The Reasons Behind the Failure of American Public Education

The effective running of schools is hampered by a number of features of government institutions that are shared by almost all public schools in the United States. Among them are:

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strict guidelines and policies for employees. According to student achievement, the most successful schools are often those where hiring and firing practices are unaffected by external regulators or supervisors. In their 1990 book Politics, Markets and America’s Schools, John Chubb of the Brookings Institution and Terry Moe of Stanford University offered a convincing justification for this.

One obstacle to an effective school organization is not only tenure. Government-mandated wage schedules collide with school groups that demand more teacher differentiation and pay certain teachers more than others based on performance or drawing power instead of seniority. Salary ranges and positions are set by the state independently of the circumstances of any one institution. School systems, or even individual schools, should be permitted to hire and compensate their teaching staff as they see fit in order to support successful school reform and more effective and efficient use of teachers. If a school is having trouble filling a science teaching vacancy (which is a real problem in many districts), it ought to be allowed to choose the appropriate wage to draw in candidates.

Originally, uniform wage schedules were not implemented as a “better way” to organize the teaching staff, but rather to address racial and social disparities among instructors. The majority of these injustices have been resolved, yet there are still ways to stop them. However, standard wage schedules have outlived their usefulness, as is the case with many government schemes. Paying instructors in one topic more than instructors in another, or rewarding a skilled teacher with 10 years of experience more than a poor teacher with fifteen, are examples of reorganization. Finding and keeping talented math and science instructors is not a secret, as education expert Denis Doyle of the Hudson Institute stated. Pay them what the market will bear, offer competitive benefits, and establish a work atmosphere where they may experience true professional fulfillment. Differential pay is the solution.

However, mediocre educators, who control state capitals and teacher unions, as well as education lobbyists in Washington, are pushing back against this fundamental shift.

a system of civil service. An associated group of issues concerning American public education originates from the early 1900s belief that a civil service that is divided and structured could and ought to provide public services. It appears that the ideal way to structure the teaching profession going forward will be as businesses offering specialized services to schools, as opposed to a unionized group of government workers with long tenure and minimal performance-based accountability. Stated differently, they ought to start to resemble legal firms. Senior partners in teaching companies would be highly respected and well-known, drawing customers to the businesses and passing on their tried-and-true teaching techniques to associates and younger partners. Is it feasible for a system like that to develop in the current public school system?

Monopoly. The idea that teachers react to incentives just like any other labor is not meant as a slight on them. There is little motivation to generate successful pupils when a school has exclusive control over its student body. Individual instructors feel no need to go above and beyond to support children when the teacher next door gets the same benefits for just watching the kids when there is no correlation between student success and awards at the school level. Furthermore, in the absence of competitive incentives in education, parents are more like inconvenient bothers than prospective customers who may shop elsewhere.

centralized choice-making. School leaders lose initiative and policies become disengaged from the students and teachers they are intended to support when choices about things like the daily timetable or the content of the history curriculum are made by decree. In the same way that American business is eschewing the factory model and hierarchical management as utterly obsolete for contemporary businesses, educational institutions too need to look for improved channels of communication and more efficient methods of resolving everyday issues.

A few of these government traits may be lessened by making minor adjustments to the public school system, but they cannot be completely eradicated without significantly reducing government involvement in the educational process.

Whether these traits have gotten stronger over the past few decades is a topic of significant debate. However, the point is not the trend lines. America could afford to have a public education system that was inefficient, bureaucratized, and ineffective in a world where the returns on education declined fairly quickly in higher grades and college, or, to put it another way, when a junior high school education was sufficient to obtain gainful employment and function in society. Students who slipped through the gaps landed with some degree of softness. However, the returns on education have improved considerably in the modern era due to a variety of variables including technological advancement. To survive in a world that is getting more complicated and convoluted by the day, all students need to be able to calculate, communicate, and think.

Politics’ Triumph

The use of American public schools to design societal outcomes that political authorities find acceptable has undoubtedly increased in recent decades. This is an inevitable, and possibly irreversible, shortcoming of state-run education.

Public education is seen by both conservative culture warriors and liberal do-gooders as a means of achieving public goals. A national emphasis on the issue of racial segregation in the 1950s and 60s contributed to the shift in educational policy from concerns about quality to concerns about fairness and access. Activists committed to a variety of causes, including ecology, humanism, spiritualism, and even socialism, started to attack the curriculum in the 1970s. They created a wide range of curricula, manuals, textbooks, and other resources, and they employed political clout to get these incorporated into the curriculum in several jurisdictions. Educators and political figures were drawn to the work of American developmental psychologists and early childhood specialists, who were in the midst of an ecological (non-genetic) phase. They maintained that formal education should be expanded into the preschool years, that specific counseling and self-esteem programs should be added to it, and that early intervention and compensatory education programs should be funded by the federal government. Decision-makers took them seriously. Thus, Chapter 1, Head Start, in-school counselors, and other “innovations” have been implemented, the value of which is now seriously questioned.

It is hard to envisage true progress when every cry for fundamental reform in American education is met with arguments centered not on student accomplishment but on issues of race, class, social mixing, and other social concerns. Learning is challenging, if not impossible, when educators spend much of their workdays filling out paperwork, teaching things that are essentially intellectual but are forced from above, and building students’ self-esteem (as opposed to serf-respect, which is earned rather than built up).

Due to all of the aforementioned issues, government education is completely inappropriate for teaching American children, but private schools provide a model of what American education may be like. The 1980s saw a rise in the number of students attending private schools following decades of decline. This year, around 12% of children in America attended private schools. While non-religious schools are the fastest-growing sector of the private school industry, Catholic and other parochial schools continue to provide underprivileged students and minorities in inner cities and rural areas top-notch educational opportunities. Even when you account for the selectivity of some private schools, studies reveal that private schools produce better pupils than public schools.

While it is true that even private school pupils have seen some academic decreases over the past 50 years, as some proponents of public education claim, this merely serves to highlight the fact that social factors other than education may have a big impact on students’ performance. Even though American families often do not place a high enough priority on education and kids frequently lack effort and focus, private schools offer a superior education than public schools.

The public education system in America is monopolistic, bureaucratic, and excessively regulated, making it terribly unprepared to face the challenges of the twenty-first century by any fair standard. Leaders in politics, business, and education keep discussing “reforming” the present public education system. Rather, they need to be debating its replacement.