Why Do We Make Education So Complicated?

These are the two governing documents for Amish run parochial schools in Indiana....

As you can tell, they aren't very thick. One is about 30 pages and the other is around 10 pages. Somehow the Amish manage to educate thousands of kids each year in Indiana, even though they only attend school (generally) through the 8th grade and none of their teachers has a degree in education (or a degree in anything or a high school diploma).

Granted, there aren't really Amish doctors, scientists and engineers. There certainly is a need for more complex, high level academic training at the high school level for kids heading into technical fields in college. Amish grammar and spelling is often poor but then again they are pretty much 100% bi-lingual. On the other hand, almost every really nice house in our vicinity is owned by an Amish family and most every small business is likewise Amish run. Virtually every child is raised in an intact family, divorce is basically non-existent and family/community ties are very strong.

So if this community can consistently churn out thousands of students with an 8th grade education that are industrious, family oriented and not a drain on society, why do "English" pubic schools need to have every teacher obtain a Master's degree (usually in education rather than the subject they teach)? Why does the U.S. Department of Education need an annual budget of $68,000,000,000 for 50,000,000 children, or about $1,360 per student when no one in the Dept. of Education actually teaches any children? Why do we need a Federal Department of Education in the first place? Why have historic trends shown an ever increasing percentage of our GDP spent on education but have a correspondingly poorer output?

Why are we not allowed to ask these questions without being accused of not caring about The Children!!!!

I am not recommending we go to a system of 8th grade education governed by a couple of what amount to pamphlets. But I do wonder why we have turned "education" into an industry that seems at times to be a giant jobs machine for people with education degrees and is so incredibly complex and cumbersome that parents and students alike appear to just be carried along by the torrent, hoping for the best. What the Amish have that is missing from the general public education is real local control. The schools are smaller and the parents via the school board have pretty absolute control over what goes on. As I will show in a future post, when the parents volunteer their time to actually build the school building, they tend to be pretty invested in the school!

As parents get further and further from the running of the school and more and more people from outside of the school district, including a lot of people that never have been to the school district in the first place and probably have never even heard of it, exert more control over the school, it becomes ever more complicated. It becomes an arcane world of experts and jargon, meetings and conferences, teaching methods and human resources.

Maybe the solution is not more and more advanced education degrees and fancier teaching methods but simply moving control back to the local school and the parents of the kids and for crying out loud just making it less complicated.

Progressive Indoctrination ≠ Education

There is no topic in America that is more emotionally charged and less fact based than public education. The endless calls for more money and more money and more money ad nauseum are always accompanied by pleas infused with a heaping dose of guilt "Don't you care about the CHILDREN?!" One cannot so much as ask a question about the amount of money currently spent or increased spending being proposed without being painted as a cold-hearted ogre and a pox on your house for nine generations if you inquire as to the results of all of that spending. Along with this is a small but vocal cottage industry of people banging the drum about teacher's being underpaid. That teachers are underpaid is an absolute article of faith for modern America and no one is permitted to push back on it at all. The topic of teacher pay is an interesting one but the broader topic of public "education" is a completely different beast. Case in point, a recent essay from the Washington Post with the sure to be a tear jerker title: Why so many teachers need a second job to make ends meet. Please ignore the fact that many people have to have second jobs to make ends meet, this is about the children you fools!

The essay is written by one Nínive Calegari and she is introduced as follows (emphasis mine):

This is a post about what teachers face when it comes to making an adequate living. It was written by Nínive Calegari, a former classroom teacher who is the founder of the Teacher Salary Project, a nonpartisan organization whose mission is to raise awareness about the effects on the country of underpaying and undervaluing teachers. She is also co-founder of 826 Valencia/National, a nonprofit that provides support to seven writing and tutoring centers around the country.

What does that fumy word, "nonpartisan" mean? Well according to Wiktionary it means unbiased, impartial, etc.

Ah, so this group, the Teacher Salary Project, is unbiased and not partisan. Well that is a relief! She makes a mildly interesting case for increasing teacher pay, although she ignores glaring logical fallacies like comparing teachers to doctors when the reality is that getting an education degree is far less competitive and less demanding than becoming an M.D. But then we get to the end of the "nonpartisan" plea for higher teacher wages where she tells us how important paying teachers well is for....well, just read it for yourself.....

Finally, now, more than ever, if we want to fight global warming, racism, illiteracy, poverty, sexism and homophobia, we need to elevate the teaching profession to the financially viable and prestigious one it deserves to be. Elevating teachers is our chance to show what our values truly are. Let’s pay teachers what we think our students, democracy and future are worth.

Weird, I thought public schools were supposed to teach children basic skills like math and spelling and history, the building blocks of an educated and functional society. Apparently not. Ms. Calegari, I guess in places like Washington, D.C. equipping "teachers" to indoctrinate children on subjects like normalizing sexual perversion and made-up "science" like global warming (low temp tonight where I live is forecast at around -8 to -10 Fahrenheit) qualifies as "nonpartisan" but in the rest of the country the only thing in your final paragraph that counts as education is fighting illiteracy and none of it is "nonpartisan". The rest of that is simple nonsense and shockingly people who work for a living don't want to pay people more to be teachers if being a teacher means pushing that sort of partisan political agenda on our children.

If you needed another example of why people who are self-styled elites in our culture have no idea why Trump won or why the citizens of this country rejected their agenda, here it is. The debate over "education" in every aspect has had next to nothing to do with actual education for a long time and is now simple indoctrination carried out in government camps called "public schools", paid for by people that public school advocates (not teachers necessarily) think are too stupid to make decisions for their own children. The attitude is "Shut up, pay what we say and don't ask any questions about what we do". It is amazing that so many people in a few urban enclaves just assume that schools should be pushing a highly biased, partisan set of political positions instead of actual education.

The widening chasm in our country between two completely separate and distinct people grows wider every day and nowhere is this more apparent than in the differing notions of "education". I am glad we can homeschool our kids even if we do a poor job at it because I simply refuse to have my kids being force fed ideological nonsense under the guise of education. Let's hope that the next four years and beyond see some sort of common sense returned to the education debate.

Cradle to Grave Continues

Listening to NPR this morning I heard a preview of the State of the Union speech and it sounds like President Obama is reviving a key "education" provision from his original platform, namely universal birth to college tax payer subsidized institutionalization of children and young adults in the "educational system". From the Huffington Post.....

