Who speaks for our children?
“When the media talk about public schools, we always hear about teachers, salaries, tenure and classroom size- what I want to know is why don’t we hear more about the parents and the students? If policy is focused on students- wouldn’t they see better results?” (Steven Crowder, PJTV)
It seems jaw-droppingly obvious. When we talk about education- we should be focusing on kids, right? After all, the children are the ones attending school (hopefully) and the ones who are supposed to be receiving an education (again, hopefully).
But as Mr. Crowder states- far too often it seems, the real focus of the education debate gets lost in the political turf-war waged aggressively by an entrenched special-interest: the teachers’ unions. While trying to maintain the facade that they are the ones fighting “for” our children, they continue to pursue an agenda that adamantly resists any change that may actually prove beneficial for students- changes like greater parental choice in education.
I know that, perhaps, I am repeating myself here, but when are parents going to stand up and take back control?? We know that overwhelmingly parents support greater choices in education- as Mr. Crowder notes in the video, in DC that number is around 80%- so when are parents going to realize that the unions are not supporting the best interests of their children?
It is fair here, too, to place some of the blame on the politicians - as they continue to place the interests of unions over the interests of children. Not that it is any excuse - but when politicians are hearing from a very vocal group, even if it is, in reality, a very small minority- they can often be mislead into believing that they are are somehow doing the right thing. And so again, it comes back to parents to become advocates for their children and to let lawmakers know they will no longer sit idly by and allow unions to dominate the debate over the future of education.
What parents, and politicians, must remember, is that a union- even when comprised of teachers- is a special interest. Their mission is to protect the interests of their members. Period. The students and parents are NOT a member of the union- and therefore will never be the primary interest of the union.
As a parent, what can you do? Get involved! Call, email, visit your local legislator (or local House of Delegates candidate)- talk to them about education. (Don’t know your local legislators- find them here.) Ask them what they propose to improve education. Are they willing to talk about educational choices- or do they just talk about teacher salaries, tenure, classroom size and funding? Urge them to support school choice and charter school options for families. Remember, many of our own lawmakers are also parents, too- and education issues directly impact them as well. They need to hear from other parents- not just special interests- and they need to hear that parents are supporting education reforms that are focused on children first.
Making education a priority
Hope everyone enjoyed a wonderful weekend!
Over the weekend, I was thinking about our fight for education reform (not that that comes as much of a surprise, I’m sure)- and I had to wonder where it “ranks” for most folks. As I see the political campaigns out doing their door-to-door walks, and watch one campaign commercial after another on tv- I hear about “transportation solutions” and “jobs,” but when it comes to education reforms, things seem to go quiet.
Okay, so I’ve seen plenty of political surveys- and I know that usually generic “education” ranks as a top priority for most voters. Sadly when it comes to “solutions” for education- too many politicians come up short.
Oh sure, we all hear their soundbites: “I’m FOR education.” (What does that even mean??) “I’m for increasing education funding.” (But can you show me where that funding will produce measurable results??) “I support our public schools.” (Gee, that’s great, but what about those public schools that aren’t working for all our kids?)
And what gets me even more is those politicians- like my neighbor- who simply stick the teachers’ union “endorsed” stickers to their yard signs. As if that is going to convince me they are really strong on education. If anything that tells me that they are going to put unions first, which too often means putting kids last.
Derrell Bradford, of E3 (Excellent Education for Everyone)- an awesome organization out of New Jersey working for ed reform- was on MSNBC last week and had a great line about “our schools are organized in ways that make adults happy, but are not serving our children…”
And sadly that seems all too true. But what is worse- why won’t anyone do anything about it?
Shouldn’t parents demand more from the educational system? Shouldn’t we demand more of politicians? They are quick to offer “solutions” for so many other areas of our lives (whether government has any business getting involved or not), but when it comes to our kids, why do so many of them seem more worried about appeasing the teachers’ unions than actually proposing real solutions that will help children to actually succeed?
In this article, Education - ‘the great equalizer’ from One News Now, Mr. Bradford explains:
“Every person has to make education a priority — every child, every parent,” he contends. “It is a serious thing, it is the thing, it is the great equalizer, and it is how we will fix much that ails this great nation.”
And we couldn’t agree more. And in making education a priority, we have to stop letting unions dictate what needs to be done to improve education. Parents need to recognize that the unions are in it to protect their membership- not stand up for children. Parents have to be the ones to stand up for their children and demand better.
He adds that at the same time leaders cannot tell children to take education seriously and then continue to send them to failing schools. Bradford believes that educational choice is key to success — and that with choice, children can get a superior education at a fraction of the cost the government is currently spending per child.
