Friday’s non-political roundtable (i.e., dinner with friends) led to someone asking me what I thought of the documentary Waiting for Superman. My takeaway from it is that it’s an obvious hit piece on the teachers’ unions, mostly because the people who’ve seen it always talk about the tenure issue and how the unions are ruining public education.
He then asked me if I thought there was an education crisis in America, and with great pause I replied, “not really.” The fact is that in general our leaders don’t value education anywhere near as much as their constituents do. Most people tend to agree that we don’t spend enough on the system without really knowing the intricacies of it. Most don’t realize that our property taxes are negligible and that we’d never notice an increase of 10 or even 100 points in our mil levies.
If there is an education crisis in America, it’s twofold. We don’t pay enough into the system, and poorer communities get the worst part of the deal. But the public education system itself is not a failure because it’s succeeding in exactly what it’s set up to do.
My kids are learning the same curriculum that was presented to me 30 years ago. And while it may be easy for me to make this argument because both mine are honor society types in public schools, I can assert that teacher pay and school funding in general have very little impact on a child’s performance. Like their parents, kids have so many factors at play in their lives, a great teacher is not going to make or break any of them. Either they have it or they don’t.
Kids who want to succeed will develop good study habits, or the kids who stumble upon good study habits will succeed. There’s no magic formula, no amount of funding, no standardized program that will change this. It’s the way’s it’s always been and how it always will be. The overall performance of all these kids over time is a normal distribution. However, if we ever have enlightenment in this area it will be the kids themselves who realize on their own what George Carlin once said.
The “real owners” of this country “don’t want a population of people capable of critical thinking,” they want us just smart enough to do the work and just dumb enough to not ask any questions.
And that’s what the schools are cranking out.
I'd like to see what it would look like if we invested half as much in education as we do in war. I'd like to see more equal funding for inner city schools and if that would yield better results in turning minorities into uptight white people. But until then, there are other crises to address.
