BY DAVID E. LUTZ
After 25 years of teaching, I have come to the realization that it is time for those pseudo-experts on public education to get off their duffs and spend considerable time in the trenches before rendering opinions on how to repair the system.
“Improving the quality of the staff” is an overused comment that not only insults our colleges and universities by implying that their course of study fails to meet the needs of public education, but oversimplifies the problem.
More schooling for teachers not only increases their worth (master’s/doctorates), for which the public complains about paying, but fails to touch the real root of the problem: Increased book work doesn’t come close to real classroom experience.
To be honest, more money isn’t the problem.
A half-dozen issues, unrelated to increasing costs, will make all the difference:
1. Stop comparing apples to oranges: Private schools are not required to follow mandates. Therefore, they can shy away from accepting the behavior problems/the learning support/the emotional support, and they can simply return the tuition of undesirables without having to provide tutoring as the public schools are required.
They also do not have to take part in standardized testing.
2. Require legislators’ children to partake in the system of which they regulate: The assumption that one can fix a problem without ever experiencing it from the inside, to truly understand it, is nothing less than foolish (often because they are doing the aforementioned No. 1).
3. Bring back discipline: Return to the teachers the power to make students sit down and pay attention.
Teachers today cannot raise their voices, place students in the hallway, force them to leave the room if they refuse, nor keep them after school without prior notice. They can’t even give students a writing assignment for the infraction because “it turns them against writing.”
Teachers have been cussed at, scratched, hit and spit on by students and parents.
Parents often freak out when they have a handful of kids for a sleepover, but insist that teachers should be able to keep complete control of 30 for seven hours unassisted, without raising their voices or touching them. Give them something they can do as a deterrent.
4. Scale back mandates: Public education is now forced to mainstream every student. The severely emotional support and extreme learning support are now included in the regular classroom. The regular education and gifted students move about in fear of setting off these “powder kegs” or fail to be pushed harder because the teacher has to scale down assignments or walk on eggshells. Yet they are to improve test scores?
5. Stop making excuses: Parents and administrators force teachers to pass everyone under the guise of helping their self-esteem.
They are now being told not to give homework anymore because “many lack a support system at home to see that they get it done.”
Teachers are required to give retests and multiple chances to complete assignments if students fail at either of them.
We now feed them breakfast, lunch and (in some cases) dinner, and, even supply eye, dental and medical care through charity organizations. We have become enablers. Stop putting all the blame on the teacher. Remember, you can lead a horse to water, but you can’t make it drink.
6. Scrutinize more than districts’ staff budgets: Building and ground budgets include extravagant construction costs for buildings and artificial fields. Districts are extremely top-heavy with administrative costs.
And now the school boards, in their infinite wisdom, forbid the recovering of cafeteria, textbook and library book obligations until the student’s senior year even though many students seldom graduate from the same district in which they started.
In larger districts, this involves hundreds of thousands of dollars per year.
Skimming the cream of the crop off the top by allowing them to take advantage of “school choice” will only exacerbate the problem.
Private schools are under no obligation to take all that apply.
So they will subtly screen applicants and find places for those that can financially, academically or athletically help their schools, but will be conveniently full for all others.
Thereby, leaving the inner-city public schools to be the dumping ground for the unmotivated, apathetic and less desirable students.
School choice creates nothing more than an elitist system rather than the cure-all that outsiders champion.
Wake up, Pennsylvania. Common sense isn’t so common anymore.
David E. Lutz of Swatara Twp. is a retired teacher.