THERE'S a new chief in town, and he's lookin' for a fight. President George W. Bush's recently unveiled education plan has a distinctively "tough on crime" feel to it. In his first radio address last Saturday, he said the government will help schools who are "willing to change" and there will be "clear consequences for failure." Bush makes it sound like the nation's schools are filled with surly ex-convicts who need to be whipped into shape.
The new president's "shape up or ship out" approach is not a sound one. Schools are going to need more time and patience than Bush is willing to give them in order to improve for the long term.
There are a few ways in which Bush's plan is admirable. It directs money to schools for higher salaries for teachers, better facilities and teaching aids, such as books and computers. The plan gets iffy when it comes to school vouchers, or "school choice," as Republicans have taken to calling it. Under the plan, the quality of schools will be rated according to students' performance on achievement tests. If schools designated as "failing" by their counties don't improve within two years, they are cut off from federal funding.
Then, the money that once was intended for the school - which can be as much as $1,500 per student - the government gives to parents to use on transportation for their kids to better public schools. After three years, however, parents can exercise their "school choice" and use the money to go toward tuition for their child at a private or parochial school. Essentially, federal money for public schools would be siphoned into private schools, threatening the health of the entire public school system.
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Bush's logic for the plan is that giving the public schools' funds to private schools will force public schools to improve in order to "compete." This reasoning is hard to understand. Most schools perform poorly because they lack resources, especially if they lack the most valuable resource any school can have: competent teachers. Teachers are the key to the improvement of any school. Schools unable to obtain better teachers within two years of receiving funding will not get better if funds are completely cut off.
If the government is looking for someone to blame for failing schools, it'll have to look closer to home. Individual schools are no to blame for a less-than-admirable general quality of instruction. It's the federal government's fault for not making teaching positions coveted. There is a dearth of qualified teachers due to low salaries. If teachers are smart, kids will be too.
There is a classic example of this in Washington D.C.'s Dunbar High School. In the early 20th century, students at the African-American high school were out-performing students at the city's white high schools on standardized tests. The reason: A large number of the teachers at Dunbar had doctoral degrees. They were teaching at the high school level because they could not get professional jobs with decent pay anywhere else. The federal government paid black teachers in Washington as much as white teachers, placing the faculty of Dunbar among the highest paid African Americans in the country.
The government should not expect individual schools to come up with quick improvements and give up on them if they don't do it fast enough. Instead it should look at a long-term solution to failing schools through the creation of a new generation of qualified teachers.
The Maryland legislature is undertaking one way to improve the situation. A bill has been introduced in the Maryland General Assembly that would pay for in-state students' college costs at any public state university and certain out-of-state institutions in exchange for their agreement to teach in the state. After graduation, the students would give two years of teaching commitment for every year of college that is paid for by the government. It is Maryland's plan to create a pool of qualified teachers, and it's not a quick fix: It'll take time for the investment to pay off.
The nation's public schools need money, and after they get it they need some time - time to find qualified people who have the potential to be good teachers and train them, and time to recruit teachers who already are good. Rome, as the old folks say, wasn't built in a day, and what a beautiful city it turned out to be.
(Laura Sahramaa's column appears Tuesdays in The Cavalier Daily)
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