Obama and McCain debate education

The New York Times has posted a transcript of last night's debate between the major party presidential candidates, Sen. Barack Obama (D-IL) and Sen. John McCain (R-AZ).

Because the Commission On Presidential Debates is controlled by the Democratic and Republican Parties the following candidates who have qualified for the ballot in Illinois were excluded: Charles Baldwin (Constitution), Bob Barr (Libertarian), Cynthia McKinney (Green) and Ralph Nader (independent).

Having a ringside seat to one of the most screwed-up school districts in the country, I thought I'd comment on the portion of the presidential debates that had to do with education.

I categorize District 209 (Proviso Township High Schools) has one of the most screwed-up in the country for a couple reasons. Test scores are abyssmal. Last ranking I heard was 90th of 90 districts in northeast Illinois.

But, getting lousy test scores is even more shameful in D209's case because it's not serving students that exclusively come from impoverished families or immigrant families. In the aggregate the families the students come from are not poorly educated. Proviso doesn't have the highest level of students walk through the door, but it's a long way from the lowest too. District 209 takes students who should be doing at least so-so and turns them into low test score machines.

Obama said a couple things that made sense in his initial response. Getting better results is going to require we invest money. People who claim there are money-for-nothing solutions are usually fudging or outright lying. Obama also emphasized getting children on-track early, “early childhood education”.

Then Obama talked about higher pay for teachers, especially in math and sciences. I don't agree that raising pay by itself will improve the situation. I would reduce barriers to people with math and science skills getting into education. Also, the quality of life for teachers is an issue.

I read somewhere, perhaps The Tipping Point by Malcolm Gladwell, that to get good teachers to work at challenging schools it helped to bring a cohort of good teachers together and also bring in good administrators at the same time.

It's hard to convince people who have the math and science skills that they should go into teaching if they are going to be supervised by people who are mediocre and worse managers.

What management training do education administrators receive? The career path seems to be that they get certified as teachers and then get an additional degree and shazam! the people are now managers.

So, if schools want to retain teachers who are talented enough to get other forms of employment the schools need to treat teachers better in the workplace.

Obama scolding parents rubbed me the wrong way.

But there's one last ingredient that I just want to mention, and that's parents. We can't do it just in the schools. Parents are going to have to show more responsibility. They've got to turn off the TV set, put away the video games, and, finally, start instilling that thirst for knowledge that our students need.

It's not that there's not some truth there, but it's not a prescription to do anything useful. Does Obama want to create a program to prepare parents to do something? Does he want to issue a checklist of things parents should be doing? Or does he judge want to encroach on Joe Lieberman's turf of being the national scold.

McCain started off completely full of shit.

There's no doubt that we have achieved equal access to schools in America after a long and difficult and terrible struggle.

But what is the advantage in a low income area of sending a child to a failed school and that being your only choice?

Which is it, Senator? Have we achieved “equal access to schools” or do we have large swaths of the country with “failed schools”? If we have families who are forced to use “failed schools”, how is this equal? Or are all schools failing equally?

Both McCain and Obama seemed to buy into the notion that there are people who good teachers and bad teachers and that the bad teachers should be identified early and transitioned to something else.

Here's what I suspect is a more accurate model.

Most teachers start as middling teachers. They haven't become skilled yet, but they bring the energy of a newbie. All of them get at least a little better; some get significantly better. Eventually, almost all of them become less effective than they were at their peak. This is called "burn-out".

The problem is partially the salary structure. By the time teachers lose effectiveness they have enough seniority that it's very difficult for them to transition to something else and get paid as much money. The teachers feel they have to stay for the retirement benefits.

The problem isn't teachers who were bad from the beginning, but teachers who have significantly declined in effectiveness.

Neither Obama nor McCain seemed to understand the problem of ineffective teachers.

McCain touted the idea of rewarding good teachers. How would this work at District 209? Would the teachers with the best students (PMSA) get most of the rewards? Aren't they already getting the easiest students to educate? Let's say someone did come up with a formula that took into account where the students were at the beginning of the year and at the end of the year. There were no questions about fairness. (This assumption is completely unrealistic, but ignore that.)

How does rewarding good teachers fix a dysfunctional and corrupt school board? How does it fix incompetent administrators? How does it get better prepared students to start at the district? How does it get families to be a more constructive part of the process?