We can no longer sit back and allow politicians to feed us empty lines about “supporting education.” We can no longer allow solutions that do not put kids first. And bottom line- we can no longer accept education reforms that do not allow parental choice to be a part of the solution.
Will you make a difference?
With yesterday’s events in DC, I didn’t have a chance to post this article in the Washington Times from Dan Lips at the Heritage Foundation: “A back-to-school wake-up call.“
In the article, Mr. Lips examines the cost of public education in this country, but also points out that we don’t always get the bang-for-our-bucks that we should expect (and even demand) from our investment.
The typical child entering first grade this year can expect taxpayers to spend more than $100,000 on his or her education through high school. (The Department of Education reports the average annual per-pupil expenditure in U.S. public schools is now more than $10,000.) But the data show that, all too often, our six-figure investment in every child’s future doesn’t guarantee a quality education.
What we particularly liked about this article is that Mr. Lips gives parents a homework assignment: get involved. Parents cannot expect special interests (like teacher’s unions) to fight for what is best for their kids. Instead, of hoping that elected leaders and education bureaucrats will “do the right thing,” parents must themselves become educated- and make sure their voice is heard- if they really want education reforms that will make a real difference in our children’s education and our future.
As kids go back to school, here’s some homework for adults for the upcoming school year. Become informed and make your voice heard in debates about education. Learn about what we’re spending on our public schools and what we’re seeing in terms of student performance. Follow what is happening in the state legislature and on the local school board.
Write a letter to the editor and make your opinions known. Challenge your elected representatives and demand that they put the interests of kids ahead of the special interest groups.
It will take hard work. But if enough people get involved and demand serious reform, we can fix the chronic problems that plague our nation’s public schools. The future of millions of children — indeed, of the nation itself — depends on it.
We invited you to get involved today. Help make a difference for your children- and for all our children. They are counting on us.
A must read: teacher accountability?
A long article, but well-worth the read. As Joel Klein and New York City struggles to improve the city’s schools, they face an uphill battle (to say the least) with the teachers union.
From The New Yorker: The Rubber Room: The battle over New York City’s worst teachers.
A few highlights (or should we say low-lights?):
Neither the Mayor nor the chancellor is popular in the Rubber Room. “Before Bloomberg and Klein took over, there was no such thing as incompetence,” Brandi Scheiner, standing just under the Manhattan Rubber Room’s “Handle with Care” poster, said recently. Scheiner, who is fifty-six, talks with a raspy Queens accent. Suspended with pay from her job as an elementary-school teacher, she earns more than a hundred thousand dollars a year, and she is, she said, “entitled to every penny of it.” She has been in the Rubber Room for two years. Like most others I encountered there, Scheiner said that she got into teaching because she “loves children.”
“Before Bloomberg and Klein, everyone knew that an incompetent teacher would realize it and leave on their own,” Scheiner said. “There was no need to push anyone out.”
And:
I asked the woman for her reaction to the following statement: “If a teacher is given a chance or two chances or three chances to improve but still does not improve, there’s no excuse for that person to continue teaching. I reject a system that rewards failure and protects a person from its consequences.”
“That sounds like Klein and his accountability bullshit,” she responded. “We can tell if we’re doing our jobs. We love these children.” After I told her that this was taken from a speech that President Obama made last March, she replied, “Obama wouldn’t say that if he knew the real story.”
It’s definitely an eye-opening read. There are so many wonderful teachers out there, and they too should reject a system that tolerates incompetence and rejects consequences for failure.
Shocker!
Just shocking. The national teachers’ union opposes charter schools.
The National Education Association pointedly criticized the Obama administration, saying the president is relying too heavily on charter schools and standardized tests in his attempt to overhaul the nation’s schools.
“We urge the administration to step outside of this narrow agenda,” the nation’s largest teachers union said in a public statement filed Friday with the Education Department.
Interesting that the union would accuse the administration of a “narrow agenda,” when the administration is considering (at least in theory) something aside from the narrow scope of status quo public schools.
Not that we agree with everything they are doing (or how they are going about it), but encouraging charter schools as another option for education reform is a “narrow agenda?” Sure, it could be a broader agenda- they could work to include all kinds of school choice as a means to education reform- but for some reason I don’t think that is what the union was getting at either.
Quick morning updates
The Virginia legislature is back in Richmond today for a special session. While originally called to deal with a Supreme Court opinion dealing with evidence in legal cases, the Governor has now announced a further budget shortfall and the need for more than $1 billion in budget cuts.
More tributes to Mrs. Rose Friedman, a tireless school choice and freedom advocate, who passed away yesterday.
And an interesting article in the Washington Times, “Don’t look for the union label.”
Maybe there can be too much of a good thing. That appears to be the lesson to take from two kinds of school choice — charter schools and education voucher programs — that have enjoyed increasing success in recent years. As voucher programs come of age and charter schools proliferate, they are both threatened by the tedious mandates and workplace rules they were created to circumvent.
