One of the few things I think most of the civilized world can agree upon is the idea that education is a key element for developing the kind of society in which we all want to live. Above all else, it is imperative that we as the human race instill in ourselves - both collectively and individually - a desire to learn, to better ourselves, and to approach the world with the kind of curiosity it takes to both understand and shape it. Education at all levels serves first and foremost to take our raw skills and turn them into something productive, but also to enrich our lives at whatever level to which we choose to rise. It is a practice which should exist both inside and outside the school or university, and it is one of the chief agents of growth among our species.
In the political world, "education" is an elevated buzzword which hangs out with the likes of "troops" and "jobs". Let me put that another way: imagine that you're on board the Titanic while it's sinking, and you see a bunch of people running around frantically and waving large buckets, screaming, "We have to bail out the water! The ship's going to sink if we don't bail out the water!" You note, however, that these people are not bailing the water out themselves (not that it would do a whole lot of good), but they're sure getting the word out that someone ought to. They are, you might say, raising awareness of the sinking problem.
This understanding of the education problem is a bit of generalization, of course; it's not true that across the board no one has been doing anything at all about the wreck of the education system. For instance - and to continue, if I may, with our ship metaphor - in 2002 Congress loaded the No Child Left Behind Act (NCLB) into a deck-mounted cannon, pointed it straight down, and blew the entire front of the ship off. Say what you want about the ramifications, it at least was action. The now-legendary outcome of this was the production of an education system which focused so exclusively on standardized testing as to nearly choke out any actual learning on the part of the students. In 2015, efforts were made with the passing of the Every Student Succeeds Act (ESSA) to decentralize school governance, and return much of the responsibility for bringing up sane, intelligent youth to the individual states. That sounds pretty good to me, but how well will it really work? We don't know; it's slated to begin taking effect at the start of the new school year in August. (For a comparison of these two acts, I've included links at the end of this article).
And, in fact, we may never know.
Meet Betsy DeVos, President Trump's pick for Secretary of Education. DeVos, who hails from Michigan and has been a decades-long generator and raiser of funds for the Republican party, ascended to her post recently after a narrow 51-50 Senate vote. Democrats are - perhaps understandably - deeply disquieted by DeVos, in particular because, if the scuttlebutt about the water cooler (internet) is to be believed, she is going to do her best to see that most ruinous of all things happen to education: privatization. Doomsday scenarios in the press have her potentially shifting funding around like a huckster with walnut shells, to the point that things like ESSA (at least, as we know it today) might not even see the light of day.
I don't know a lot about Mrs. DeVos. I know that she is a strong proponent of increasing parental and state involvement and authority in schooling, and that she believes very strongly in the voucher system and privatized schooling. I know that she and her husband own a company which specializes in, among other things, clean energy (something which I've heard nary a Democrat yet mention, strangely). I know they're billionaires. And I know that when she's in a tense situation, she has a tendency to invoke the threat of bears in hypothetical situations. As far as DeVos goes, I can only comment on this last point, and say that preparedness is what will save a few of us when the zombies (or zombie bears) finally come; we'll see who's laughing then, readers...
As for the education part...
In fact, the whole situation has had me stymied for years now. I recognized that NCLB was a mistake years before I ever actually worked in a school, but I only saw things on a surface level. I see things today perhaps a little clearer, but not enough to be shouting from the rooftops that I have the answer to everyone's questions (I reserve that practice for spoiling episodes of The Walking Dead for my neighbors). So why write about it, you ask? Simple. I, like most other people in the world, have an opinion, and I want to share it with you and get your opinions. Make no mistake; I'm open to being wrong. One of the best lessons in life I ever received came to me in my early twenties, when I discovered that it is okay to be wrong, as long as you're willing to change your opinion once you see things differently. So if you see places below where I've made a critical error in judgment, I adjure you to bring it to my attention (preferably in a nice way).
Let's start by reviewing what it is that everyone's so afraid will happen if we privatize education.
Potential Problems with Private Education
1. Privatizing education and adopting things like the voucher system will constrict the flow of funding to the public school system, which is already weakened by the current low amount of available funds.