McCain's idea about rewarding good teachers won't accomplish much in the real world except to cause teachers to spend time and energy criticizing the formula for determining who is a good teacher.

No Child Left Behind. Two of the most useful insights I've gotten on NCLB have been at the local level.

Randy Tinder, the former superintendent of District 91 (Forest Park elementary schools) said that NCLB is a rigged evaluation system that will label every public school in the United States a “failing school” in a few years.

I will add to Tinder's thought process (and perhaps he already thought of this, but declined to say it publicly), that the Republican Party wants to cut money going to public schools and send it to private schools, especially religious schools. Labelling public schools as “failing” is part of a strategy to shift public money from public schools to private schools.

Barbara Cole is a local voice that defends NCLB. Cole reasons that by testing and including categories and subcategories that there's no way for schools to overlook when they are providing lousy education to minority groups and special needs students.

Obama criticized NCLB as an unfunded mandate. McCain wanted to renew it, but was reluctant to spend more.

McCain and Obama differed on vouchers. Rachel Cooper discusses the definitions of "vouchers" and "charter schools". Ryan Grim (CBS/The Politico) sorta criticizes Obama on the details of the DC schools. And Steve Benen (Washington Monthly) rips McCain's explanation of the DC program and cites research that says vouchers are ineffective.

Here are the links I found for the minor party candidates' education policies.

Charles Baldwin (Constitution) wants to disband the Department of Education.


Bob Barr (Libertarian) wants to privatize education and speaks favorably of homeschooling.

Cynthia McKinney (Green) calls education a right and decries the disparities in U.S. education.

Ralph Nader (independent) begins his statement about education by say,

Education is primarily the responsibility of state and local governments. The federal government has a critical supporting role to play in ensuring that all children -- irrespective of the income of their parents, or their race -- are provided with rich learning environments, equal educational opportunities, and upgraded and repaired school buildings.

Nader sees the two greatest threats to education as being commercialism and vouchers.

what's needed to fix U.S. public schools?

First, Kill All the School Boards (The Atlantic, Matt Miller) makes the case that local control is bad for schools.

While it's easy to cherry-pick data to make this case, Chicago Public Schools are much less locally controlled than suburban districts and CPS hasn't produced great results. Although, CPS is kinda an odd case to include in the debate because the district has a hybrid system of strong central control combined with elected Local School Councils that can exert some influence.

Back to Miller's article.

But let’s look at what local control gives us today, in the “flat” world in which our students will have to compete.

The United States spends more than nearly every other nation on schools, but out of 29 developed countries in a 2003 assessment, we ranked 24th in math and in problem-solving, 18th in science, and 15th in reading. Half of all black and Latino students in the U.S. don’t graduate on time (or ever) from high school. As of 2005, about 70 percent of eighth-graders were not proficient in reading. By the end of eighth grade, what passes for a math curriculum in America is two years behind that of other countries.

In Bowling For Columbine Michael Moore analyzed violence in the United States by comparing it to Canada, especially levels of violence and rates of firearm ownership. As I understood the film, Moore at least suggested that U.S. attitudes and traditions of violence were influenced by the history of racism and bigotry (against Native Americans, Blacks, certain religious groups, immigrants and descendants of non-European immigrants).

So, it seems possible that local control is not the only uniquely American attribute contributing to our public schools being different and inferior to other countries' public school systems.

Many reformers across the political spectrum agree that local control has become a disaster for our schools. But the case against it is almost never articulated. Public officials are loath to take on powerful school-board associations and teachers’ unions; foundations and advocacy groups, who must work with the boards and unions, also pull their punches. For these reasons, as well as our natural preference for having things done nearby, support for local control still lingers, largely unexamined, among the public.

Would District 88 (Bellwood and Stone Park elementary schools) be better off if bureaucrats appointed by Gov. Rod Blagojevich controlled the district? (FYI D88 just fired its fourth superintendent in four years. Three of the four were not allowed to even complete the academic year.)

Would District 209 (Proviso Township High Schools) be better off if state bureaucrats controlled the school district? Let me rephrase that, would students and taxpayers get better educations with more efficiency in spending if the State of Illinois was calling the shots?

I would give a relatively high probability to things improving if the state controlled these two districts.

But how would Oak Park do? Would Oak Park and River Forest High Schools (District 200) improve? Would District 97 (Oak Park elementary schools) improve?

