Easter. A ramble (not an essay) on education.

View 720 Sunday, April 08, 2012

Easter Sunday

Roberta is mobile again, and our friend who had been hospitalized after an aneurism was at church this morning, a bit weakened but cheerful. There was much to be thankful for.

It’s 2100 and at o-dawn-thirty I have to get up and go out to get an MRI. Routine followup, but it happens early enough that I have to get to bed early. Happy and joyous Easter to all.

I’ve been working on an essay that goes along with what Niven and I are doing in the novel we’re working on, and has to do with fixing the education system, or at least getting some of it to work. We’re novelists so we can control things – all novelists have to do is be plausible. It’s more complicated in the real world.

I do start with the assumption that if education is an investment, then it should operate in ways that at least make it possible for there to be a return on that investment. That means that at least some of the population must come out of the system more productive than they would have been if they had never been in it. Since most parents in the US game the system to try to get their children into anything other than the public school system, and with some notable exceptions it’s almost axiomatic that bright kids fare better in charter schools, home schools, special magnet schools – almost anywhere but in the local school where they live and grow up – we are clearly not doing well by the bright kids.

We don’t seem to be doing well by many of the others, either. Drop-out rates are awful, and we know from experiences in special places such as Harlem and Chicago that it’s possible to have much better results with the same kids as the public school system takes in (and lets drop out) it is certainly possible to do better. So why are things so wrong, or are they? Is that just a perception? Does the public get a decent return on the education investment, which is, after all, a major part of the state budget, and for that matter, the federal Department of Education gets three or four times as much as NASA; and while NASA is not terribly efficient, it does tend to have a positive effect on science and research. Has anyone ever shown that all the Federal money spent on education improves education for anyone?

Of course that’s overly broad. But education in the US is highly organized and very expensive, and correlating money spent with results isn’t encouraging – that is if you are allowed to have a hard look at results. The purpose of the public education system seems to be to insure the job security of all teachers good or bad and of the outfits who provide credentials; proof of the relationship of credentials to effective teaching seems singularly lacking.

But this is all musing. You’re welcome to comment. Just don’t take it that I have presented the above as anything but rambling. My general conclusions haven’t changed in years: the best thing we could do for education now is to return control of hiring, spending, policy, teacher qualification, and just about everything else to local school districts which pay for the schools and elect school boards. Some of them will be terrible, some will be wasteful, but does anyone believe that the overall result would be worse than what we have?

But enough. I have to get up at blooking dawn to get out there for an MRI, and I have to first figure out just where it is that I am going.