2. Privatized education would be unregulated, and you would end up with a wild west frontier of unqualified teachers being hired, and they would be teaching unregulated curricula. (The two great fears contained within this notion - so far as I have been able to tell - are both contained in the teaching of science. They are that creationism will be taught alongside or in place of evolutionary biology, and that human-involved climate change will be presented as false information.)
3. Because of the deregulation mentioned above and the ensuing attrition rates of both students and funding, fewer and fewer genuinely qualified teachers will emerge from the fields of academia, leaving the public school system to die a long, slow death.
4. The voucher system will not work well enough to cover the poorest students so that they can receive a free education, and as a result only students from middle to upper class families will be able to go to school in the long run (this, by the way, was one of the driving reasons behind NCLB in the first place).
I realize I'm only hitting the most basic points here, but as I indicated before, that's about all I'm qualified to do. My assessment of the situation may well be underdeveloped, as may the following solutions; again, I welcome your input, readers.
So I'll start with my theory, and then work through the few details provided, and hopefully we can all have a lively debate on the subject once it's done. As a quick side note, I'm in the planning stages for a podcast in the (hopefully) near future, which will be linked to this site and my social media accounts for your listening pleasure. If and when I can get it off the ground, I'll be doing a lot of interviews with some very interesting people. Many or most of them will be smarter than myself, and all of whom will know more about their respective fields than I do. To that end, I have already begun compiling a short list of interviewees, and at least three of them will be speaking to me at some length on the subject of education from three very different viewpoints. It will be interesting to see their points of convergence.
Take everything I say with a grain of salt...here goes...
J.M.'s Theory of Education
Education basically boils down to two sections: teaching and administration. For the purpose of keeping this simple, I'm going to include the administrative staff of an individual school on the teaching side, so that the administrative side refers to everyone in the district outside the individual schools, going all the way up to the Secretary of Education herself. If anything, you can think of the individual school administrative staff as envoys between the two (which, in many cases, is exactly what they are).
➤It is the purpose of the teaching side to do just that: teach. Granted it is a much more nuanced field than this, but on the whole this is its purpose.
➤It is the purpose of the administrative side to provide and maintain educational standards and practices, as well as to provide and maintain the necessary checks and balances which run concurrent.
(Note: The other thing that the administrative side has historically been responsible for has been budgeting and allocation of funds. To that end, they are strongly tied into the political system on both sides [though most notably on the Democratic side, as I believe no one will dispute].)
These two sides make up the same coin, which is the education system. And whether things are run from the bottom up or from the top down, we seem constantly to be of the opinion that it is malfunctioning. And indeed, even our system for checking to see whether or not it's broken (test scores) is apparently broken.
Education should be a hybrid system. Purely privatized education is unsustainable even on theory, and purely public education is unsustainable in practice. We need a system which utilizes the best parts of both ideas, and will carry us into a brighter - and more intelligent - future.
I propose, therefore, a system of education in which the teaching side may be largely privatized, while the administrative side remains the local, state, and federal series of nesting dolls which it has always been (albeit with a severe overhaul and possibly an entire reformation). This would address many or all of the problems mentioned above, in the following ways.
1. The reason to fear that privatized education will constrict funding to public education is that there would be competition between the two on the teaching side of things (i.e. the actual schools themselves). Privatizing the school side (and there are exceptions, just wait for it...) removes this competition, as on the whole public schools would be eliminated from the picture. You don't have to worry whether or not you're going to get adequate funding to your public school if it no longer exists.
2. Regulating private education would become the purview of the remaining administrative side. That's right, the group whose job it is to create and maintain oversight for the current public school system would now be in charge of doing the same for the private school system. In other words, the compromise that the private school entity would have to make is that it would have to comply with the standards and practices agreed upon by the administration (which, in theory, would represent the will of the people, as they will have elected said administration either directly, or through the proxy of appointment). Again, I must stress that this could not occur without a significant restructuring of the administrative side, and without a very structured initial approach to building the privatized school system in the first place; neither entity can completely resemble their current versions.
3. I see no reason whatsoever for the privatization of the school side of education to cause a decrease in the production of qualified teachers. Oversight of the school side on the part of the administrative side will necessarily require that teachers hired in the private system be fully qualified, just as they do currently in the public school system. Additionally, privatization will allow for the creation of a meritocracy in the teaching class, something which works so well in every other workplace environment that I am astounded anyone could ever think it's a bad idea (though I know there are those who do). Privatized schools means competition among schools, and competition is good for both the consumer and the employee (and, of course, the owners). Want to see teacher salaries on the rise for good teachers (because surely we can all agree that we don't want bad teachers to be better paid)? Introduce the free market into the mix.
