Education Inc.

After branding the whole education system a failure, the "experts" have decided that "bad" teachers are causing the system failure. As a result, a movement of measurers and evaluators has invaded schools to find those teachers, who measures are low, lay them off and thereby improve the educational system. Case in point is Michelle Rhee in Washington DC. She came in with ideas very much like the one employed by a new company CEO who wanted to employ mercilessly the tools of the trade: hiring and firing of teachers. The communication with the public has changed from open forums and public discussion into pronouncements, proclamations or simple hiding of information.

Instead of a mode of studied seriousness, the DC public schools started to look arrogant, know-all and dismissive of the public. Suddenly, new teachers hired during the summer were laid off several months later because an alleged budget shortfall that soon after was discovered to be an accounting error. Do you expect such reality to improve education? Schools changed from educational institutions to not entirely private enterprises with bottom lines in the form of test results, managers as royalty , teachers as expendable resources; students as raw material.

First, the education system in the US is not a failure. There are excellent schools and then there are bad schools. Well off neighborhoods have great schools. The reason these schools are excellent is way beyond great teachers. Actually, the strength of these schools makes them function well even with mediocre teachers. The schools are well equipped; they offer a wide variety of courses; parents are typically highly involved. Poor schools slowly lose excellent teachers through attrition; the equipment is not up to par; parent are way too busy to make ends meet leaving involvement in schools second to survival (can you blames them?); kids grow up in less stable families and is less than perfect condition; poor neighborhood suffer from higher crime and neglect.

Laying off teachers because parents are poor seems as a reasonable approach to the “experts.” To the lay men it seems moronic. Running tighter school ships may help. This help, however, will increase school performance somewhat, but in the larger picture, the improvement will be limited. The damage to the teachers’ moral and the industrialization of education will end up costing students way more than added efficiency.