In the second of a two-part discussion, Tuthill talks with a teaching assistant professor and leading thinker on “unschooling,” or self-directed learning. Tuthill and Currie-Knight discuss the public education marketplace and the dichotomy between choice opponents’ growing concern about monopolies from companies such as Google and Amazon while ignoring the lack of innovation that occurs in public education, a monopoly of its own capturing 90% of America’s students.
Currie-Knight notes that the largest disparities among groups occur in the legal and education systems. Yet for all the attention progressives pay to revolutionizing the legal system, he points out, they appear unwilling to acknowledge the need for revolution within the country’s education system.
“We've waited long enough for government to prove to us they can desegregate schools ... if we give (families) the option of disconnecting their school from their ZIP code, there's every reason to think we'll get more integration in schools.”
EPISODE DETAILS:
· The history of public-school funding and how funding has created a marketplace where the supplier controls most of the consumer spending
· How efficient markets drive innovation and why public education is not an efficient market
· The pernicious myth leveled by choice opponents that choice is intended as a vehicle for segregation, ignoring the rich history of choice support from the left
· The conflict of interest of government-funded schools teaching children about the government
LINKS MENTIONED
Merrifield: More school choice could make a teacher's job less Herculean. (Image from teacherportal.com)
Editor's note: John Merrifield is an economics professor at the University of Texas at San Antonio whose primary academic interest is school system reform studies. He's also editor of the Journal of School Choice, initiator of the annual School Choice and Reform International Academic Conference, and author of the critically acclaimed "The School Choice Wars."
A recent Wall Street Journal article about a National Council on Teacher Quality report on widespread deficiencies in teacher training programs is the latest example of hand-wringing about teacher ineffectiveness. Without discounting completely the need to address this issue along with others in the teaching profession – such as low pay, tenure, high turnover, poor materials, and the tendency to draw the lowest ability students - allow me to suggest the root of our teaching skill problem is actually the public school system’s monopoly on public funding.
The current system generates classroom composition that is so heterogeneous in student ability and life experience that only an extraordinarily rare teaching talent achieves significant academic progress for a high percentage of students in public school classrooms. Policies like mainstreaming a lot of special needs children will make teacher and public luck, in the form of unusually homogenous classrooms, increasingly rare.
Data reveal a few schools at the top and bottom that perform well or poorly with all students, respectively. But the truth is, teachers are quite effective with certain students and not effective with others - something that is often concealed by comprehensive test score averages. In 2011, I analyzed this fact in Texas, which has test score data disaggregated into several student sub-groups, and is especially important in Texas because of its diversity: large black and Hispanic populations and considerable variation in urban and rural settings. We found schools that taught black students well, and Hispanic students poorly, and vice versa. Other schools did well with low-achieving students, but not well with high achieving students, and vice versa.
Many would like to believe schools do an equally good job, regardless of race, ethnic background, students’ average ability level, or socio-economic status. Sadly this is not the case, and the differences are significant. Each school typically does better than others with different groups because teachers have strengths and weaknesses, even when they are not hired for them. (more…)
