Five Education Policy Proposals for 2016 Presidential Politics

Every election year, someone bemoans the fact that education is never a major factor in presidential politics. This year might be an exception, because of Common Core. But the reality is, presidential aspirants never talk about the issues that really interest the public at large.

Instead, politicians read from the same Big Book Of Education Shibboleths that pundits do.

To wit: Our public schools are a national disgrace with abysmal international rankings. Our test scores that haven’t budged in 40 years. Unions prevent bad teachers from being fired. Teachers are essential to academic outcomes but they are academically weak and unimpressive, the bottom feeders of college graduates. Administrators are crippled because they can’t fire bad teachers. We know what works in education. Choice will save our country by improving student outcomes. Charters have proven all kids can learn and poverty doesn’t matter. And so on.

All the conventional wisdom I’ve outlined in the previous paragraph is false, or at least complicated by reality. Any education reformer with more than two years experience would certainly agree that the public is mostly unmoved by rhetoric about teacher quality, tenure, curriculum changes, and choice—in fact, when “education reform” is a voting issue, the voters are often going against reform.

Education reformers are very much like Meg Ryan in When Harry Met Sally: All this time I thought he didn’t want to get married. But, the truth is, he didn’t want to marry me.  

Yeah, sorry. Your ideas, reformers, they just don’t do it for the public.

So I put together some policies that a lot of the public would agree with and many would consider important enough to make a voting issue. In each case, the necessary legislation could be introduced at the state or federal level.

There’s a catch, of course. These proposals are nowhere on the horizon. But any serious understanding of these proposals will lead to an understanding of just how very far the acceptable debate is from the reality on the ground.

To understand these proposals, a Reality Primer:

1) Some children cannot learn to the desired standard in an acceptable timeframe or, in the case of high school, in any timeframe.
2) The more rigorous the standard, the greater number of students who will be incapable of learning to that standard.
3) As a result of the first two immutable facts, schools can’t require an unbendable promotion standard.
4) By high school, the range of student understanding in any one classroom is beyond what most outsiders can possibly conceive of.

and somewhat unrelated to the previous four:

5) Education case history suggests that courts care neither about reality or costs.

The primer is important. Read it. Embrace it. In fact, if you read the primer and really get on board, you’ll be able to come up with the proposals all by yourself.

Some additional reading to remind readers of where I’m coming from:

• The Fallacy at the Heart of All Reform
• Not Why This. Just Why Not That
• An Alternative College Admissions System
• Algebra, and the Pointlessness of the Whole Damned Thing
• Jason Richwine, and Goring the Media’s Ox
• Just a Job
• What causes the achievement gap? The Voldemort View

I originally had all the proposals as one huge post, but I’ve been really short on posts lately. Here’s the list as I build it:

1. Ban College-Level Remediation
2. Stop Kneecapping High Schools
3. Repeal IDEA
4. Make K-12 Education Citizen Only
5. End ELL Mandates

Handling the Teacher Perks

Before turning teacher, I spent all but five years as a temp worker, self-employed or contract. Unemployment? A hassle I didn’t bother with the few times I was eligible. Retirement? My very own funded SEP_IRA, no employer matching. Paid vacation and sick leave? Outside of those five years, I never had any.

Going from that life to public school teaching was kind of like Neal Stephenson’s description (excerpted from In the Beginning was the Command Line) of the guy who was raised by carpenters from early childhood with only a Hole Hawg as a drill and then meeting up finally with a puny homeowner’s version.

What the hell. With so much free stuff, how can you call this work?

From Veteran’s Day to the first week of the New Year, over three weeks off, the bulk of them from mid-December to early January. Five plus days off at spring break, and two months off in the summer. Eleven days of sick leave that accrue, and two “use it or lose it” days. I get the same amount of pay every single month. Guaranteed pension, already vested comfortably, probably to retire with 30%—not bad for a late entry.

Plus, I hear it’s hard to get fired.

I clearly remember watching the perks of corporate employment slowly be stripped away back in my twenties, perks that few people under 50 can even imagine. So it’s bizarre to have entered a profession where it feels like the 80s again.

Now, I’m wondering if I’m getting used to it.

In the previous five years of teaching, my collective time out of the classroom was 3 sick days and 6 mandated professional development days. This year, I was out of class for nearly 10 days of professional obligations: three days for an honest to god, out of state, education conference, two-plus days for mentoring and induction responsibilities, and 4 days of Common Core testing.

I felt very guilty about all this time off, and without question the absences impacted instruction time and coverage. So much so that when I came down with a really severe case of with food poisoning (you know those rotisserie chickens? Used to love them. Hope I eventually trust them again) during testing week, I came in anyway because I knew it would wreak havoc both on testing schedules for administration and my carefully scheduled coverage plans (I was missing alternate classes during the week). I went four days munching crackers and chugging that weird chalky pink stuff, previously unknown to me.