Days before President Barack Obama outlines his agenda for the coming year, a think tank with close ties to the White House is outlining a plan that would provide preschool for all children within five years.

The Center for American Progress proposal, released Thursday, provides a road map for how the Obama administration could move forward with pre-kindergarten programs for all 3- and 4-year-olds. For families with younger children, federal subsidies for child care would increase to an average $7,200 per child and the number of students in Early Head Start programs would double.

The troubling results from Head Start coupled with the fact that we have no money should quash this but few politicians want to take a stand that appears to be voting against "education" even though this has nothing to do with education in the first place. The report from the Huffington Post tags the cost at north of $25,000,000,000 per year and that of course is laughably low balled since any program like this is going to overrun costs right out of the gate under the banner of "It is for the children!". In case you missed it, we don't really have any money right now and every year we add a trillion to the debt. Just a little fiscal factoid for ya!

This part killed me....

Closer to the kitchen table, the proposals have an economic resonance. The average family with two parents working and with children younger than 5 spends roughly a one-tenth of the income on child care. For families making less, that percentage climbs quickly.

So little Johnny and Suzie are going to get to go to a tax payer subsidized day care, er early childhood education program so that mom can go to work without paying for child care but since we don't have any money those same kids stuck in preschool warehousing early childhood education programs will get to deal with the additional debt incurred on their behalf to pay for their care when they hit adulthood. In other words, mom and dad get to pass off the cost of child care to their own children. What a great deal! New iPhones for everybody!

Set aside this sort of stuff. What is going on here is the continuance of a policy that seeks to separate children from their families, especially their mothers, at an earlier age and for more of the day. Children now barely get twelve weeks with their mothers before they are shipped off to daycare and the time after this three month period is filled with day care, preschool, public school, activities, sports, etc. that ultimately leads to children spending less and less time at home with their own family with each year that passes and in turn spending more and more time under the supervision of the state. This is a situation unprecedented in our history and unquestionably damaging to children and family cohesion in general.

That may come across as a little tin-foil hat hysterical but not when you examine some of the underlying philosophy behind the educational elite. You can be sure that the idea of adding thousands of government subsidized jobs that will fall under the umbrella of the teachers unions is a key driver for this movement. As we have moved further away from a child spending their preschool formative years at home with a parent and toward two income families with children increasingly cared for by strangers away from home, it is nigh impossible to make the arguments that families are stronger or education is improved. The only beneficiaries are the child care industry, including public schools, and large corporations that are able to pay less for labor thanks to the influx of women into the work force under the false impression that daycare for their children is "free". Make no mistake, for all of the noble language this sort of effort is couched in, the real motivation is almost certainly far more sinister.

Creationism in Public Schools

I hold unapologetically to a six 24 hour day creation position. I am familiar with the arguments for other positions and find them unpersuasive. However I have no interest whatsoever in seeing secular public schools teaching the Genesis account in science classrooms, something proposed in my state and fortunately squashed. From the Indianapolis Star....

The bill approved by the state Senate would have permitted local school districts to teach creationism as long as the curriculum also incorporated origin-of-life theories from multiple religions, including Christianity, Judaism, Islam, Hinduism, Buddhism and Scientology.

The original bill proposed by Sen. Dennis Kruse, R-Auburn, simply called for allowing schools to teach creationism, but the Senate revised it to include references to multiple faiths.

House education committee Chairman Robert Behning, R-Indianapolis, said last week he believed the multiple faiths requirement made the proposal unworkable because it would be almost impossible to find teachers who would know about origin beliefs from so many religions.

That doesn't sound like a terribly good idea. Lumping in Genesis 1 with the crazy story L. Ron Hubbard made up, and have it all taught by whoever happens to be the teacher? I am pretty sure that is not the intent of the oirignal bill but it seems perfectly reasonable in a religiously pluralistic society. If we are going to teach creationism alongside evolution, it naturally follows that we open that up to all religious viewpoints. So when little Johnny and little Suzie are in science class, they would be presented with the creation account in Genesis right alongside the Scientology belief of human beings as eternal aliens called thetans. Maybe Tom Cruise can come in for a guest lecture?

I am glad that Indiana is not going down this path. If you want your kids to learn about creationism from a Christian viewpoint, don't send them to a public school.

Some great quotes on education

I ran across an interesting post from Seth Godin, who I know nothing about, regarding our educational system, Back to (the wrong) school. It has several great quotes:

Part of the rationale to sell this major transformation to industrialists was that educated kids would actually become more compliant and productive workers. Our current system of teaching kids to sit in straight rows and obey instructions isn't a coincidence--it was an investment in our economic future. The plan: trade short-term child labor wages for longer-term productivity by giving kids a head start in doing what they're told.

Large-scale education was never about teaching kids or creating scholars. It was invented to churn out adults who worked well within the system.
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If you do a job where someone tells you exactly what to do, they will find someone cheaper than you to do it. And yet our schools are churning out kids who are stuck looking for jobs where the boss tells them exactly what to do.

Do you see the disconnect here? Every year, we churn out millions of of workers who are trained to do 1925 labor.

I imagine that Seth is approaching this topic with a different worldview than I am but I agree with many of his points. I made a similar argument a few posts ago, Why do we still educate our kids like we did in the 50’s? I think the underlying issue is that the public education system was never really intended to create a well educated populace, it was created to produce a pliable workforce with a basic education and today the public "education" system serves a two-fold purpose: providing tax-payer funded daycare for kids so parents can work outside of the home and providing a source of union jobs for kids with education degrees.

Even if we didn't choose to homeschool our kids because of our faith, there is still a very compelling case for home education based on the nature and results of public education. Certainly lots of kids are quite successful in life after going to public schools but I would say that is in spite of public education, not because of it. With the overwhelming numbers of high school graduates continuing on to a four year degree regardless of ability or aptitude, public schools have become little more than a holding pen for kids until they can go to college. For what we spend on public schools, we certainly should expect more.

Why do we still educate our kids like we did in the 50’s?

I verified the date on my computer this morning, it is indeed the year 2011. As I drove to work this week, the roadways were festooned with children standing at the end of their driveway waiting for the school bus to pick them up and whisk them away to school for the day. This is as much a part of the warp and woof of American life as the crop cycle and the sports seasons from the opening day of baseball to the Super Bowl. There is very little fundamentally different from the way kids are educated today compared to when I was school age or even my parents. Therein lies the problem. The America of 2011 is a vastly different place than the America of 1961, technologically and culturally.