And the implacable enemies of school choice, teacher unions, have supporters between a rock and hard place. They say they will give up their old hostility, but there’s a catch: First schools must be unionized and regulated by government.
Education as “The Way out of Poverty”
This one is definitely worth a read. Michelle D. Bernard, president and chief executive officer of the Independent Women’s Forum and Independent Women’s Voice, shares “The Way out of Poverty,” in Sunday’s edition of The Examiner.
School Choice Virginia Chairman Chris Saxman has made the point before that :
Education is the first rung on the ladder of success for any citizen. As Thomas Jefferson said, “If the children . . . are untaught, their ignorance and vices will in future life cost us much dearer, in their consequences, than it would have done, in their correction, by a good education.”
Ms. Bernard echoes this point, and emphasizes the need for an improved and reformed educational system so that edducation can be a much-needed ladder out of poverty for many kids in this country.
For years, the poor have found the way out of poverty blocked by their lack of access to an excellent education. As individuals, and as a nation, we have a moral responsibility to make sure that education can be the ladder out of poverty.
American education has long been highly stratified. The wealthy send their children to exclusive private schools. Members of the middle class purchase more expensive houses in better neighborhoods to get their children into good public schools.
The poor are left with the educational dregs: Schools where learning is minimal, violence is the norm, and survival is the main objective.
A lucky few win scholarships for their children or save enough money to enroll their children in parochial schools. Most poor students, however, have no choice butto suffer in schools that simply do not work. And many activists of all races, ethnicities, and religious backgrounds who spent years angrily — and justly — challenging the notion of a “separate but unequal” public K-12 education system have remained largely silent about this scandalous situation.
Yet early civil rights activists knew that education was the great equalizer and the key to advancement. This is precisely why one of the principal targets of desegregation was education.
Poor people around the world recognize the centrality of education to advancement. Ask a child walking barefoot for miles to get to a simple classroom in any developing nation what he or she wants, and the response will be an education. The impediments to progress in these nations are far greater than in America, but they know, like we do, that the essential first step in getting ahead is education.
Obviously, not all schools in impoverished neighborhoods fail. Many dedicated teachers do their best in trying circumstances. But they are fighting an entire system seemingly organized to prevent learning and punish achievement.
The problem is not money. Spending does not correlate with academic achievement. Indeed, many of the worst public schools spend the most. They face enormous social problems, of course, yet there are private schools in underserved communities that confront the same difficulties and do far more with less.
The problem is the system. The public school monopoly is organized for the benefit of political constituencies, not families. Administrators, politicians, and teachers unions all put themselves before students. Money is spent on bureaucracy rather than teachers. Jobs are protected irrespective of how badly teachers perform. Administrators and teachers alike dismiss parents’ concerns and resist parental involvement — other than to ratify whatever the system has decided.
These are our children
“Bottom line is these are our children, they are disadvantaged children, and they often return to our public schools,” said Jean Clements, president of the Hillsborough Classroom Teachers’ Association. “I want them to get the best possible education, wherever they get it.”
Yes, you read that right folks. The St. Petersburg Times reports the head of a local Florida teacher’s association putting kids first- not matter where they go to school. Kudos to Ms. Clements for standing up for children and education, and not getting caught up in the politics of school choice and where families choose to educate their kids. And kudos to the Hillsborough County schools and teachers’ union, who have joined forces with a nonprofit Florida voucher group in an effort to provide additional training to private school teachers who serve some of Florida’s scholarship students- among the county’s most economically disadvantaged children.
It is wonderful to see a community coming together and finding common ground on education. As we have noted before, this isn’t a matter of pitting public versus private, home school versus charter school- it is about ensuring every child gets the best education possible and giving them every chance to succeed.
Red-herring shell games?
Yesterday we shared with you the first part in our examination of some of the arguments made by opponents of school choice. In the recent article, “A parent’s right to choose,” we saw several arguments made opposing choice, so today we wanted to take a look at another of these false claims.
“It’s all a red-herring shell game… The people who are pushing choice are the ones who want to be able to send their kids to schools where they have some control over who their kids get to play with, what kind of community the kids are associating with, and they apparently want to turn their backs on their own community school instead of doing the hard work of making sure that the schools that their kids are zoned to go to have the resources and high-quality teachers and kind of administrative support that they deserve to have.
As we did yesterday, we agree - in part. Most people pushing school choice DO want to be able to decide where to send their kids to school and have some control over the kind of community where their kids are being educated rather than having that decision dictated to them by government bureaucrats. And why shouldn’t they? Shouldn’t parents be able to decide if they want their kids in safe schools so they can learn without fear of violence? Shouldn’t parents be able to choose a school where their child isn’t bullied or threatened? Shouldn’t parents be able to choose a learning environment where other students share a passion for learning? It doesn’t seem like that radical a notion to us.
