As reported here and elsewhere, LBUSD has voted 4-0 (Ellis, once again, conspicuously absent) to ask the voters to approve a five-year parcel tax in November to further fund public education.
Let’s leave, for the moment, the continuing saga of persistent absentee LBUSD Board Member and constituent-insulter Michael Shane Ellis. That topic will require yet another column of its own.
Instead, for now, let’s discuss the wisdom, or lack thereof, of continuing to pour ever-increasing millions of our tax dollars into consistently underperforming public school systems.
Let me say right up front that I have a profound respect and admiration for all competent teachers. I believe they are, to a person, grossly over-worked and despicably underpaid considering the critical importance of their mission. They are constantly asked to teach ever greater numbers of students with fewer and fewer resources and to do so according to standards that are, in some cases, impractical and lamentably arbitrary. But I believe these adverse conditions to be caused primarily by our current approach to certain public policies generally and to public education specifically, rather than, as many believe, by any lack of commitment to the broader ideal of properly educating our population.
Let me also say that, as Public School Districts go, LBUSD seems to be more fiscally responsible than most but, in truth, that really isn’t saying very much. From what I can see, LBUSD allocates its funds only slightly less foolishly than other Public School Districts. But budgetary foolishness has, indeed, been occurring. From out-of-town Training and Team building junkets to blatant misallocation of Title 1 subsidy to being far too top heavy administratively, like it or don’t, LBUSD has been making its share of what I consider to be laughable budgetary gaffs.
I believe the actual number of truly competent public school teachers to be diminishing steadily. In government-run institutions, like Public Education, that incentivize seniority (tenure) over results (quantifiable academic achievement), the measure of success necessarily becomes longevity, rather than excellence. Combine this truth with the fact there are few, if any, real consequences assessed to a public school teacher that consistently produces un- or under- educated students and we are left with a public educational system that once was a model among other industrialized nations but that is now consistently below average in comparison.
In January 2006, ABC News Correspondent John Stossel hosted an excellent TV news special on this challenge entitled “Stupid in America – How Lack of Choice Cheats Our Kids Out of a Good Education.” As you can imagine, Mr. Stossel’s report critical of the sorry state of Public Education in America was not well-received among various Teacher’s Unions who quickly organized protests against both he and ABC in New York City, Chicago, Atlanta, Detroit, and elsewhere. But all these Unions could do was protest the manner in which ABC chose to deliver Stossel’s message; they could not (and never did) refute his findings. But he had some responses for them anyway.
If the true mission of a teacher is to teach…to educate…then why are some too busy quoting contract language to demonstrate a willingness to work with parents to improve their child’s education? Why, as my lovely wife and I have personally experienced, would a public school decline to require a teacher to make a simple and occasional phone call as a means of communicating more effectively with the parents of a student experiencing challenges in the classroom? For when we once asked that a public school teacher place a simple and periodic phone call for that purpose, we were, in fact, told by School Administrators that the teacher’s contract “didn’t require it” and, so, no phone calls would be forthcoming and, indeed, none were received.
Is such a response and approach institutional at LBUSD? Perhaps not.
But, in my view, such a response should not even be an option. Not in a taxpayer-funded public school system responsible for educating our kids and which publicly proclaims the importance of parental involvement in a child’s education.
But I believe the aforementioned anecdote to be symptomatic of a much greater challenge: that of an approach to educating our children that has generally become as antiquated as it is bloated, inefficient and ineffective. The proofs of this, at least for me, are in the test scores and academic expectations that (with a few notable exceptions) continue to plummet even while the dropout rates and per pupil costs continue to soar.
In 2008, the Cato Institute’s Andrew J. Coulson conducted a comprehensive comparison of the per-pupil costs between public and private schools in Washington, D.C. His study, entitled: “The Real Cost of Public Schools” was originally published in the Washington Post and then expanded upon on the Cato Institute’s website. Coulson concluded that D.C. taxpayers funded the average K-12 public school pupil to the tune of $24,606 per year as compared to $11,627 for the average K-12 private school student.
But let’s turn our attention to this coast: According to EdSource.org, California’s public school teacher salaries are among the highest in the nation, even when adjusted for the cost of living, yet our State has a higher-than-average proportion of schools not making adequate yearly progress (AYP), as the State defines it, under “No Child Left Behind” (NCLB). Overall, California ranks among the lowest on the U.S. Department of Education’s National Assessment of Educational Progress (NAEP – the “nation’s report card”).
In Long Beach: As of April 2009 and as a local education agency (LEA), our beloved LBUSD has now been in federally-mandated performance improvement (or PI) placement for two (2) consecutive years. This is the NCLB equivalent of academic probation and it means that LBUSD has failed to meet all of the academic criteria established for all Title 1 (federally subsidized) Schools in California for three (3) consecutive years (a School or District must have thus failed for 2 consecutive years before it is placed on it’s first year of PI).
NCLB standards also apply to individual schools within the District and, also as of April 2009, eight of our T1 Elementary Schools and nine of our T1 Middle Schools are also on federally-mandated Performance Improvement status and some of those schools have been failing by this measure for six (6) consecutive years!
One failing year according to these standards can certainly happen (though for many Districts and schools in California it never has), two failing years, perhaps, if the challenges at a given school are particularly complex and difficult to mitigate. But six consecutive years of failing to meet all of the academic standards that apply to all other T1 public schools in the State?
Such consistent and repetitive failure on the part of one school can be attributed to a failure of administrative leadership at the individual school. Such consistent and repetitive failure on the part of almost half of our T1 Middle Schools screams, at least to me, of an abject failure of administrative leadership at the District level. Perhaps this is why LBUSD is currently on PI status too.
The same District that will be coming to us in November for still more taxpayer-funded revenue just does not seem to be making the grade when it comes to educating our kids.
In truth we have many education options and, in my opinion, more should avail themselves of them: Charter schools, Private Schools, Homeschooling, just to name a few. A successful statewide voucher initiative would return true educational choice to parents and allow them to allocate their educational dollars as they choose, for the best benefit of their own child, rather than as government mandates.
Vouchers would have the additional impact of instilling more much-needed competition into the public school system. Perhaps the overall performance of some of our public schools will improve if they stand to lose revenue to an education competitor when they don’t do so. As it stands now parents can certainly choose to send their child to a private school, but to do so they effectively pay twice; once to the private school and again, through taxation, to the public school system they have chosen to opt out of.
Thus even if they fail, our public schools retain their taxation-based funding. So where’s the motivation for them to improve, let alone to excel?
One of the greatest laments of public school systems generally is that there are so many more students than there used to be and that more students require more tax-based funding to teach. Not true of LBUSD. According to the California Department of Education, total K-12 student enrollment in LBUSD trended steadily upward from 76,783 in ‘93-‘94, eventually peaking at 97,560 during ‘03-‘04. Since that time, however, total enrollment has been steadily declining again to a ‘08-‘09 student population of 87,499. So we have over 10,000 fewer K-12 students enrolled in LBUSD since the peak year yet costs are somehow strangely increasing. Clearly the student population is not driving cost increases at LBUSD.
I think it is long past time that we, as a community, as a City and as a society revisit our overall approach to public education and start making some hard choices about how we want to allocate our individual and collective education dollars in the future.
I very much welcome your questions and your comments.