The basic process of educating kids is hardly different from half a century ago in America. At the same age, kids start school getting onto buses that take them to the same or very similar school buildings that are structured the same way they were decades ago. The buildings look the same: an office, water fountains, a gym, hallways full of lockers interspersed by classrooms full of desks facing the front. The classes are organized the same way. All children of the same basic age from the same basic geographic area are put into the same class and taught the same subjects the same way. Kids that are not up to “grade level” are held back. Kids that are way ahead of grade level are either bored to tears or pushed ahead a grade. Most kids just trudge along in lowest common denominator classes so rather than being challenged they are being spoon fed. The result? Failure.

As the world changes, our educational system tinkers around the edges and yet we wonder why we are rapidly “falling behind”. The rest of the world is catching up and passing America by and our response is “more of the same!”, i.e. more money.

There are almost 2000 public schools in Indiana, all of them doing the same basic thing the same basic way. Sure the methods are modified but the essential model is the same. Classrooms full of children grouped together based on their age and where their home is. Those 2000 schools are full of teachers all recreating the wheel in school after school. Thousands of teachers teaching American history. Thousands of teachers teaching math, English, science, etc. Some very good teachers and some really bad teachers and for students it is all luck of the draw or based on the size of their parents mortgage so that they can attend “the best” schools. Meanwhile other kids in lower income school districts have to make due. The solution proposed by the educational bureaucracy and teachers unions is always more money. More staff, more spending, more classrooms, more union employees putting money into the coffers of the education unions and paying tuition into university education programs. Left out of the equation are parents and students, the very people funding this giant Ponzi scheme and the very people being shortchanged by it. To compound matters, many young people want to help kids get an education but the one and only road to doing that boils down to getting an education degree with some sort of specialization, doing your student teaching and then being stuffed into the same system that has turned countless bright eyed and eager young teachers into disgruntled and discouraged school employees. Not every teacher of course but the grind of trying to teach kids in the 21st century by mid-20th century methods is enough to wear even the best of us down.

I am not suggesting I have the right answers. After all I have no skin in this game because we have intentionally elected to live in a state with some of the most favorable homeschooling laws in the country. That doesn’t mean that this conversation doesn’t need to happen. In a nation drowning in computers, tablets, iPads, smart phones, Kindles, etc. how is it that we still stick millions of kids on busses to repeat the same process that has been used and increasingly has been shown to be failing for decades? How can an education system designed for an agrarian society where typewriters were the high tech invention of the day produce results in a day and age when technology is exploding? Simply adding computers to the classroom setting is like putting a GPS on a horse and buggy. It is high time that we completely revamp the entire education system. Video conferencing? Charter schools? I don't know all of the answers but I know that we were are doing is hugely expensive and not working.

Insanity is defined as doing the same thing over and over and expecting different results. What do you call it when you do the same thing over and over for half a century and expect different results?

Machen on Education

I read this quote from J. Gresham Machen today while perusing an excellent post by Dan Phillips.

"A public-school system, in itself, is indeed of enormous benefit to the race. But it is of benefit only if it is kept healthy at every moment by the absolutely free possibility of competition of private schools. A public-school system, if it means the providing of free education for those who desire it, is a noteworthy and beneficent achievement of modern times; but when once it becomes monopolistic it is the most perfect instrument of tyranny which has yet been devised.

"Freedom of thought in the middle ages was combated by the Inquisition, but the modern method is far more effective. Place the lives of children in their formative years, despite convictions of their parents, under the intimate control of experts appointed by the state, force them to attend schools where the higher aspirations of humanity are crushed out, and where the mind is filled with the materialism of the day, and it is difficult to see how even the remnants of liberty can subsist. Such a tyrrany, supported as it is by a perverse technique used as the instrument in destroying human souls, is certainly far more dangerous than the crude tyrannies of the past . . . ."

From Christianity and Liberalism, p. 14.

A New Documentary on Homeschooling

What do you think of this trailer for a new documentary called Indoctrination?

IndoctriNation Trailer from IndoctriNation on Vimeo.

It seemed a bit over the top to me, especially the music, although I probably agree with the message...

Great essay on homeschooling

Saw this essay this morning (thanks Russell Moore!) at First Things. The essay is by David Mills and looks at the curious response parents get when telling someone they homeschool their kids for the first time.

The response varies to the news that you do something still considered, even by some conservative Christians, odd, eccentric, and possibly subversive. Some suddenly furrow their brows and purse their lips and declare their concerns about homeschooling, less often about the quality of the education as about the children’s (meaning, in context, our children’s, which is, you know, really rude) “socialization.” I sometimes feel I must surrounded by fascists, such is their apparent concern for making sure our children fit in to the society as it is.

I am not sure that anything you say about your children short of “We chain them to a tree outside and feed them raw beets” elicits the same, immediate questioning of your parenting skills like “Our kids are homeschooled”. We get this all the time when we meet new people and they invariably ask where our kids go to school and we respond “we homeschool our kids”. We have gotten lots of variations on “What about socialization?” or “But we have really good schools in our community”. For some reason educating your children outside of the societal norm gives non-homeschoolers warrant to drill you about this choice. When someone says “My kids go to Millard Fillmore Middle School”, I never respond with “What about all of the sexual predators in public schools that keep making the headlines” or “Aren’t you concerned with your child becoming an unthinking drone fit only for service industry work?”. Even if I am thinking this, it would be presumptuous and rude for me to say so. Not so with homeschooling! I don’t really expect anything different from unbelieving friends and family.

What is troubling, as Mr. Mills points out, is that we have the same conversations with many professing Christians. The idea that perhaps sending your kids to be educated by strangers who likely do not share your beliefs, or at least are not permitted to teach as if they do, is not the best solution for Christians parents comes across as a dangerous notion.

Perhaps the paradigm we have grown up with is not a healthy one. Get married later in life once you have had your fun and travelled, have a couple of kids and no more because both parents work, go to church on Sunday mornings so your kids get a moral education, send your kids to a school system based on where you live (or move somewhere with “better” schools)to be taught by someone chosen by administrators and with no idea what their expertise and worldview are, make sure your kids are plenty busy with activities and extra-curriculars so they can get into a “good” secular college and graduate with a degree and a bunch of debt so they can repeat the same cycle for generations to come.