4. At last, we come to the part where we discuss what happens to all those poor people who can't afford to go to the private schools. In most cases, the answer to this is so simple I have to wonder if it's too good to be true. Let me give you a fictional example; I'll make up numbers for simplicity's sake, as well.
There are five schools in School District X. The annual funding for the schools and the district administration is ten billion dollars. Two billion goes to the administration, and eight billion is distributed among the five schools. All of a sudden, the Jennings Education Hybrid Act (JEHA) of 2017 is enacted, and the five schools are slated to close by 2022. In that time, four of the school buildings are sold to private companies who are jumping through the necessary hoops to open up private schools, and the fifth one is sold to someone who wants to bulldoze the site to create a theme park (it's okay, though, because there's a private company from upstate who has invested in some property in town, and they're going to build their own fifth school). When 2025 rolls around and the transition is complete, the annual ten billion-dollar budget now drops to two billion, since now all that's being funded federally is the administrative side. But wait, you say. What about the vouchers? What about all the kids who can't afford to go to a private school?
Well, we have this eight billion dollars (a year) now, just sitting there and waiting for us to do something with it. That eight billion went to give a free education to all the kids in the district before, and now a significant portion of those kids are no longer needing funding. So to fully fund education for the remaining ones who do need it would take - can we say without pulling out a calculator - less than eight billion dollars? I think so. Let's say that it takes four billion, and this can be in whatever way best works. Maybe it's a voucher system, or maybe it's a much smaller public school system, wherein instead of selling that fifth school, the district keeps it open and provides free education for those who meet economic need.
I think this could work. I'm sure that it's full of bugs, and maybe even huge holes; I'm counting on those of you who disagree with me and have evidence to the counter to show me the error of my ways. Or, assuming I'm onto something, I'm counting on those of you who see it and know more about this than I do to expound upon it in conversation, both in the comments and with other people you know.
I'm going to go put on my suit of armor and then hit "Post" on this. I eagerly await your thoughts.
No Child Left Behind Act (NCLB) Overview
Every Student Succeeds Act (ESSA) Overview
In the political world, "education" is an elevated buzzword which hangs out with the likes of "troops" and "jobs". Let me put that another way: imagine that you're on board the Titanic while it's sinking, and you see a bunch of people running around frantically and waving large buckets, screaming, "We have to bail out the water! The ship's going to sink if we don't bail out the water!" You note, however, that these people are not bailing the water out themselves (not that it would do a whole lot of good), but they're sure getting the word out that someone ought to. They are, you might say, raising awareness of the sinking problem.
This understanding of the education problem is a bit of generalization, of course; it's not true that across the board no one has been doing anything at all about the wreck of the education system. For instance - and to continue, if I may, with our ship metaphor - in 2002 Congress loaded the No Child Left Behind Act (NCLB) into a deck-mounted cannon, pointed it straight down, and blew the entire front of the ship off. Say what you want about the ramifications, it at least was action. The now-legendary outcome of this was the production of an education system which focused so exclusively on standardized testing as to nearly choke out any actual learning on the part of the students. In 2015, efforts were made with the passing of the Every Student Succeeds Act (ESSA) to decentralize school governance, and return much of the responsibility for bringing up sane, intelligent youth to the individual states. That sounds pretty good to me, but how well will it really work? We don't know; it's slated to begin taking effect at the start of the new school year in August. (For a comparison of these two acts, I've included links at the end of this article).
And, in fact, we may never know.
Meet Betsy DeVos, President Trump's pick for Secretary of Education. DeVos, who hails from Michigan and has been a decades-long generator and raiser of funds for the Republican party, ascended to her post recently after a narrow 51-50 Senate vote. Democrats are - perhaps understandably - deeply disquieted by DeVos, in particular because, if the scuttlebutt about the water cooler (internet) is to be believed, she is going to do her best to see that most ruinous of all things happen to education: privatization. Doomsday scenarios in the press have her potentially shifting funding around like a huckster with walnut shells, to the point that things like ESSA (at least, as we know it today) might not even see the light of day.
