As I wrote in my last blog, opportunities for a decent education and a productive life are created long before young people decide what to do in their adult lives. Before retiring, my wife taught kindergarten and primary school classes for 37 years. For reasons unforeseen at the start of her career, she had the unique experience to teach in three widely different school environments that tell the story of primary education in modern America.
Her first public school district was in central Pennsylvania, not far from State College, the site of Penn State. Back in the 1970s, the children of this district came from families of coal miners, truck drivers, other blue-collar workers, and some professional people. Their experiences of the outside world were limited. The social ills that years later would become commonplace in rural America, like alcohol and drug abuse, divorces, out of wedlock births, had just started to take their toll on the social fabric of the local community.
Her second tour of teaching brought her to two exclusive private schools in Upper West and Upper East Manhattan. There, the children’s parents worked in Wall Street or law firms or other top professions. On Fridays, school would end early so the students could go to their country homes. Every fall, they would come back to school telling their teachers the foreign cities they had visited during summer vacation.
The third and longest part of her teaching career took place in a minority suburb of Long Island. The children came from African-American or fresh immigrant Latino families. They lived in modest homes or crammed apartments. In the winter, some came without coats and they would do with whatever their teachers could find in the lost and found pile of clothing items. The teachers would buy, with their money, crayons and blocks and the cupcakes and drinks for birthday parties and special days. The same social ills that plagued the white rural district in Pennsylvania were the nemesis of these Long Island children. Coming to school and been received by a smiling and affectionate teacher made their day.
The one type of school district my wife didn’t teach is the affluent small-city or suburban school district of mostly white families with their well-funded school budgets, their special programs, and impressive athletic and artistic facilities.
These four types of school districts occupy the spectrum of primary and secondary education in today’s America. They stand apart in terms of race or wealth. They are the result of a segregationist reality that the American society prefers to ignore. The blame is not with the existence of private schools. Actually, many parochial schools do not have more resources than peer public schools. Despite the noble and sincere intentions of the “No Child Left Behind” law, American public schools produce unequal results across districts, states, and racial groups. This topic is huge and I don’t pretend to know all that can elucidate its many dimensions. But here are some of the facts that have come to my attention.
First, family background matters. It matters for academic attainment as well as for a child’s adult life. A recent NYT article “Data Zooms In on the Springboard to Prosperity” refers to research findings that show that students who attended schools in the same district attained different results as adults because of differences in family backgrounds.
Second, school funding matters. Financially strong schools are able to hire more accomplished teachers, give them more teaching resources, and expose students to a wider menu of educational, cultural, and athletic programs and opportunities. The Wall Street Journal reported that in at least 12 states school budgets are now below their 2009 level. State data from the National Center for Education Statistics shows that quality varies directly with funding.
Fourth, attracting high-skill individuals to teaching matters. Contrary to widespread belief, teacher salaries are not competitive enough to keep incumbents in or attract new teachers. Erika Christakis, writing in The Atlantic reports that there will soon be a shortfall of 100,000 teachers. The WSJ also reports that the teacher turnover ratio is at an all-time high as teachers leave for better-paying jobs. As, years ago, job opportunities for women (who make the bulk of teachers) expanded into finance, law, medicine, and other professions, the relatively higher salaries of these fields attracted many female students that in previous times would have entered a teaching career. Thus, unlike countries, as for example Finland, teaching has not been viewed favorably as a well-rewarding career in the US. If teacher salaries were competitive by market standards, careers in teaching should be in high demand and turnover a lot lower than it is now. So, the market test puts the lie to the argument that teaching is an easy career that need not be better remunerated.
Fifth, society’s regard for teachers matters. Many working and middle-class Americans resent teachers by falsely believing that they earn disproportionate benefits thanks to their union power. The fact that school funding comes mostly from local taxes feeds into this resentment. However, the information in the previous paragraph suggests that even with unions teachers do not extract extra benefits. Research has also shown that districts with strong unions perform better because unions help in weeding out bad teachers. Demonization of teacher unions, non-competitive salaries, and inadequate support contribute to keeping competent individuals out of teaching. Despite the misinformed view that public schools performed better in the 1950s-1960s, findings show that math and reading scores have improved while teachers are now faced with greater challenges as they have to teach more students from dysfunctional families or from non-English speaking families (E. Christakis, The Atlantic).
The current drive for charter schools risks pushing further back the public’s awareness and appreciation of education as a social good. The individual’s right to seek the educational provider of choice (the charter schools’ argument) collides with society’s goal to offer all children educational opportunities that are as equal as possible with as little as possible regard to wealth and race. If we neglect as a society to provide a good education to our children, we all stand to lose. Social studies have shown that crime, broken families, alcoholism and drugs, poor earnings, and low work skills are the results of poor education.
The fact that government subdivisions, down to the local school district, are left with the power to administer the education of their children is not an excuse for all of us to turn away from the inequalities and poor results that afflict the less fortunate children. After all, they are not responsible for what is delivered to them as public education. As they grow into adulthood, these less educated children of America will deliver their indictment when they ask what their country has done for them.
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