Really?

If you choose not to homeschool your kids, that is your call and they are your kids. Just don’t presume that someone who does is volunteering to interrogation because they dared step outside of the cultural norms of our secular society.

Movie Review: Waiting For “Superman”

I have been looking forward to watching Waiting For “Superman” since I heard about it and finally got the chance to watch it last night. It was a gut-wrenching movie that takes the situation in our public schools beyond abstract statistics and into the lives of parents and children who are desperate to get into a better school and get out of one of America’s failing public schools. They are mostly younger kids and because of where they live they are on the path to a dropout factory high school if they don’t get into a charter school. Even one young lady in a very nice suburban school is trying to get out because even in an affluent school district, the schools are doing a poor job of preparing all of the students for the economy of the 21st century instead of preparing them for niche jobs as worker bees in the 1950’s. The movie follows these families and intersperses their experiences with interviews of innovative educators who describe the incredible obstacles to trying to reform the school system, most notably the teachers unions that are so politically powerful that they have successfully blocked any sort of real reform for decades.

What is especially heart wrenching is watching auditoriums packed full of parents and kids desperately hoping that their child is selected at random to attend a charter school knowing that if their child doesn’t get picked that they are destined for a much harder road to college. As the names are read off and the kids are not selected, you can see how crushed the children are and perhaps even more so the parents. (spoiler warning!) Ironically the one kid who did get into a charter school is the young woman from California who lives in a neighborhood of million dollar homes and attends one of the nicest looking schools I have ever seen.

It was an interesting juxtaposition that the day we watched Waiting For “Superman”, teachers unions in Wisconsin were encouraging their members to skip work to protest changes to the collective bargaining arrangements in that state and Democratic lawmakers went into hiding to avoid a vote. The public school system is entirely about the entrenched interests and those interests, as the movie points out, are all about the adults and not the kids. That is readily apparent as the movie showed scenes of rooms full of screaming teachers yelling and gesturing at Michelle Rhee of the D.C. public schools for daring to make hard decisions and take a tough stance in the worst public school system in the country.

There are good teachers and there are bad teachers and I think the system wears down good teachers over the years. When you look at the next classroom over and that teacher is putting forth minimal effort and getting paid the same as you, where is your incentive to work harder? What we are left with is an education establishment that I believe has as its goal nothing more than getting as many union members into the educational system and keeping them there no matter what. The good teachers, and there are lots of them, should be rewarded just as high performers in any private organization are rewarded for excellence. They should be allowed to innovate and adapt and they should be encouraged to take risks. The bad teachers should be managed out the door before they can do any more damage. No private organization would survive with the same work rules as a public school (see: Automakers, American). If we are as serious about education in this country as we pay lip service to, we must shatter the monopolistic hold of the public school teachers unions. The teachers unions hold good teachers back and keep bad teachers employed and that is doing nothing to help our kids.

I would highly encourage any parent with a child in the public school system or really anyone who is concerned about the state of American education and what it means for the future of America to watch Waiting For “Superman” .

Indiana moving forward on school vouchers

The Indiana House is moving closer to a system of private school vouchers for lower income families in Indiana:

A House committee is expected to vote this morning on a controversial plan to let lower-income parents use tax dollars to pay for private school tuition for their children.

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The proposal, which is among the education reforms backed by Gov. Mitch Daniels, would allow families whose incomes are low enough that their children qualify for free or reduced-price lunches to get a voucher equivalent to 90 percent of the money that would have gone to their local school district. That's capped at $4,500 for elementary school students, although there is no cap for Grades 9-12.

Families whose incomes are a bit higher -- up to 200 percent of the level at which free and reduced-price lunches are available -- would get half of the money that otherwise would have gone to their local school district.

The Indiana Department of Education said that means a family of four could earn up to about $42,000 a year and receive the voucher worth 90 percent of their public school tuition, and it could make more than $42,000 to about $84,000 a year to qualify for the 50 percent voucher.

I am all for this. It should be self-evident that we are past the point of simply funding public schools just because we are supposed to. In an era of belt tightening, even public schools must be accountable to the tax payers and must be exposed to competition. It doesn’t go as far as I might like, I would be all in favor of parents being given a full voucher for tuition at either a public or private school of their choice and let them decide where every nickel goes but I recognize that there is a overall social benefit for providing universal schooling. So I am a big supporter of this idea because it puts more choice in the hands of parents, it takes more power away from teachers unions and it helps enhance a culture of competition among schools, public and private, to ensure that the best schools get the most students.

As I watch the debate about vouchers, I have a question. What about homeschooling?

Except in the most extreme wings of the education establishment, homeschooling is recognized as a legitimate method of educating children. Homeschooling is legal in all 50 states and colleges are generally recognizing the value of home education and enrolling homeschooled students on a regular basis. Once a fringe movement, homeschooling has become more or less mainstream. When I tell people we homeschool our kids, they are generally pretty accepting of it. But when it comes to the voucher system, homeschoolers are left out in the cold. That really causes a problem with the notion of real school choice when one of the three main methods of educating children is left out of the funding debate.

Just as parents who choose to send their kids to private schools should be able to divert at least a portion of their tax revenue to offset the cost of private school tuition, parents who homeschool their children should also be able to get a “refund” of some of their taxes that go to support public schools. I understand that a sizeable portion of the property taxes we pay on our home go to fund public schools that my children get no direct benefit from. I may not be happy about that but that is part of the cost of choosing to educate our kids at home. If the goal is to make educational choice more affordable for Indiana families, it certainly seems reasonable that we should get a tax credit to offset the cost of educating our kids at home. Homeschooling requires more than glue and macaroni. There are books, videos, curriculum, computer programs, basic school materials that cost money, lots of money. If I have to pay for computers for public schools, why shouldn’t I get to retain a portion of my tax dollars to pay for computers that my own children will use? The most important thing to remember is that every penny that goes to a public school originates in the pocket of an Indiana family. This is first and foremost our money and we, and not the public school establishment, should have final say over how those funds are spent.

If Indiana is serious about excellence in education, we must pursue every possible educational method and seek healthy competition among the competing options. A monopolistic public school system has been failing children for a long time and it is high time that the public school system be required to justify the money it receives and when it doesn’t, those funds that come from the pockets of Indiana families should be reallocated by the people who know our children the best, their parents.

Our children, our money, our choice.

