Changes to K-12 Education in the United States – Systemic

Following on the heels of suggested changes to the student and teacher elements of K-12 education in the US, this post will focus on the system itself. I’ll cover aspects of the system reaching down from the national set all the way to the individual classroom. With that said, the following are just a jumping off point for fixing the system. They’re not necessarily in any kind of order, but the first is the primary issue that needs to be fixed.

Qualified Leaders

The biggest issue, from what I’ve read and experienced, is fairly easy to identify yet never seems to be directly discussed. Why are the people in charge of education in the US actually there? Since the Carter administration separated the job of Secretary of Education from the areas of Health and Welfare, there have been 11 full time appointees and a handful of interim position holders. Of the list of people of officially held the title of Secretary of Education, you would think there would be a plethora of people with advanced degrees in education and classroom experience, especially at the K-12 level since most of our national endeavors come from this office. The actual number who have both qualifications is comical:

ONE

Terrell Bell, appointed during the first Reagan administration, is the only person who has an advanced degree (BA, MA, and PhD) in education as well as experience teaching in a K-12 classroom. Rod Paige has an EdD, and did coach at the K-12 level, but his background was Physical Education with little to no pedagogical training at all. Interestingly, several of the appointees have experience as university presidents, but most of their degrees were in areas like zoology, Latin American Studies, and law. The most common terminal degree is a JD, belonging to 4 of the 11 appointees.

Margaret Spellings, the Secretary under George W. Bush for his second term, has a BA in Political Science and performed so poorly as the President of the University of North Carolina system that she was forced out by faculty and student pressure. She was the primary proponent of the atrociously anti-evidence based boondoggle known as No Child Left Behind.

Arne Duncan’s only real qualification for the position was being President Obama’s basketball buddy and being a fraud who, as CEO of Chicago Public Schools, brazenly “increased” testing scores by shutting down poor performing schools and turning them into charter schools so they wouldn’t count in test score ratings. His BA in sociology was hardly enough to qualify him to force the disaster that is the Common Core Standards on our children. His successor, John King Jr, seemed more qualified on the surface but had only taught in a charter school setting and his EdD was in administration, not actual theory or pedagogy.

Betsy Devos is almost best left undiscussed. She never even went to a public school, much less had any kind of leadership position in one. Her degree is in economics from a low level private college. Her fortune is from a trust fund from her financially successful parents. Her only involvement with the public education realm is owning for profit charter schools. How did she even get into the discussion for the position?

Moving on…

Sports

We have to figure out what to do with sports. Living in West Texas, I can tell you that football is reasons 1-100 for returning to school while Covid-19 is still a serious threat. If our goal is fair access to equitable free education for all students in the US, we absolutely cannot make decisions based on profit driven sports.

I’m not anti-sports by any means. I played high school sports and, despite a serious spinal injury, played at the club level in college. My biggest drawback to focus and deep work is the fact that there might be a hockey or lacrosse game on TV. I signed up for a streaming TV provider just to see the NHL playoffs in the bubbles in Canada. With that said, there are examples at the K-12 and collegiate level all over the world, where the lack of sports TV contracts have coincided with schools not opening for face-to-face instruction anytime soon. We have to do a better job of prioritizing, and focus on physical education for all over competitive sports for some.

Standardized Tests

Useless. They’re literally useless for anything other than a point in time account of a single student whose score can be influenced by a myriad of issues (lack of sleep, cold coming on, etc) that have nothing to do with their understanding of material or intellectual capability.

This isn’t a screed against testing. The testing effect is real and well documented in education literature. Frequent, small, and low or no stakes testing with immediate, high quality feedback is one of the best ways to improve student performance. Standardized testing is the exact opposite of those things. It’s long, happens typically once a year, and the only feedback for teachers or students is a score that has shown to have no statistically significant impact on short or long term academic performance.

Even before Covid-19, there were around 1,000 universities that didn’t require the SAT or ACT as part of the admission process. Among those were excellent institutions such as St. John’s, James Madison, Wake Forest, NYU, and the University of Chicago. Hopefully this year will be the one that breaks the stranglehold of a multi billion dollar testing and textbook industry that adds no measurable value to education outside of lining their own pockets.

School District Funding

For some asinine reason, much of the public education funding in the US is based on property taxes of surrounding homes in that school’s district. Dilapidated buildings, worn out textbooks, and lack of basic supplies traces directly to this attitude of me before you prevalent amongst so much of our society.

The intention of public education is, or at least was, to provide a base level of equality of opportunity for all children in the country. When one school has a planetarium, and another is only a few miles away and has a shortage of textbooks, then we’ve lost the plot. This kind of decision making ties back into the primary point of the majority of decision makers for education at the national (and often state and local) level having no useful educational background.

We have to rediscover the desire and ability to push past the partisan nonsense and level the playing field in education.

Class Sizes

At first glance, you would expect that the US is doing well on this front. Research varies, but most studies seem to settle around 18:1 student to teacher ratio as the maximum to have quality attention given to each student. At the moment, there are only 5 states (Utah 34, California 23, Oregon 20, Nevada 20, and Arizona 19) that are over that threshold on average.

Here in Lubbock, TX, our county ratio is actually 14:1, lower than the 15:1 state average. A closer look at under-performing schools shows a higher ratio, occasionally exceeding the 18:1 ratio. Those that don’t are located in poorer areas of the city where property taxes don’t provide as much financial support as other neighborhoods in the county. The top two performing high schools in the county have ratios of 9:1 and 12:1 respectively.

How do we fix it?

• The leadership for K-12 education in the US has to be made up primarily of people with meaningful academic credentials and K-12 teaching experience.
• Sports need to not be the primary driving force for decision making as they are in many places.
• Standardized tests, at least as a measure of student and teacher performance, need to go the way of the dodo.
• School districts need to be funded as equitably as possible so that students aren’t punished for factors outside of their control.
• Class sizes need to be restricted as much as is feasible with plans to reduce them quickly and permanently.