Free the schools.

Printed in the Friday, November 19 issue of The New Hampshire "From the Right"

Public education in America today is faltering. Standardization of curricula across the nation along with a buddy-buddy relationship between teachers unions and government has yielded an education system that only serves to turn out unquestioning drones. In this week’s column, I hope to identify what I believe are the key problems with our system and offer ways to address them.

Let me begin by defining what I mean by “public education.” Public education alludes to access to elementary and secondary education for every American child: a general concept that our society regards as crucial for a stable and prosperous future. It does not have to be public in the sense that it is run solely by government at taxpayers' expense. Recently, within the past 40 years or so, we have made sure to never forget our education system in terms of funding. Per pupil spending on elementary and secondary education in America has doubled from 1970, yet test scores have remained stagnant. Figures published yearly by the United Nations reveal that the United States spends more on education as a percentage of its gross national product than do most of the countries whose students outperform U.S. students on standardized tests including Japan, South Korea and Spain.

How did this happen? Why are we continually getting less for our educational buck? Are we adequately preparing our youth to participate in a globalizing, ever-changing economy? The public school system, one that I and many of us at UNH has survived, has become bloated, inefficient and fraught with misguided measurements and priorities.

No Child Left Behind, the federal program that ties grants for schools to nationally standardized test scores, was doomed from the start. The notion of casting a single measurement over an entire nation of 100 million schoolchildren could never have been realized, simply because it does not allow teachers to teach. Furthermore, the incentives tied to these goals put the financial interests of the school ahead of the intellectual development of the students. By tying federally mandated test scores to grants for schools—enabled by the Department of Education—the government encourages school administrators to fiercely scrutinize their teachers in order to make sure their students learn what is federally required. Teaching to the test means big money for school administrators and teachers in the form of new technology or higher salaries and benefits. We can't blame teachers and administrators for pursuing greater financial relief, they're paid too little as it is; the fault is with the system. The incentives are all wrong. The problem is that we've tied the money to the schools instead of the students.

Too much power is given to big teachers unions that benefit from the status quo. Teachers unions put too much pressure on administrators to keep teachers employed rather than to better serve students. Proponents of today's tenure process, unions encourage the employment of older, less-qualified teachers over younger, possibly better teachers simply because of job longevity. Many schools have faced deep budget cuts in this down economy, and most end up firing young, untenured teachers because the tenured ones are untouchable, even if it would benefit students if an older, unmotivated teacher were canned instead of the new, passionate young educator. Tenure allows teachers to elude professional evaluation for the remainder of their career, considerably reducing the incentive to educate effectively. Seniority in teaching should mean a teacher is good enough to be kept around, not that somebody was able to get through 3 years of evaluations and has been coasting for 30.

How can we fix this system? I believe that we have structured the incentives for teachers, administrators and parents all wrong. The way to get more for our educational buck in is to increase competition among schools for children, instead of just money. This does not mean de-facto privatization of our educational system, it means localization. The way to achieve this is to tie funding to the children, not to schools. Think of parents as investors and schools as businesses: schools compete to provide the best education while parents find the best school for their child based on their personal preferences. Take the tax money we spend on scores-based grants and issue it in the form of vouchers for each student. Set up a sort of transportation voucher for the family that chooses a school farther away than usual. Eliminate geographical boundaries that determine where kids go to school; let parents decide where to send their children. Allow educational entrepreneurship to take the reigns and devise a set of best practices that the industry has been missing. Our current education paradigm only values conformity to the system. Sit up straight, be quiet, and learn what you have to. If a student cannot learn this way, we medicate them to the point of submission, assuming the child has ADHD. We need to cultivate the natural curiosity in our children in order to instill a thirst for knowledge, not suppress intellectual development for the sake of obedience (did you ever think giving Ritalin to children was a good idea?). Only through a system that allows schools to invent themselves through competition and market-based, instead of test-based methods of merit can we develop a quality public education system in America.