Teacher Training

Very interesting article on the teaching of teachers and the need to raise the standards for those charged with educating the yutes of America in today's Wall Street Journal. The article, Teacher Training Is Panned, looks at the patchwork system for training teachers for America's schools and the efforts in a number of corners to improve that system to hopefully turnout higher quality teachers. Sounds nice but I think the article misses the mark.

There are two fundamental issues here. One, teachers are perceived to not be paid very well. I say “perceived” quite intentionally and I will address that in a moment.

Secondly, as the report implies, the perception that teaching is a lower paying professional position tends to discourage the “best and brightest” from pursuing teaching as a career.

Studies have shown that, historically, students who enter teacher-education programs generally have lower grade-point averages or lower scores on college-entrance examinations than students who enter other professions.

I would concur with this anecdotally from my own time in college. The only way to consistently encourage the very best students to choose teaching as a career is to change the pay perception and that takes money. Unfortunately money is in short supply these days for most school districts. Between lower property values and the explosion of extra staff that are not traditional classroom teachers, the odds of getting large pay increases for teachers are pretty poor and frankly not needed.

Compounding the problem is that the public is in no mood to keep giving more and more money to public schools. As more data comes to light and is more readily accessible, it is also apparent that teachers are not nearly as “underpaid” as folklore would claim. According to a report published by the Manhattan Institute in 2007, statistics show that the average public school teacher made $34.06/hour in 2005. If you were to annualize that hourly rate to 40 hours per week times 52 weeks per year that would be the equivalent of just shy of $71,000. That doesn’t mean that the average teacher makes $71,000 per year but then again they aren’t working 52 weeks per year either. There are 260 weekdays in a non-leap year. The average school year is 180 days or 36 weeks. Compared to a private sector employee with three paid weeks of vacation, public school teachers get the equivalent of 16 weeks of vacation. So they are really only “on the job” around 70% of the year. During the time that they are on the job they are paid an hourly rate that is much higher than most private sector workers who have full-time employment and a college degree. Because teachers only work a partial year, their annual income is perhaps low but frankly the per hour pay for actual work is much higher than most . Granted, many teachers spend a lot of time outside of school grading papers and other school related activities but those same teachers still have an enormous amount of time off compared to private sector workers. Perhaps for those reasons (lower pay that is offset by having 16 weeks off per year and a work schedule that corresponds to the school schedule of teachers children), it seems that teaching is more and more a female dominated profession that attracts women who expect to have a spouse who works to help offset the lower annual pay. The entire conversation about teachers being underpaid is framed by the talking points of teachers unions in a guilt trip scheme to continually add to the pay of teachers (and the coffers of teachers unions) but when you look at the facts as opposed to relying on folklore and emotional appeals, it is apparent that public school teachers are paid on an hourly basis far better than their higher achieving peers from college.

The other factor is that there is no real correspondence between pay and performance of students. If it were a simple mathematical formula, where X amount of additional money yields Y percent improvement in student performance, it would be far easier to make the case for paying teachers more. Unfortunately that is not the situation. Case in point from the same Manhattan Institute report, Detroit public school teachers have the highest average hourly pay at a whopping $47.28 per hour. That is an annualized rate of nearly $100,000 per year so if teacher pay was tied to educational quality, Detroit public schools should be leading the way in academic excellence. Alas that is not the case.

The education system is antiquated and it is broken. Merely throwing more money at it is not going to fix the problem and the public seems to be increasingly hesitant to rubber stamp millage increases on an annual basis for government services including public schools.

Maybe what is needed is a radical rethinking of the entire system. I am not suggesting that all parents should homeschool their kids but I do think that we have a system in place for educating children that has been virtually unchanged since I was a child and long before that. The four walls of a school building and the anachronistic schedule actually confine and restrict education instead of supporting it.

I am not sure what this radical rethinking looks like. Perhaps we see more out of classroom work, more online or interactive studies. What about asking someone who is a business person to come in once a month and teach economics or instruction from other subject matter experts from the “real world”? Why not pool resources in a given school district, instead of having a history teacher in each school have one history teacher who covers classes in multiple locations either in person or by video conferencing. I think the artificial, age based system of K-12 grades absolutely should go. Students should be grouped by ability and background, not age. Kids with an aptitude for math shouldn’t be restricted because a certain class is not offered at their “grade level”. I obviously don’t have all the answers or perhaps any of them. I do know that stubbornly trying to use 19th century methods and structures to teach children in the 21st century is foolish and self-defeating. We are no longer a primarily agrarian society so why do we still have academic years that are built around farming?

What are some ways to radically change the educational system in this country without increasing the costs?

The intolerance of those who consider homeschooling intolerant

Michigan has some of the least restrictive laws on homeschooling in the U.S. and that galls many people to no end. Periodically that anger over parents actually being permitted in a free country to make decisions on their own regarding the education of their own children leads to rants from ill-informed citizens. The latest salvo comes from Dennis Smith of Sturgis, Michigan in a letter to the editor of the Kalamazoo Gazette. He writes in response to a essay penned by Justin Wing, a homeschooler who is on the Gazette’s Young Editorial Staff that argues against embryonic stem cells. Mr. Smith responds in a less than charitable fashion. When you have a letter that starts out…

The trouble with homeschooling is not so much that it serves as a smokescreen for havens of child abuse, but that it can, with state sanction, substitute ideological indoctrination for actual education.

…you know you are in trouble. Nothing like poisoning the conversation right out of the gate by implying that homeschooling is little more than a means for child abusers to hide their misdeeds from the watchful eye of public school officials. In that one paragraph Mr. Smith, who styles himself “Reverend Dennis Smith”, demonstrates that he has no understanding of the homeschoolers of Michigan outside of the slander and propaganda that he parrots back in his letter. The letter in question is supposed to be a defense of stem cell research but apparently Mr. Smith sees this as an opportunity to attack the homeschooling families of Michigan by painting us all as child abusers and brainwashers.

Mr. Smith apparently cannot differentiate between “schooling” and “education”. What you get from the public schools, i.e. rote memorization and behavior control in a state run institution, is the furthest thing from actual education that you can find. Kids who come out of the public schools with an actual education do so in spite of, not because of, the public school system. Rather than castigating parents who take a more active role in the education of their children, Mr. Smith and others like him should be pleased to see parents getting involved .