In retrospect this struck me as idiotic, so I went to the principal’s secretary and asked how to request time off. That’s when I learned formally I had 13 days a year, including two use or lose–which I’ve been losing for the past five years. I took a whole day and a half just for a family graduation 10 hours away, when I normally would have left Friday afternoon and come back Sunday night.

More evidence: for the first time in eight summers, six of them as a teacher, I decided to forego employment (part-time and no benefits, of course) at my favorite hagwon, where I usually act as chief lunatic for book club, PSAT prep, and occasionally geometry.

Why? I wanted more time off.

This wasn’t a sudden decision. Last year it finally sunk in that despite the easy hours and students, the elapsed time of my hagwon day clocked in at 9 hours: three on, three off, three on, for eight weeks. While this hadn’t seemed punitive with a 5 minute commute, the schedule lost much of its charm when I moved 45 minutes away. Meanwhile, the eight week schedule left just eight uninterrupted days off at the end of summer.

Yes. The four weeks I am granted throughout the year is not enough. I want more of the eight uninterrupted weeks. It shames me.

But there’s hope. If eight days seemed too little, two months off seemed….excessive. Years of temp work leaves me never entirely comfortable not knowing where my next dollar would come from. Long vacations make me nervous. Back in my tutor/test prep instructor life, my son and I took a long road trip one summer that culminated in a 6 week stay in another city. I notified a local Kaplan branch, got some SAT classes, put ads in Craigslist and got some private tutoring, making enough to offset the fuel and food expenditures for the trip.

I am not yet ready to abandon summer work altogether. I wanted a summer job. Just a different one, with a shorter work day, a shorter employment term, and higher hourly pay so I’d get more time off but the same dollars’ pay.

Normal people are thinking “Hah! And a pony.” Teachers are thinking “Duh. Just teach summer school.” Public summer school, that is. Six weeks at most in my area, higher hourly pay, out at 1:30.

I have very strong feelings about summer school, none of them positive. But public summer school it is, this summer. More of that later, assuming I can push through and finish this absurdly non-essential piece because family fun time and work are coming perilously close to giving me writer’s block.

As a side note, a transition marked: I’ve now left all three legs of my previous income behind. Private tutoring mostly gone over the past two years, the hagwon this last year, Kaplan since ed school.

A job change to get a longer summer break. Another worrisome trend?

But then, just when I began to worry about having been slowly sucked in, I learned what my preps for the upcoming year would be and nearly had a meltdown.

Every year, teachers are given a form to list their preferences for subject assignments (aka, “preps”). Every year, my form says “I’m happy to teach any academic subject I’ve got a credential for–but please don’t limit me to one prep a semester. Two is better, three is best.” Then I list three classes I haven’t taught in a while, or would like to do a second time. This year, I’d asked to teach at least one session of history, to build on my last year, pre-calc, which I hadn’t taught in a year, and any lower level class, just to keep myself humble. Again, this is in the context of teaching any other class as well.

I went into school after summer started to work on one of the professional obligations above, and as a thank-you, the principal showed us the master schedule board.

Semester One: Algebra 2, Trig. Two blocks of each.
Semester Two: Algebra 2, Trig. Three blocks total, two blocks Trig.

This schedule would be, to most teachers, a perk. Just two preps I’m familiar with. An easy year, after an extraordinarily demanding one in which I had two brand new classes, one of which was in a completely different academic subject for the first time in five years. Some might view the schedule as a form of thank-you, or maybe an acknowledgement that I’ve got more professional responsibilities so require a schedule with less planning or curriculum development.

I looked at the board and thought Christ, I have to quit this school, that’s awful, I love this school, but I have to get out of here. I need some time for job-hunting. I can’t quit summer school, it starts Monday. But I can jobhunt in the afternoons, it’s a Friday so I have some time to update my resume. Maybe I won’t have to leave the district, so I could keep tenure, and maybe I can talk to the administrator at summer school, hey, it’s actually good that I’m not at the hagwon this year, I just need to update my resume….

So not a perk, to me.

I tend towards extreme reactions, as alert readers may have noticed. Self-knowledge has led to compensatory braking systems. In years past, I would have just turned in my resignation on the spot. But my braking system kicked in, I remembered that quitting is just a symptom of my temporary worker mindset. I reminded myself how good it felt to get tenure, that my administration team likes me. Before I quit, I should perhaps consider other alternatives.

I will cover those alternatives, and my fears, in a follow-up post. No really, I promise.

So no, I’m not yet sucked in by the teacher perks. But I do want more free time during my 10 weeks off. Call me ungrateful.

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Note: I will always value intellectual challenge over predictability for my own job satisfaction. But many teachers do an outstanding job teaching just one subject or the same two preps for thirty years. Outsiders, particularly well-educated folks with elite pedigrees, champion intellectual curious teachers with cognitive ability to spare as an obvious advancement over what they see as the “factory model” teacher turning out the same widgets ever year. But little evidence suggests that intellectual chops produces better results, much less better teachers. So please don’t interpret my rejection of predictability and routine as evidence of anything other than a fear of boredom.