I don't know a lot about Mrs. DeVos. I know that she is a strong proponent of increasing parental and state involvement and authority in schooling, and that she believes very strongly in the voucher system and privatized schooling. I know that she and her husband own a company which specializes in, among other things, clean energy (something which I've heard nary a Democrat yet mention, strangely). I know they're billionaires. And I know that when she's in a tense situation, she has a tendency to invoke the threat of bears in hypothetical situations. As far as DeVos goes, I can only comment on this last point, and say that preparedness is what will save a few of us when the zombies (or zombie bears) finally come; we'll see who's laughing then, readers...
As for the education part...
In fact, the whole situation has had me stymied for years now. I recognized that NCLB was a mistake years before I ever actually worked in a school, but I only saw things on a surface level. I see things today perhaps a little clearer, but not enough to be shouting from the rooftops that I have the answer to everyone's questions (I reserve that practice for spoiling episodes of The Walking Dead for my neighbors). So why write about it, you ask? Simple. I, like most other people in the world, have an opinion, and I want to share it with you and get your opinions. Make no mistake; I'm open to being wrong. One of the best lessons in life I ever received came to me in my early twenties, when I discovered that it is okay to be wrong, as long as you're willing to change your opinion once you see things differently. So if you see places below where I've made a critical error in judgment, I adjure you to bring it to my attention (preferably in a nice way).
Let's start by reviewing what it is that everyone's so afraid will happen if we privatize education.
Potential Problems with Private Education
1. Privatizing education and adopting things like the voucher system will constrict the flow of funding to the public school system, which is already weakened by the current low amount of available funds.
2. Privatized education would be unregulated, and you would end up with a wild west frontier of unqualified teachers being hired, and they would be teaching unregulated curricula. (The two great fears contained within this notion - so far as I have been able to tell - are both contained in the teaching of science. They are that creationism will be taught alongside or in place of evolutionary biology, and that human-involved climate change will be presented as false information.)
3. Because of the deregulation mentioned above and the ensuing attrition rates of both students and funding, fewer and fewer genuinely qualified teachers will emerge from the fields of academia, leaving the public school system to die a long, slow death.
4. The voucher system will not work well enough to cover the poorest students so that they can receive a free education, and as a result only students from middle to upper class families will be able to go to school in the long run (this, by the way, was one of the driving reasons behind NCLB in the first place).
I realize I'm only hitting the most basic points here, but as I indicated before, that's about all I'm qualified to do. My assessment of the situation may well be underdeveloped, as may the following solutions; again, I welcome your input, readers.
So I'll start with my theory, and then work through the few details provided, and hopefully we can all have a lively debate on the subject once it's done. As a quick side note, I'm in the planning stages for a podcast in the (hopefully) near future, which will be linked to this site and my social media accounts for your listening pleasure. If and when I can get it off the ground, I'll be doing a lot of interviews with some very interesting people. Many or most of them will be smarter than myself, and all of whom will know more about their respective fields than I do. To that end, I have already begun compiling a short list of interviewees, and at least three of them will be speaking to me at some length on the subject of education from three very different viewpoints. It will be interesting to see their points of convergence.
Take everything I say with a grain of salt...here goes...
J.M.'s Theory of Education
Education basically boils down to two sections: teaching and administration. For the purpose of keeping this simple, I'm going to include the administrative staff of an individual school on the teaching side, so that the administrative side refers to everyone in the district outside the individual schools, going all the way up to the Secretary of Education herself. If anything, you can think of the individual school administrative staff as envoys between the two (which, in many cases, is exactly what they are).
➤It is the purpose of the teaching side to do just that: teach. Granted it is a much more nuanced field than this, but on the whole this is its purpose.
➤It is the purpose of the administrative side to provide and maintain educational standards and practices, as well as to provide and maintain the necessary checks and balances which run concurrent.
(Note: The other thing that the administrative side has historically been responsible for has been budgeting and allocation of funds. To that end, they are strongly tied into the political system on both sides [though most notably on the Democratic side, as I believe no one will dispute].)