What is especially galling is the naïve attitude that public schooling is a value neutral learning environment. According to Mr. Smith, homeschoolers are indoctrinating their children with religious drivel while the public schools are turning out open-minded thinkers. The reality, as anyone with even a passing understanding of the public education system in America knows, is that the public schools are heavily influenced by all manner of ideologies and that many of those ideologies run contrary to the values of parents. The idea that the public school bureaucracy that is doing such a bang-up job in Michigan should be given even more kids to oversee is laughable. What sort of solution is it to give a failed system even more control?

It is one thing to disagree about a topic like embryonic stem cell research. It is quite another to engage in demagoguery that slanders an entire population of parents and children because they have exercised their right to choose an education that reflects their own worldview instead of the worldview of the public school bureaucracy and those who see the public schools as a Petri dish for social experimentation aimed at undoing the values instilled in children by their parents. The homeschooling population of Michigan is far from a monolithic block of mindless drones. We are a vibrant community that runs the gamut from families like mine that are homeschooling for primarily religious reasons to those that are seeking a more challenging curriculum for their children. To declare homeschooling a haven for child abusers and slack jawed yokels because you disagree with a well written editorial penned by a homeschooler shows an incredible lack of perspective and what can only be labeled ignorance and intolerance.

It is ironic that the man who describes the homeschooled population as a pack of ignorant, controlling child abusers shows himself to be completely incapable of engaging with an argument without resorting to name-calling and caricatures. Maybe if Mr. Smith had been homeschooled he could have put together a more cogent argument.

Unequally yoked with the state

2 Corinthians 6: 14-15 is one of the most frequently but narrowly quoted passages in the Scriptures. We reference it (correctly) as a prohibition against Christians marrying unbelievers but I think it has far greater application for Christians than just marriage….

Do not be unequally yoked with unbelievers. For what partnership has righteousness with lawlessness? Or what fellowship has light with darkness? What accord has Christ with Belial? Or what portion does a believer share with an unbeliever? (2 Cor 6: 14-15)

It strikes me as odd that many Christians will use this passage to say that Christians shouldn’t marry unbelievers and yet many of those same Christians will partner with unbelievers to educate and raise the children that God has blessed them with and commended to their care. Ephesians 6:4 tells fathers to bring up our children in the “discipline and instruction of the Lord”. How do we read that and 2 Corinthians 6: 14-15 and then turn around and partner with schools where God is denied? No right minded Christian would vote to call an atheist as an elder in their local church but plenty of Christians will elect to send their kids to public schools to be taught by one. Obviously not all teachers are atheists but every public school is atheistic by definition and many teachers are unbelievers. You don’t get to pick and choose who teaches your kids in a public school so you are left with the understanding that your children, that most precious charge you have received as a blessing from God, are certainly going to sit under the teaching of at least a few people who deny God and even in classes where the teacher is a Christian they are going to be instructed in a curriculum that denies Him. The image of unequally yoked oxen in 2 Corinthians 6: 14-15 is essentially that if you have two oxen that are going in different directions, your plowing will never get done. Being yoked with the public school system as a Christian parent is the equivalent of being yoked to an ox that is facing the opposite direction.

More on this later….

Who is teaching your kids?

An incident came to light recently at a nearby school that I think is instructive.

Just good clean fun, blowing steam after a year of dealing with other people’s kids!

MERIDIAN TOWNSHIP — A police report that details an evening of troubling incidents among a group of Haslett Public Schools teachers involving drug use and “drunk shaming” is prompting questions about the teachers’ behavior and institutional accountability in this suburban community near East Lansing.

The police report addresses a number of incidents that took place at an end-of-year party hosted in 2007 by a Haslett teacher and attended by several other teachers from the district. The police report was provided to Michigan Messenger by one of those teachers, Veronica Piechotte, who says she was victimized by her colleagues that evening and that neither the Haslett school administration nor the legal system had acted on her complaints until Michigan Messenger began its inquiry.

According to the account Piechotte gave police the day after the incident, on the last day of school in 2007, Piechotte and five other Haslett school teachers, Lauri Etheridge, Timothy Beebe, Brian Town, Daniel McKinney and Heather Woodworth, joined their colleagues at an East Lansing bar to celebrate the beginning of summer vacation. As the party moved from the bar to McKinney’s house, things took a turn for the worse. The people involved dispute some of what happened during the evening, but each of them spoke with police at the time, providing a contemporaneous, first-hand account.

According to the police report, Etheridge, Town, Piechotte and Woodworth stopped at Town’s home on the way to McKinney’s house, which is a short distance from the school. There, according to the report, they decided to smoke marijuana and Town produced and provided the drug for the three women, who went to the garage to smoke it. The teachers then continued on to McKinney’s house.

Later that night, after more alcohol consumption by all involved, Piechotte crawled between a coffee table and a sofa in McKinney’s living room. There she passed out

According to the report, Town and Beebe decided it would be “funny” to draw on Piechotte’s unconscious body. …Much of the writing was sexual and crude. McKinney and his wife, as well as Etheridge and staff member Phil Rutkowski, watched the drawing. McKinney took pictures with his digital camera, and at least one person took pictures with a cell phone.

(Please note that the article cited contains a number of graphic depictions, so read the whole thing at your discretion.)

As you might expect, the school district sprang into action when they found out that they had pot smoking teachers engaged in this sort of activity. Or not…

While criminal charges were never filed in this case, Haslett school officials — according to police records, emails and other documents provided by Piechotte and an interview with Superintendent Mike Duda — were aware of the incident and took little if any action in response to it until Michigan Messenger started examining the case.

Sure it is off campus and outside of the school year and perhaps legally there is not much they could do about it. Nevertheless, this is another example among the many of the mixed bag of people you get in the public schools. That is true of every industry. There are bad people in banking, in veterinarians offices, in garbage companies. The difference is that you don’t turn your kids over to those people to raise for most of the day. You do turn them over to the public schools and I guess you are left with hoping your kid makes it through school without being taught by drug users and imbeciles.

You might raise your hand here and say, not in my school! We have a “good” school. Really?

According to Wikipedia (and I have no reason to doubt these stats), Haslett has a median family income of $69,806. Not exactly an impoverished area. Also from Wikipedia:

Haslett was named 42nd best place to raise your kids in America by BusinessWeek in 2007. It was rated this based on five factors: math and reading test scores; cost of living; recreational and cultural activities; number of schools; and risk of crime.

