More on the Education Core Competency

Last week, I wrote a post entitled "Returning to the Core Competency" where I argued that schools have gotten so lost in the myriad details of social programs and social justice that they have lost focus on the one thing we expect schools to do--i.e. educate children.

The post garnered some lenghty comments that I thought I would try to address. Mike wrote:

A lack of will and management backbone is also a problem. Who can review a group, no matter how worthy, asking for school time to present its program, and measuring it against the guiding principle (core business) and say, "I'm sorry. It would cut into instruction time. We just can't do that"? Unfortunately, very few principals.

It can be done. It should be done. It's unlikely to be done on a large scale. Tragic.

I fully agree, it is tragic that we do not do such exercises when we think about education. But the even greater tragedy is that we take the same attitude Mike does and seemingly resign ourselves to the status quo.

Does the course of action I suggest take time and political guts (another thrust of Mike's comments), absolutely!! But that is not the bar to success, merely an obstacle. Afterall, the money being spent on these programs is our tax money!! When Congress suggests appropriating money to build a bridge to nowhere, the whole country goes beserk and the concepts of reigning in government spending takes center stage. Yet aside from entitlement spending (Medicare, Social Security and the like), the single greatest national expenditure is on education, nearly $600 billion dollars a year at the combined state, local and national levels. The spending on educaiton continues to increase and we almost never question what the money is being spent on. Such an attitude is not prudent, leads to corruption and a sense of entitlement among the education bureaucracy that they simply need more money to do all of these jobs.

Returning to the core competency is about aksing ourselves whether spending all that money actually does something to improve the education of our children.

In a different comment, Brad Hoge wrote this:

I've talked to teachers who have students coming to school smelling of urine because there is no responsible parent in their household. I've talked to teachers who have children in their classrooms unable to obtain even the most basic school items because of real poverty. These are not isolated incidents, they are somewhat common to schools in poor areas (inner-city, Appalachia, any poor area the stories are the same).

There has indeed been a drain on the "core constituency" of schools by programs that provide counseling, nutrition, afterschool programs, etc. but we should ask ourselves why before throwing the baby out with the bath water.

The bottom line of what is wrong with education is a lack of community support (at all levels, local, state and federal). Teachers must face increasing challenges with decreasing support because we want to solve our problems by ignoring the true causes of poverty and neglect while insisting on a return to the basics.

Should schools be the place where these inequities are addressed? Absolutely not, but until some other agent of change arises, what else are we to do with children who are truly challenged by their environments? We certainly are NEVER going to solve these problems by ignoring them, no matter how noble our utopian ideals are.

Looking back at what I wrote, I can see where Brad might infer that I think all "social" programs at schools should be scrapped and that my policy suggestion would be "throwing the baby out with the bath water." However, that is certainly not my intention. There may be programs, such as free and reduced breakfasts and certainly lunches, that when provided to students have a direct impact on their ability to learn. For example it is very hard to learn when you are hungry. I also know that often the meals that poor rural and urban students receive at school may be the only decent meals they get. Thus a program such as this one, which is in my book a "social" program would probably pass muster and not be subject to the budgetary axe.

However, having said that I hope, dear readers, that you can understand that programs not directly related to education drain resources away from the core mission of schools.

I am not sure what Brad is referring to when he states that the root cause of problems in education is a lack of support for teachers and schools. The last I looked, financially, schools are doing quite well on paper. The problem is, I believe, in implementation. I once read a quote, I believe in Joe Williams' book Cheating Our Kids, where a bureaucrat in Washington DC once said that schools were in good shape, just look at all the people who work here. This is the kind of mindset that garners a failure to look critically at how we spend money in the education system.

Finally, in a pretty vitriolic attack on all school choice advocates, Wax Banks wrote:

If the 'playing field isn't level,' if people aren't performing up to spec in classes, it is the responsibility of the public school system to help them. That is, after all, its purpose. But many right-leaning critiques of the school system amount to nothing more than '...but the eternal verities! Old values! Back to basics! We wouldn't have to pay special attention to anyone (read, in general: nonwhites) if we could just teach our children better, the old ways. By, for instance, paying special attention to them...' The standard conservative critique of public education holds that we focus on 'peripheral' matters to the detriment of students, but in defining 'core' concerns, commentators invariably demonstrate very common myopia about what exactly belongs in the classroom. Usually it's some vision of the 50's or 60's - a Cold War vision, a pre-structuralist vision, a positivist vision, a Great Man vision, an antitechnological vision. Most frighteningly, it's a viciously antimeritocratic vision from the very beginning, because - for instance - your 'core curriculum' notion is set up primarily to unmake the 'equal opportunity' afforded students in public school. If nothing else our kids should get to start on more or less even ground, in terms of resources and requirements. What exactly bothers you about that notion?

Typical of such screeds, the entire message is garbled with pseudo-intellectual thought about the relevance of a rather simple idea.

First, if the playing field is not level, why is it that the schools must be the agent leveling the field. Why are not other social programs in place to perform such tasks if society believes such tasks are worthwhile? Such matters are done in the schools because it is the one budgetary area in which no one will seriously question the propriety of expending funds to "level the playing field." Second, there is a difference between schools addressing the unlevel playing field in terms of education and an entirely different matter to level the socio-economic playing field. Third, the purpose of an education system is to educate and that education is the school system's effort at social change, providing those on the lower end of the socio-economic ladder an opportunity to move up. The leveling of the playing field is an outcome of education, not the starting point. No two children, no matter their background, start at the same point or level when the begin school. To believe otherwise is simply wrong.

Next, Wax Banks seems to imply that beacuse I criticize the "peripheral" matters in our school system, I am invariably asking for a return to a 1950s or 1960s era of education or some other bygone era and I have some political ax to grind. Finally, my vision is

Most frighteningly, it's a viciously antimeritocratic vision from the very beginning, because - for instance - your 'core curriculum' notion is set up primarily to unmake the 'equal opportunity' afforded students in public school.

I will admit that I have a political ax to grind and I do believe I have never made a secret of it although I may not have been explicit about it as I am now. I do believe the current policies and politics of the public education system is doing more to undermine our nation's children than any single policy in America. I seek to change those policies in favor of a market based/choice model similar to one that works for our university system. There, I am explicit.

But, at the same time, I have no illusions that a better time existed in forty or fifty years ago in terms of education. But a return to basic education, as the core competency of our schools, does not mean that a return to an era that simply did not exist. A return to a core curriculum, one based on liberal arts and sciences, with a focus on core knowledge and skills, will do more to provide "equal opportunity" to everyone than any social program ever could. Such a curriculum provides students with a solid foundation for everything they will do in life, from going to college, entering the job market or raising a family.

We as a nation have been able to put 14 men on the moon, sent probes to the farthest reaches our solar systems, built machine only a few atoms in size, cured devastating diseases and a whole host of scientific and social miracles, yet we still cannot teach every child to read and do math. Why?

I truly believe that a strict focus on the core competency of education and expending resources only on that goal will do more for our children than any fancy curriculum, instructional method or textbook. It will perform better than any multi-degreed teacher and it will serve all children because the schools can constantly assess whether or not our tax dollars are properly spent.