These two sides make up the same coin, which is the education system. And whether things are run from the bottom up or from the top down, we seem constantly to be of the opinion that it is malfunctioning. And indeed, even our system for checking to see whether or not it's broken (test scores) is apparently broken.
Education should be a hybrid system. Purely privatized education is unsustainable even on theory, and purely public education is unsustainable in practice. We need a system which utilizes the best parts of both ideas, and will carry us into a brighter - and more intelligent - future.
I propose, therefore, a system of education in which the teaching side may be largely privatized, while the administrative side remains the local, state, and federal series of nesting dolls which it has always been (albeit with a severe overhaul and possibly an entire reformation). This would address many or all of the problems mentioned above, in the following ways.
1. The reason to fear that privatized education will constrict funding to public education is that there would be competition between the two on the teaching side of things (i.e. the actual schools themselves). Privatizing the school side (and there are exceptions, just wait for it...) removes this competition, as on the whole public schools would be eliminated from the picture. You don't have to worry whether or not you're going to get adequate funding to your public school if it no longer exists.
2. Regulating private education would become the purview of the remaining administrative side. That's right, the group whose job it is to create and maintain oversight for the current public school system would now be in charge of doing the same for the private school system. In other words, the compromise that the private school entity would have to make is that it would have to comply with the standards and practices agreed upon by the administration (which, in theory, would represent the will of the people, as they will have elected said administration either directly, or through the proxy of appointment). Again, I must stress that this could not occur without a significant restructuring of the administrative side, and without a very structured initial approach to building the privatized school system in the first place; neither entity can completely resemble their current versions.
3. I see no reason whatsoever for the privatization of the school side of education to cause a decrease in the production of qualified teachers. Oversight of the school side on the part of the administrative side will necessarily require that teachers hired in the private system be fully qualified, just as they do currently in the public school system. Additionally, privatization will allow for the creation of a meritocracy in the teaching class, something which works so well in every other workplace environment that I am astounded anyone could ever think it's a bad idea (though I know there are those who do). Privatized schools means competition among schools, and competition is good for both the consumer and the employee (and, of course, the owners). Want to see teacher salaries on the rise for good teachers (because surely we can all agree that we don't want bad teachers to be better paid)? Introduce the free market into the mix.
4. At last, we come to the part where we discuss what happens to all those poor people who can't afford to go to the private schools. In most cases, the answer to this is so simple I have to wonder if it's too good to be true. Let me give you a fictional example; I'll make up numbers for simplicity's sake, as well.
There are five schools in School District X. The annual funding for the schools and the district administration is ten billion dollars. Two billion goes to the administration, and eight billion is distributed among the five schools. All of a sudden, the Jennings Education Hybrid Act (JEHA) of 2017 is enacted, and the five schools are slated to close by 2022. In that time, four of the school buildings are sold to private companies who are jumping through the necessary hoops to open up private schools, and the fifth one is sold to someone who wants to bulldoze the site to create a theme park (it's okay, though, because there's a private company from upstate who has invested in some property in town, and they're going to build their own fifth school). When 2025 rolls around and the transition is complete, the annual ten billion-dollar budget now drops to two billion, since now all that's being funded federally is the administrative side. But wait, you say. What about the vouchers? What about all the kids who can't afford to go to a private school?
Well, we have this eight billion dollars (a year) now, just sitting there and waiting for us to do something with it. That eight billion went to give a free education to all the kids in the district before, and now a significant portion of those kids are no longer needing funding. So to fully fund education for the remaining ones who do need it would take - can we say without pulling out a calculator - less than eight billion dollars? I think so. Let's say that it takes four billion, and this can be in whatever way best works. Maybe it's a voucher system, or maybe it's a much smaller public school system, wherein instead of selling that fifth school, the district keeps it open and provides free education for those who meet economic need.
I think this could work. I'm sure that it's full of bugs, and maybe even huge holes; I'm counting on those of you who disagree with me and have evidence to the counter to show me the error of my ways. Or, assuming I'm onto something, I'm counting on those of you who see it and know more about this than I do to expound upon it in conversation, both in the comments and with other people you know.
I'm going to go put on my suit of armor and then hit "Post" on this. I eagerly await your thoughts.
No Child Left Behind Act (NCLB) Overview
Every Student Succeeds Act (ESSA) Overview