In other words, this is a “good” school. Kids aren’t getting shot. Lots of kids go to college. You could do far worse than to send your kids here. Haslett is a very nice community with excellent schools. Yet in this school, five teachers decided to “celebrate” the end of the school year by getting drunk, stoned, one to the point of passing out followed by juvenile antics.

Now I recognize that there are tons of great people teaching in public schools. There are Christians who devoutly believe in our Savior. There are plenty of teachers who celebrate the end of the school year in ways that don’t involve marijuana. On the other hand, there are apparently many that do. I don’t think this is normal or accepted among teachers but how many of us really know? My point is not that all public school teachers, or even most, are drug users and sophomoric.

Here is the thing. You really don’t know. You might get the fine, upstanding perhaps even Christian teacher. Or you might get one of these knuckleheads. You have virtually no say in the matter. You don’t interview and hire or even get a chance to talk to most teachers before they are hired by your school system.

Are you sure you want to roll the dice with your kids? Maybe they get the good teacher. Maybe the get the one who just happens to have some weed at his house in case of a party emergency. Maybe you have no idea from a five minute teachers conference which one is which?

Think about it.

Run with scissors, God is sovereign!

I read an irritating post by someone convinced that they are “called” to send their kids to public school. Whenever someone claims that they are “called” to something based on their subjective feelings, I get nervous. Perhaps that is a symptom of having come out of a cult where the heart is trusted to lead people in place of the Word of God. What really got my goat was the misuse of a theological truism to defend their actions. The point of the post is that God is sovereign so send your kids to public school and trust Him. I am sorry but I am going to let loose here and completely go off….

That attitude is a capitulation to the culture while hiding behind theology.

Here are some other logical actions that would stem from this sort of philosophy…

Throw your kids out of a moving car. Why? God is sovereign.

Drop your kids off at the local strip club after school. Why? God is sovereign.

Encourage your kids to run with sharp objects and swim immediately after eating. Why? God is sovereign.

Never gather with the church, never study the Word, never preach the Gospel, never love your neighbor, never pray. Why? God is sovereign.

The idea of sending kids off to public schools where God is denied under the guise of God’s sovereignty sounds very noble and pious. However I don’t see the piety of disobeying God while hiding behind sovereignty. That is the error of antinomianism. God is sovereign so I can do whatever I want with no repercussions. It is also the error of hyper-Calvinism. God is going to save every one of His elect so His command to preach the Gospel to all creatures is irrelevant. God’s sovereignty is one of the great truths of the Bible but it is one we need to handle with care. It has been misused over and over through the ages and that still happens today. God is sovereign indeed above all but a recognition of the sovereignty of God does not give us a free pass to act however we want even if our actions fly in the face of Scripture and common sense. Don’t make the mistake of thinking you can live however you want and do whatever you want and that you can pull out the “Sovereignty Card” at will.

If you truly believe that God is sovereign then you should desire to see your kids taught about Him when they rise up and when they lie down, when you sit in your house and when you walk by the way (Deu 6:7). They are not going to get that in a public school. If you truly believe that God is sovereign, then spend your days teaching your kids that God in His sovereignty has placed in your care. In your care, not a daycare and not the secular government. If you think God is “calling” you to send your kids into a public school where He is denied, you had better check your heart at the door because the heart is deceitful above all things (Jer 17:9). All manner of mischief is given a free pass because someone feels “called”. I recognize that some people wave the flag of homeschooling around like a prideful banner, and that is wrong and where I have done so I am wrong. It is at least as grave an error to try to score theological points at the expense of your children. If you choose to send your kids to school because you feel unqualified to teach them or finances prevent you from doing so or you just don’t want to, that is your business. I think it is wrong, but they are your kids. To use a profound and serious Biblical doctrine to hide behind that decision? That is something that calls for repentance.

A belief in the sovereignty of God is no excuse to abdicate your solemn responsibility as a Christian parent.

Another perspective on homeschooling

It is no secret that I am a vocal advocate for home education. Homeschooling is an issue for me that needs to be trumpeted on a regular basis among God’s people. I make no apology for that. Among God’s people we need to understand how we should live now that we are redeemed. A very small section of that is the church meeting on Sunday morning. The family is where most Christians spend most of their time, and I think few things are more vital than Christian parents using every possible waking moment with their kids to pass on God’s teaching

I read a very witty and interesting piece on homeschooling by Andrew O'Hehir in Salon magazine, Confessions of a home-schooler. I don’t frequent Salon very often but I saw a link for this article and had to check it out. What is interesting is that this family is not a prototypical homeschool family, i.e. not Midwestern, religious, a bunch of kids, etc. They are a New York City family, his wife is described as a leftist feminist with anarchist leanings. At least among homeschoolers who are conservative Christians, there are lots of us. If you are on the secular Left, there isn’t much of a support system. I am pretty sure that we are not having a “Neo-Anarchist Home Education Convention” in Michigan next year.

Being a homeschooling family in secular society is a difficult task. When you tell people you homeschool, you are almost immediately put on the defensive as if you have to explain to someone else why you choose to educate your kids in the place and manner of y our choosing. As Mr. O’Hehir boldly points out, this is especially true among mothers who don’t homeschool.

At the risk of gross generalization, there's a hierarchy of responses when you drop the home-school bomb in conversation. Childless men don't much care; the question is too remote from their consciousness. Childless women are often curious and even intrigued; the question is hypothetical but possesses a certain allure as a thought experiment. As for men with children, they may or may not be sympathetic, but they don't experience the subject as a personal affront. Let's be honest: It's almost always mothers who react defensively when the subject comes up, as if our personal decision not to send our kids to public school contained an implicit judgment of whatever different choices they may have made.

I have found that to be true as well. Granted, in our circles we bring some of that on ourselves. It can be pretty easy to make Christians mothers who don’t homeschool feel like they are betraying their faith. On the other hand, in our community the pressure to be a typical American mom, working or otherwise, and also be a Christian mother can be overwhelming to the point of being impossible. I am not sure how a mother juggles the constant pressure to be super working mom and also be a faithful Christian mother and wife.

This was excellent stuff through and through, even from a guy who somewhat derisively describes fundamentalist Christian homeschoolers as Bible thumpers wearing denim jumpers. Frankly, there are an inordinate number of denim jumpers among my homeschooling sisters which is OK! As part of his article, he relives a conversation he had with a woman taken aback by his homeschooling of their kids and the questions he is asked, the answers he gave and the real answers he should have given. I think many homeschoolers tend to give short, quasi-apologetic answers. My wife is like that because she is a genuinely nice person and not confrontational (I am perhaps hyper-confrontational). How we choose to educate and raise our kids is not something to apologize for but too often that is how we respond.

