Morning Shots

David Mathews, president of the Kettering Foundation, recently came out with a book titled “Reclaiming Public Education by Reclaiming Our Democracy” (dedicated site here – including free download of the first chapter). As with his last work on the subject, “Is There a Public for Public Schools?” (now out of print), Mathews provides an insightful and thorough analysis of the disconnect between the public and the modern education system, and in this work goes into greater detail on what he sees as the solution.

As with his last book, Mathews offers a great deal of evidence as to the roots and the current state of the issues preventing community engagement. It’s a challenge that’s been more than a century in the making: when the idea of professional specialization took hold at the end of the 19th century, the public passed the reins of our schools to a new class of education administrators, and that trend grew over time into the chasm we see today between the two groups. As a result, we have owners who aren’t getting the results they want from schools, but don’t feel qualified to direct change, and we have experts who resent being second-guessed by people who aren’t qualified to make decisions. (For more, see my notes on his last book here.

He also paints an exciting picture of what education could look like if communities were welcomed and fully involved. He sees the potential for the community itself as an educational institution, allowing for reinforcement and application of academic content in a real-world environment made up of encouraging and active citizens. And just as importantly, he sees the public as the proper authorities to set educational mandates –the outcomes we wish to reach by educating our kids.

However, while his analysis of the problem

Read More …

Coaches must produce winning teams or they will be terminated. Managers must make their quotas or they will not be retained. Teachers must ensure that students…oh, wait a minute. Tenured teachers will receive an increase in salary every year based on their level of education and years in the classroom.

Mike Antonucci, writing in the Education Intelligence Agency Communiqué says that, “Student enrollment in the United States will grow this school year by a total of 349,452 students (0.7 percent). The number of classroom teachers is expected to grow by 62,443 (2.0 percent).”¹ This translates to, “one new teacher for every 5.5 new students.”² Although most enrollments will be at the secondary school, “49,965 more elementary school teachers (2.8 percent),” are expected to be hired in our schools.³ “That’s one new K-8 teacher for every 1.8 new K-8 students”.⁴ I’m left wondering how this can happen.

Antonucci explains that there will be significant teacher turnover in the coming years through retirement and layoff of probationary teachers. Tenured teachers, in all likelihood, won’t be affected.⁵ Retirements and layoffs cannot be the only way to accommodate all these new teachers.  There will have to be additional ways to add more staff. 

Almost five years ago, Jay Greene, a Senior Fellow at the Manhattan Institute for Policy Research co-wrote a piece about the effects of funding incentives on special education enrollment. What he and his colleague determined was that, “schools are increasingly diagnosing students as disabled and placing them in special education for reasons unrelated to those students’ genuine need for special education services.”⁶ Ample evidence seems to suggest that it is financially advantageous for a school to label a child “special needs” because state and federal funding can then pay the tab–provided the school is located in a bounty system state.

Read More …

During the past few years, scores of impoverished inner-city schools have shut their doors. On the surface, that could be a blessing. After all, one of the major problems with American education is that bad schools seem to live forever.

But, alas, I’m not writing about those schools–the persistently failing public schools that, under No Child Left Behind, are supposed to be ”restructured” out of existence, or at least subjected to an extreme makeover. No, the ones leaving children standing outside their locked doors are generally places of deep learning, community institutions that have effectively served the children of the poor for generations. They are Catholic parochial schools–and their closure is nothing but a tragedy.

The trend is unmistakable. The Archdiocese of Detroit closed 21 schools last year (and more are likely to shut next year). The New York and Brooklyn archdioceses shut down 36 schools over the past two years. In 2005, the Chicago archdiocese ended operations in 18 schools. And the tally in Boston? Twenty-one schools over four years. The longer-term trends are even bleaker: Several big cities, such as Chicago, serve less than a third of the students today than they did 40 years ago.

The closures have little to do with the quality of education that these schools provide. Two decades of studies have shown them to be effective, especially for poor and minority children. Rather, broader demographic trends are to blame. Simply put, the schools’ pipeline of affordable teachers has run dry. Once upon a time, most Catholic-school instructors were members of religious orders, requiring little or no cash compensation; now there are more nuns over age 90 than under 50 in the U.S., and only five percent of the schools’ teachers come from religious orders. Lay teachers must be paid a decent wage, pushing Catholic-school

Read More …