Governor Joe Manchin has decided to launch a full scale assault against the status quo in the West Virginia school system. West Virginia ranks 16th in the nation in spending per pupil, $1,000 more than the national average. It also ranks high in other spending indicators as well.
Okay we get it. West Virginia spends a lot of money. We and Governor Manchin ask, where are the results?
We could blame the teachers, but we will not. We could blame the parents, but that makes less sense. The fact is that, and I am speaking as a person who was an education major as an undergraduate, spent a few years as a substitute teacher, and has seen two children grow up in West Virginia schools, the entire system is, as the military men call it, FUBAR. You can ask a vet to translate that for you.
Our biggest mistake lay in moving away from community based schools. You can still see the buildings from that era on roadsides everywhere. Some were one room schools, others a little larger. They are usually square, whitewashed wooden buildings that do not look expensive to build or maintain. I asked someone once why we stopped building those schools, at least for elementary and junior high students. I was told that they represented a fire hazard. This is interesting because I have never heard of a rash of fires buring down schools in the old days. Additionally, the fact that so many of those buildings still exist is a testament to their original design and construction. Some remain standing even when vacant for decades. Certainly such structures required much less investment in resources, resulting in a larger percentage of money actually used for teachers and students.
At some point the state embraced the concept of giant consolidated schools as the wave of the future. We uprooted students from their towns and made them ride buses sometimes for an hour and a half to get to school. Fewer teachers had direct community connections with the students they taught. You have more incentive to put a little more into time with a student if you see the parent in church on Sunday or at little league pratice. We need deconsolidation. Smaller community based shcools with less travel burdens on children will give them more time to study and more time to do the things they want to do, as opposed to communting up to three hours per day. Smaller classrooms in those schools allow for more instructional attention. We don't need schools with all the latest technological bells and whistles. We need smaller schools with less students. If this means less computers, less televisions, and less gizmos, so be it. Too many of them cannot write a paragraph, but they are very Facebook literate. Which is the more important skill?
Get rid of block scheduling and go back to Carnegie units. Block scheduling requires students to spend two hours on each subject at a time. I can tell you as an adult college student, two hours was more than I could stand for subjects that I loved. You force a student to endure two hours of a subject they hate and you will get worse results. I remember the arguments made for it, more time for creative teachers, teachers will just have to work harder to make it more interesting, etc. The fact is that you make policy to incorporate the less optimistic scenarios. You account for the fact that some kids hate math and some kids hate history and they can only force themselves to pay attention for an hour at the most.
Eliminate the Department of Eduation and any federal legislation concerning schools. States and localities ought to make education policy, not the federal government. Obama's administration made federal education policy a scandal by appointing a guy to run safe schools who included anecdotes in his book about encouraging underage boys to go to bus stations to have sex with older men. No Child Left Behind has destroyed the confidence of many teachers because it tries to force communities into a set of standards determined by numbers. Standardized tests have never taught anyone to read and actually discourage teaching that results in thinking.
Eliminate educational psychology courses in favor of more content classes for teaching students. I took three ed psych classes and they essentially all taught me the same thing. Teachers need to know a lot more about the subjects they teach. Twenty years ago the content education required of teachers was not enough to create a full understanding of their subject and they are required to know even less now. Of course this creates more reliance on materials provided by others, which may be the idea.
Most importantly we need competition for the school system. It is a classic example of why socialism does not work. In Belgium school funds follow a student to their choice of accredited school or pays for homseschooling materials. If Catholic, Protestant, and home based schooling had the same chance at education funds, this would create competition and force schools to perform better. Already parents opt out of traditional schools at higher levels than we have seen in a long time even with the added financial burden. They sense that things are not right at some level.
Finally, I would encourage our school system to create the position of "master teacher." This would be a certified teacher who went on to earn a masters and/or a doctoral degree in their subject. They would naturally receive more pay. I would also include in teacher education a mandatory semester of substitute teaching. This is where one learns the classroom management skills that educational psychology classes leave out. How do you deal with the 7th grade shop class where the school dumped all the problem kids and the teacher left ten minutes of busy work? You have to really develop some skills to handle a day like that. You find out really fast whether or not you want to be a public school teacher. You also watch the regular teachers at work and hear their complaints. I changed my major in my junior year of college after a year of substitute teaching on the side. I had little trouble managing classes, but I saw right away that I did not want the headaches of dealing with educational bureaucracy or the increasing numbers of problem children forced into regular classes. Weeding out people who just are not right for the job by tossing them into the deep end of the pool is a good idea.
We must also step back from the idea that education is a right. It is not. It is a privilege to be educated. Calling education a "right" creates a culture of entitlement. Children who create problems on a consistent basis should not be in classrooms with children who are there to better themselves. No one is entitled to sit in a classroom and wreck havoc and remain in regular school. No one is entitled to remain in a regular school and mercilessly bully other children. No one is entitled to assault a teacher who dared to discipline them (as has happened in Mineral and probably nearly every county) and remain in regular school. Calling education a "right" hamstrings teacher and school efforts to maintain an environment conducive to learning. Trying to make seventeen the dropout year is backwards thinking. If they want out of school and are only causing problems while there, by all means let them go and allow students who want to learn to gain the advantage of the absence of troublesome peers.
Fact is that these are deeply based systemic problems that demoralize students, teachers, and parents. They feel trapped in a system that believes in numbers, not individuals. I can definitely understand why a public school teacher would have their confidence crushed by the things they must deal with and would never encourage my children to go into that field.