I really liked the way he approached the idea of public education as an irrevocable social contract that we enter into by way of being American citizens and having children. If you have a baby in America you better plan on turning her over to the government to educate in short order and if you don’t, you better have a really good reason to explain yourself!

Other stuff is involved as well. Some people seem genuinely disturbed by our decision, on philosophical or political grounds, as if by keeping a couple of 5-year-olds out of kindergarten we have violated the social contract. Specifically, we have rejected the mainstream consensus that since education is a good thing, more of it -- more formal, more "academic," reaching ever deeper into early childhood and filling up more of the day and more of the year -- is better for society and better for all children. This is almost an article of faith in contemporary America, but it's also one that's debatable at best and remains largely unsupported by research data.

Another quote, this time on the underlying philosophy of public education.

Both Leslie and I went to public school and had the usual assortment of excellent, mediocre and bad teachers. We're not zealots with some animus against public education. We're glad it exists and relatively happy to pay taxes to sustain it. As I said earlier, though, we feel dubious about the ideology that seems dominant in public education these days, and especially about the idea that sending kids to school virtually all day for 10 months a year, beginning at age 3 or 4, is the healthiest mode of delivering it.

That is a great way of putting it. Homeschoolers by and large are not “anti-education”. But many of us do question whether this increasing grip that the state has on our kids from progressively earlier ages is the best way of delivering an education. I also think he really gets past the rhetoric and gets into the reality of what the system is all about.

The real purpose of all this formal schooling is to get the kids out of the house and train them to stand in line and follow instructions while mommy and daddy get back to their ultra-important lives as economic production units. If you break down the impressive-sounding, bureaucratically adumbrated federal list of kindergarten standards, a whole lot of it amounts to learning to count from 1 to 20, learning the alphabet and the months of the year, and learning to tell time.

All-day kindergarten is clearly a boon -- or more like a necessity -- for working families who have few other options, and where the alternative is likely to mean parking the kids on the sofa all day with Nintendo and Noggin.

Ding, ding, ding give the man a cigar! Besides being tax payer funded daycare, all day kindergarten is little more than a training ground to teach kids to conform to going to school. They learn mostly how to be in a school environment where they will spend the next dozen years. You go to school to learn how to go to school. Potential trouble makers are identified, “gifted” kids are likewise identified, little boys who squirm in their seats like little boys have for millennia are referred to a physician to be sedated with medication to make them compliant.

The article is an interesting one, and gives you a different perspective on homeschool and public school from someone who is not educating their kids at home for religious reasons.

Yet another reason to not send your kids to public schools

These are the sorts of people who make policy at the highest levels for public "education"

President Obama's "safe schools czar" is a former schoolteacher who has advocated promoting homosexuality in schools, written about his past drug abuse, expressed his contempt for religion and detailed an incident in which he did not report an underage student who told him he was having sex with older men.

Conservatives are up in arms about the appointment of Kevin Jennings, Obama's director of the Office of Safe and Drug Free Schools, saying he is too radical for the job.

Jennings was appointed to the position largely because of his longtime record of working to end bullying and discrimination in schools. In 1990, as a teacher in Massachusetts, he founded the Gay, Lesbian and Straight Education Network (GLSEN), which now has over 40 chapters at schools nationwide. He has also published six books on gay rights and education, including one that describes his own experiences as a closeted gay student.

Do you want men like that creating education policy for your kids? Read the whole article to see who the education establishment thinks knows what is best for your kids.

Albert Mohler on the New Hampshire homeschool case

A great treatment by Al Mohler of the controversy over the New Hampshire homeschooled child, who by all accounts is well adjusted and academically excelling, nonetheless being forced to public school because a religious education is deemed inherently inadequate and perhaps harmful. Several important points were raised in the show.

What about kids in a Christian school? If a "rigid" religious education is deemed harmful (and who decides what qualifies as a "rigid" religious belief as opposed to a permissible one?), maybe kids shouldn't be allowed to go to religious private schools where they will be surrounded by other like-minded kids. That seems to be a unacceptable to the court as homeschooling and since religious school teachers fall outside of the iron fist of the teachers unions, don't think for a second that they are safe.

The reality is that parents will make poor choices, will make mistakes, will be bad parents. So what is the alternative? The only alternative as Dr. Mohler puts it honestly is to remove parents from the parenting equation. Let the state take over kids and assume that the state will somehow do a better job raising kids than it does in public education or really any other function the state takes on.

Pay attention here, religious liberty is chipped away every day and the death by a thousand cuts is a death nonetheless.

School is back in session. What is your child learing today?

Today is the first day of public school in Michigan, thanks to a law mandating that school not start until after Labor Day. If you are a Christian parent, in Michigan or somewhere else, and your kids got on a bus and went off to a state run school this morning, I would ask you to give some thought to what that means.

Ask yourself a few questions...

- How well do you know the people, students and staff and teachers, that your kids are spending the bulk of their day with?

- How familiar are you with the curriculum your kids are being taught from? What is the worldview it teaches from?

- What will your kids hear or learn about God today other than hearing His name taken in vain 100 times?

- What are you doing in place of educating your kids today and is whatever you are doing more important than raising your children?

I am not saying you are a bad parent if your kids are in the public school right now. I am asking you to give some serious thought to what that means for your children.

Is it an issue of money? If you are an intact, two-parent family are you really financially further ahead by having both of you work? Are the goods and services you purchase with the extra money worth the cost to your child?

Is it an issue of ability? Because honestly you are probably as capable as most school teachers to teach most subjects and you are far more familiar with your child and far more flexible than a classroom full of 30 kids can be for 40 minutes a day. One of the great advantages of homeschool is the ability to be flexible with scheduling and style.

Is it something you have even thought about? Is your decision to send your kids to the government run, secular public school a decision made because you can't afford a private Christian school? Is it just what you do? Being a Christian parent supersedes being a citizen of the United States.

The stewardship of parents over their children is one of the most precious and solemn given to a Christian. At the very least it deserves prayerful thought and consideration. Before you put your child on that bus, make sure you know what you are doing and why you are doing it.