Perhaps some folks are not aware of some of the problems that exist in many schools in Virginia- problems that aren’t so simple that they can just be fixed with more money. Perhaps she is unaware of a growing gang problem in many public schools- even in some elementary schools.
And yet there seems to be a disdain for parents who would want to be a bit more cautious in the “community the kids are associating with.”
This is not about people turning their backs on their own community school – this is about kids and education. As we noted yesterday, there seems to be some distractaction going on from the real issues by focusing simply on schools, rather than the real goal: education.
Parents should not be criticized or faulted for wanting better for their children, for wanting to put them in an education environment where they can thrive, for wanting them to be safe when they leave home every day. It is a shame that some folks would attack those parents for wanting better for their kids.
As in the arguments we examined yesterday, they always seem to manage to bring things back around to their excuse about needing more “resources,” or more accurately, “money.” But as we pointed out yesterday, more money is not always the answer.
Kevin Chavous, a former member of the Washington, D.C., City Council who now heads up the group Democrats for Education Reform and serves on the Board for the Black Alliance for Educational Options points out, again, that the focus here should be education.
“It’s not the money. It’s what you do with the money,” Chavous said. “Funding and fueling a bureaucracy does not ensure that children are going to be educated. And that’s the ultimate goal. The ultimate goal isn’t so many dollars for public education. The ultimate goal is educating children.”
And he’s exactly right. The ultimate goal in any discussion of education reform should be educating the children. We think the only “red-herring shell game” being played here is by the opponents of choice, and their attempts to prevent real efforts for meaningful education reform and more parental choice in education.
Funding schools or funding education?
Yesterday we shared with you the article, “A parent’s right to choose,” from The New Dominion Magazine. Over the next few weeks, we’ll be taking a look at the various arguments made by opponents of parental choice in education - namely the VEA.
The article states, “The VEA opposes public-school-choice initiatives, Boitnott said, instead preferring to see resources are put into individual schools “so that they can be successful, and kids can achieve.”"
We’ll agree with Ms. Boitnott (head of the teacher’s union), in part. We also want schools to be successful and kids to achieve. That’s the easy part. Who doesn’t want that? But to use this as an argument against school choice? That just doesn’t make sense.
Ms. Boitnott argues that “resources” should be put into schools - and by resources we are guessing she primarily means money (based on her other comments). Here is where we start to disagree with her position. Should our focus be on funding “schools,” or on funding “education?”
Now some will argue that they are one and the same or that we’re just splitting hairs. But there is a difference. As taxpayers, what are we investing in with our hard-earned money? Do we want to be simply investing in a bricks and mortar school, or would we rather be investing in a child’s education? I think most people would believe that education is the goal. We want well-educated students who can grow up to be successful, productive members of society. We want a highly trained and qualified workforce to run our businesses and build our economy.
Yet somewhere along the way we seemed to lose sight of that, instead allowing politicians, bureaucrats and unions to convince us that the debate should be about schools, not education. You’ve heard the arguments. Ms. Boitnott does not disappoint here again arguing “But until and unless the Commonwealth of Virginia is able to fully fund public schools in the way that they are required to do by the Virginia Constitution, there is no wiggle room for allowing taxpayer dollars to go toward funding or supplementing funding for private-school educators, because their first and primary responsibility is to the children in the Commonwealth of Virginia’s public schools...”
Again, for her it’s all about the public schools, not about education. (This isn’t really surprising because her primary concern is to protect her union members.) But shouldn’t our “first and primary responsibility” be to ensure every child has access to a high quality education that meets their needs?
Opponents of school choice are fond of using the Virginia Constitution to try and prove their point, yet the Constitution has this to say:
The General Assembly shall provide for the compulsory elementary and secondary education of every eligible child of appropriate age…
While it also establishes a public school system, it is clear to point out that the state has an obligation to provide an education for all students- not simply a public school.
But back to Ms. Boitnott’s first argument about investing in schools to make them successful and help students achieve. Perhaps she should take a look at the American Legislative Exchange Council’s research on the relationship between money and academic results. For the 15th straight year:
The Report Card on American Education clearly shows there is no correlation between educational dollars spent and student achievement in our traditional public school system.
While states continue to invest more and more dollars into existing public schools, they are receiving no added return on their investment. So the VEA’s argument seems to be rather flawed from the start.
So next time a politician or a bureaucrat starts telling you that they are “for education,” ask them what they really mean. Are they really for education- for ensuring every Virginia child has access to a quality education to give them the best opportunity for success- or are they really simply for the existing public school system and preserving the status quo?
