to do that.

To sum up, if the people responsible for New York's education who aren't in the classrooms actually wanted to make things better they should stop screwing around with crap that doesn't work but looks like they're doing something.  Instead, they should end social promotion and work with communities and families to provide enriching activities outside of the school environment that will help poor students catch up their vocabulary and life experiences.  Also, a genuine effort to make New York an attractive place to live, work, and found industry would be at least as big a help.

Unless or until these reforms are attempted, anything, and I mean *anything* they try inside schools - from Common Core, to the new evaluations, to even dumping tenure and making it possible for the governor to fire anyone anyone he wants at the drop of a hat - will not work.  Period.