Which community has more clout: Oak Park or Proviso? Oak Park has succeeded in preventing I-290 from being widened to four lanes causing traffic to bottleneck.

Back to Miller's article. He lists two problems facing local school districts and then writes:

Incompetent school boards and union dominance. “In the first place, God made idiots,” Mark Twain once wrote. “This was for practice. Then He made School Boards.” Things don’t appear to have improved much since Twain’s time. “The job has become more difficult, more complicated, and more political, and as a result, it’s driven out many of the good candidates,” Vander Ark says. “So while teachers’ unions have become more sophisticated and have smarter people who are better-equipped and -prepared at the table, the quality of school-board members, particularly in urban areas, has decreased.” Board members routinely spend their time on minor matters, from mid-level personnel decisions to bus routes. “The tradition goes back to the rural era, where the school board hired the schoolmarm and oversaw the repair of the roof, looked into the stove in the room, and deliberated on every detail of operating the schools,” says Michael Kirst, an emeritus professor of education at Stanford University. “A lot of big-city school boards still do these kinds of things.” Because of Progressive-era reforms meant to get school boards out of “politics,” most urban school districts are independent, beyond the reach of mayors and city councils. Usually elected in off-year races that few people vote in or even notice, school boards are, in effect, accountable to no one.

Thoughts? Reactions?

Miller also lists the inequalities in education funding as being interrelated with local control of education. I have shown in the case of Proviso Township High Schools that lack of resources is not the problem. Per student Proviso spends less that Oak Park-River Forest, but a comparable about to Lyons Township and Riverside-Brookfield. The following local high school districts spend less and get better test scores: Elmwood Park, Leyden, Morton and York.

The beginning of Miller's conclusion poses a good question.

I asked Marc Tucker, the head of the New Commission on the Skills of the American Workforce (a 2006 bipartisan panel that called for an overhaul of the education system), how he convinces people that local control is hobbling our schools. He said he asks a simple question: If we have the second-most-expensive K–12 system of all those measured by the Organization for Economic Cooperation and Development, but consistently perform between the middle and the bottom of the pack, shouldn’t we examine the systems of countries that spend less and get better results? “I then point out that the system of local control that we have is almost unique,” Tucker says. “One then has to defend a practice that is uncharacteristic of the countries with the best performance.

Miller comes down on the side of federalizing public education. To respond with a cheap shot, do you want the guys who decided to invade Iraq (and can't get us out) to decide how to fix Proviso Township High Schools?

I found Kevin Drum's entry (Washington Monthly) more persuasive than Miller's article in The Atlantic Monthly.

[Emily Bazelon's article about school integration in [the] New York Times Magazine is] basically a review of many decades of research showing that the most important way to improve school performance is to eliminate high concentrations of poverty: other things equal, it turns out that academic achievement for all races shows dramatic gains when the proportion of low-income students in a school falls below 50% or, even better, 40%. This finding, says UCLA education professor Gary Orfield, is "one of the most consistent findings in research on education."

Drum notes that many districts don't have the ability to dilute students from families in poverty with students from more affluent families.

But to bring it back to Miller's way of questioning the status quo, what do other countries with high levels of poverty do to deliver education?

ED, what should a quality education include?

WJBD 1350 AM has has a story that references Sen. Kimberly Lightford's (D-Maywood) ideas about education, jobs and poverty.

People without diplomas have inferior jobs and their children tend to live in poverty. There's a committee working to lower the drop-out rate. Lightford then jumps to schools need more money and Illinois needs a tax swap.

Why don't people who have diplomas get good jobs?

• Is it because they know certain facts? Or can't process the information?
• Do employers not offer jobs to people without diplomas?
• Or is it that people who don't show up to class turn into employees that don't show up to work?

The follow-up questions are important. If people without diplomas basically can do the jobs but employers are discriminating then it would make sense to make it easy to get some piece of paper equivalent of a high school diploma.

If the issue is absenteeism, it doesn't seem like investing in teachers is an appropriate strategy. What's the point of having great teachers if the students aren't coming to class?

Here's a concern: what if the schools, teachers unions, administrators, et al are starting with the premise schools need more money and are fitting their arguments around the assumption that more money is the end and not the means to educating students?

Have we, as a society, defined what a good education is? Is it time to step back from the education issue and ask, what constitutes a quality education in this era?

Once we define a quality education then we can design a system to deliver a quality education to all.