On Education

Each election cycle comes and goes with elected officials and their challengers touting partisan solutions to national problems. In anticipation of President Obama’s education reform proposal due out tomorrow, I wanted to make the following admission: I don’t quite know what to make of education policy. Since this blog is fairly new, I thought it would be a good idea to begin outlining a position on education, assuming that additional attention, as well as your feedback, can help each of us come to terms with informed, practical solutions to what currently is a national catastrophe.

I've taught several community college courses on government over the past decade, and while my experience is mostly anecdotal (n=6, not the stuff of robust empirical analyses), I remain confident that my experience is not unique. For one thing, international students (particularly Chinese students) consistently outperform their domestic peers in my classroom. What does it say, really, about our education system when international students are outperforming American students in an American Government class? In addition, the quality of writing is on the decline – this too is an observation with limited data points, though not inconsistent with national reading/writing test scores. Worse, still, there seems to be increasing pushback from the students themselves when it comes to completing their assignments and accepting the instructor’s evaluation of their work. *on a side note, last semester I assigned Madison’s Federalist Papers 10 and 51, standard stuff for an American Government course. One student asked if there was a version that translated the works into “current” English. Seriously.

“Keep the students happy,” I hear from some on the left…I call it the Kumbaya approach: “Make them feel better about themselves, it’s not their fault if they are unable to perform to expectations.” From an admin position I can understand the viewpoint…after all, a happy student is less likely to drop out…a happy student therefore results in steady tuition revenue, along with additional money from the state.

On the other hand, the right complains about federal interference and the baneful influence of teachers’ unions. Personally, I have had my issues with unions over the years. I have not been one to lament the waning of union power and influence. Having said that, I do not believe the teachers’ unions are solely or even primarily responsible for the current state of education.

As is usually the case, the cause of the performance decline is complex and varied. For instance, certainly video games and TV play a role, as students spend less time working on their assignments and turning instead to accumulating WOW gold, or to finding out whether Snooki makes it home from her latest bar fight on Jersey Shore. In addition, we seem to be comfortable with the belief that we, as a culture, are entitled to the benefits of education, even if we do little to participate. Parents are also to blame, to be sure. I constantly see parents giving in to their kids’ demands, they seem to have lost their cajones when it comes to instilling a sense of discipline.

Those, however, are cultural issues, not to be solved by any Federal or local education policy maneuver. There are some general policy measures that warrant consideration. Here are a few that come to mind: Investing in classroom technologies, reducing class sizes, increasing the length of the school year, offering more opportunities to study abroad, limiting tenure, providing merit-based performance incentives, developing interactive community programs (yes, think PTA), and perhaps most importantly, paying educators a salary commensurate to the value that we place on education, so that the best and brightest have an additional incentive to join the ranks of this noble profession. These are some of the policy measures that CAN be addressed at the community level, the state level, AND the national level. Each deserves some additional attention, so look for this discussion to continue over the coming days. As always, your own ideas are valued, please feel free to comment if you wish.