Public Schools Should Have NO Performance Standards!
- By PavarottiShakur
- 18 November, 2012
- 5 Comments
Not even Roger Sterling could turn a Baltimore public school around.
“Fire your bottom 10% each year,” is a performance boosting strategy by the great strategic CEO Jack Welch.
Such a strategy works in the private industry because they have one goal — pursue PROFIT. Sell the most product! Make your competitor sell less product! Welch operates in a performance model. There no individual is more important than the products.
Education operates in an equality model. The Department of Education’s foremost priority is to ensure no child is denied access to an education the same way the President’s foremost priority is national defense. Therefore, students with behavioral problems, bad parents, stinky armpits, pending murder trials, and poor grades have just as much a right to an education as well mannered, well raised, geniuses. And I believe that’s great. It ensures slow but steady American progress.
In modern education, bad kids, smart kids, kids with behavioral issues, C- kids, and kids with learning disabilities are all taught in the same room. While it helps the D- kids. It hurts the A+ kids. Because A+ students only have to be quieter than the loudest person and better than half the low achievers to get stellar grades. But those smart kids are in for a rude awakening when they compete on a National level such as the SATs and realize they should have competed against themselves and not the poorest performers. For those students an A+ is not enough.
That leveling of the playing field never happens in for-profit companies. You’ll never see a CEO say, “I have too many great employees in this department. Let me put 10 screw-ups and 5 probationals in there so this company can achieve mediocrity. Yes it will hurt profits but it will make Larry Dunsk more confident.” Again, people are important but not more than the product.
However, public education is all about the people: free lunch, free breakfast, free education, and free childcare from 8am-3pm. It’s about the people, that’s why it’s called it PUBLIC school. In private school parents have to put skin in the game: pay for tuition, books, lunch, football games, field trips AND sign off on the child’s homework every night. With that bond between school and parent and the potential loss of hard earned money, private schools are guaranteed to produce children who take a stake in their education.
Jack Welch can control the quality of easy bake-self washing-barbie doll machine ovens. But can he control this:
Parents are quick to fire teachers. Trust! if every year 10% of your lowest performing teachers in Baltimore, Chicago, and Houston are fired, then that building would be filled with cockroaches and lunch ladies. Most teachers teach because they love what they do. That helps because they work 10 hour days and the pay sucks. They do it for the people.
Sorry to say but a public school cannot be judged on academic performance. Yes they should have many standards but academic performance standards tells us the least about quality teachers, good lesson plans, and strong students.
Public school should be judged how other public services are judged like Parks, Community pools, and Commuter Bus service. These services are judged by the number of people that use it, its availability, and how well it spreads awareness. It is the citizen’s right to use or not use that service! Praising or destroying a school by college acceptance rates is A LIE. So what if 100% of black and hispanic high school students are accepted to a college. Every student in America can be accepted to somebody’s college. But how many mastered the pythagorean theorem, can brake down a text, and find the main idea of a passage more than 4 sentences long. Probably 10%.
It is the parent’s responsibility to educate. If the parent is horrible, it is still the student’s responsibility to educate him or herself.
Copyright © 2013
while i agree that standardized test scores are not a good indicator of the performance of a public school, i have to disagree with the idea that teachers are without fault.
"if you can, do. if you can't….teach".
ever heard that expression? well that shit is true. my grandmother was a teacher all the way into retirement and it has been one of the biggest regrets of her life. most of the young teachers i know are desperately tryna get out of it, and only started cuz they didn't know what else they wanted to do.
i wish i knew i some teachers that loved teaching lol.
i guess i'm saying that the whole teaching profession needs to be totally revamped, professionalized, and upgraded, including pay. teachers are really important to our society…but its actually waaaaay too easy to become one.
"If u can't…teach." oooh. I'm gonna need a minute to think on that.
uhh yeah. I…I get your point. true – teaching is something anybody can do. And I think that's partly why the job is so hard. BECAUSE EVERYBODY thinks they can tell you how to do your job. I know teachers who received teaching advice from the chronically unemployed, George W. Bush, and drug addicts. Answering a simple "How was your day" will make you think twice.
"Education operates in an equality model." No, education SHOULD operate in an equality model. Part of the problem, however, is that with each passing day, teaching is moving toward the business/capitalism model, which is great for some, but essentially GUARANTEES that there will be losers.
As someone who left the teaching force 6 months ago to try to solve education issues on a macro-scale, I can say that I LOVED my kids, and I did/would do anything for them. Hell, I'm not even teaching anymore, and I'm about to go help one of my former students with his homework. A lot of the teachers I worked with were the same way. I never understood how a group of people who worked so hard to serve kids and their families could be so vilified.
That being said, the places where I worked were nothing remotely like the schools I attended. About 90% of the students I taught lived in poverty, and the last two years I taught, I had no textbooks to match the standards I was charged to teach. We hear a lot about standards and accountability, but the reality, is that test scores are emphasized much more greatly in places like this–places where the majority of kids are black or Hispanic and live in poverty. We were forced (by the superintendent and administration) to spend so much time on test-taking, that our children got precious little time devoted to critical thinking and higher order thinking skills. Kids that the school I went to are still getting the higher order stuff we got when I was in school 10 years ago. Is this disparity the teachers' fault? No. It's not even the parents' fault. It's a structural/societal/systemic problem that is being exacerbated by this current standards and accountability movement. Until these structural problems are addressed, our children will continue to lose.
Kristen, I'm eager to do something huge for local education. What ideas large or small do you think could make a significant change?