Letters to Neal McCluskey (First in a Series)
Dear Neal,
I hate to go all fanboi on you and everything, but I really admire your work. So I'm using you in this relationship. All the ideas that are floating around in my head -- I need to get them out, and somehow they all seem to very naturally address themselves to you. So congratulations, you get to hear my thoughts on education and reform, and also bear the brunt of my skepticism.
I've been an educator for more than 20 years, first as a curriculum writer, then as a teacher, then as a program manager, then as a director of an education/literacy nonprofit. Would it surprise you to know that I hated education, at least until grad school? I hated high school with a passion.
When I started teaching high school English, my only serious goal was that my classroom would not offer the insipidly bland education I received. And I had my successes, for what it's worth. But the deck is stacked, the system rigged, the maze set up to guide you to the cheese every time. It didn't take long to realize that life would be hard for someone who not only wrote his own curriculum and lesson plans, but has his own vision of scope and sequence. (I had to teach the rise of Hitler before my students could meaningfully read Wiesel's Night, for example, and the basics of the Roman Republic before we could read Shakespeare's Julius Caesar.)
I threw my hat in the ring with reform and choice: charters, ESAs, vouchers, tax-credit scholarships -- I was game for anything that would break the monopoly. But it's been a decade and more since then, and whenever I listen to reformers speak, I hear their equivalent of the "Communism has never really been tried" argument. Why don't we see significant improvement from reform models? Oh, that's not real reform, they say. Real reform would definitely work!
I get their point. Real reform would require market-based mechanisms. Sure, I'm down with that. Hell, my middle name is Hayek. (Not really. It's Mike.) But I'm not clear on how the market deals with the fact that education is something that parents buy, but children consume.
I mean, here's the plan: Step one, we adopt all the reform models. Step two, we get the price signals into the market. Step three, something happens. And then, step four, the problems go away. I'd like to hear the reformers address the step three part.
I think back to my own students: I saw a lot of kids who would spit out anything that was served to them, even if it tasted like chocolate cake. Why? Because they were 15. And they were (mostly) boys. We're talking about a population that, almost by definition, doesn't want anything you have to offer. What they want is to tear down, to experiment (to one extent or another) with danger and violence and antisocial behavior. We're never really going to channel that in a classroom, no matter how hard we work toward "making it relevant" (a buzz phrase I've always hated).
I don't doubt that the market could clear up a lot of the lack of transparency, the administrative bloat, the wasted money. But what will they really put on the table that will be substantively different from the industrial model we currently have? Because, more and more, that's what parents want. They want to deposit their undisciplined brat of a kid at the school in the morning and pick up their educated citizen that afternoon. They want to outsource all the tough decisions of parenting to the school. That's why the no excuses model has so fully dominated the charter field. Given a broken education/disciplinary system, parents have turned to those places that want to double down on the failure.
I'll stop for now. But know that I'm listening and reading, and I'll be back with more questions.
Yours,
Enobarbus
I hate to go all fanboi on you and everything, but I really admire your work. So I'm using you in this relationship. All the ideas that are floating around in my head -- I need to get them out, and somehow they all seem to very naturally address themselves to you. So congratulations, you get to hear my thoughts on education and reform, and also bear the brunt of my skepticism.
I've been an educator for more than 20 years, first as a curriculum writer, then as a teacher, then as a program manager, then as a director of an education/literacy nonprofit. Would it surprise you to know that I hated education, at least until grad school? I hated high school with a passion.
When I started teaching high school English, my only serious goal was that my classroom would not offer the insipidly bland education I received. And I had my successes, for what it's worth. But the deck is stacked, the system rigged, the maze set up to guide you to the cheese every time. It didn't take long to realize that life would be hard for someone who not only wrote his own curriculum and lesson plans, but has his own vision of scope and sequence. (I had to teach the rise of Hitler before my students could meaningfully read Wiesel's Night, for example, and the basics of the Roman Republic before we could read Shakespeare's Julius Caesar.)
I threw my hat in the ring with reform and choice: charters, ESAs, vouchers, tax-credit scholarships -- I was game for anything that would break the monopoly. But it's been a decade and more since then, and whenever I listen to reformers speak, I hear their equivalent of the "Communism has never really been tried" argument. Why don't we see significant improvement from reform models? Oh, that's not real reform, they say. Real reform would definitely work!
I get their point. Real reform would require market-based mechanisms. Sure, I'm down with that. Hell, my middle name is Hayek. (Not really. It's Mike.) But I'm not clear on how the market deals with the fact that education is something that parents buy, but children consume.
I mean, here's the plan: Step one, we adopt all the reform models. Step two, we get the price signals into the market. Step three, something happens. And then, step four, the problems go away. I'd like to hear the reformers address the step three part.
I think back to my own students: I saw a lot of kids who would spit out anything that was served to them, even if it tasted like chocolate cake. Why? Because they were 15. And they were (mostly) boys. We're talking about a population that, almost by definition, doesn't want anything you have to offer. What they want is to tear down, to experiment (to one extent or another) with danger and violence and antisocial behavior. We're never really going to channel that in a classroom, no matter how hard we work toward "making it relevant" (a buzz phrase I've always hated).
I don't doubt that the market could clear up a lot of the lack of transparency, the administrative bloat, the wasted money. But what will they really put on the table that will be substantively different from the industrial model we currently have? Because, more and more, that's what parents want. They want to deposit their undisciplined brat of a kid at the school in the morning and pick up their educated citizen that afternoon. They want to outsource all the tough decisions of parenting to the school. That's why the no excuses model has so fully dominated the charter field. Given a broken education/disciplinary system, parents have turned to those places that want to double down on the failure.
I'll stop for now. But know that I'm listening and reading, and I'll be back with more questions.
Yours,
Enobarbus
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