School as a business

[Dalmbraast]

What a lot of people are missing in this argument, which has only been mentioned by one person, iirc, are the needs of the students. A business model would create a system focused on achievement, grades, and success based on some outside model and ideal of success that many students are simply not going to achieve. This isn't what education is about.

Having a "business model" doesn't create accountability, it creates a new way for standardized testing to be the most important part of "education" (which has been mentioned by several people, thankfully). It creates a way for the government or regulating body to say "Such and such a school is not meeting test results, we need to force them to change". And this might result in a change of admin, a change of teaching staff, etc. Perhaps this prepares some students, those who can and will go to university, for what they're going to be facing in the future, but not enough.

Speaking from the perspective of a teaching professional (I teach in one of the poorest areas of the greater Vancouver area in BC), this doesn't help some kids meet their potential. I know this sounds all mushy touchy/feely, but the fact is that many people simply do NOT value education anymore. They want what they need to get by immediately and don't have any concept that perhaps you won't need Romeo and Juliet or the quadratic formula in life - but the skills to apply, to think, to analyze, this is intrinsic and also taught along with this. But you can't measure that, so who cares, right? ><

Secondly, teachers are faced everyday with kids who are grossly behind in various skills. With the "No Child Left Behind" policy in the states, I'm sure it's only worse. I teach high school, but when I get say a grade 9 or 10 student who has a grade 4 reading and writing level, I'm not teaching my subject at my grade level anymore. I'm trying to make up years of deficiency, but I'm also trying to get them to enjoy at least a little bit what they're learning, and appreciate that even if they're not getting an "A" that they are in fact learning something. How is this student ever going to be successful on a state exam? Where do these types of students (and there are a great many more of them than I think people are aware) fit into a business system?

Now dont' get me wrong. I'm not trying to complain about my job and it's challenges - I'm fully aware of the various things I'll have to deal with. But when you're creating a business like system, only those with a "proper" homelife and/or money are going to succeed, you are not truly educating nor preparing students for the real world. What you are doing is putting MORE power in the hands of politicians who have little real knowledge of how to best educate people or help people succeed in areas they're good at. You're further propagating the status quo, widening the gap between the "haves" and the "have nots". You're relegating people who cannot perform well on government written tests to crappy jobs for the rest of their lives. To me that's not good business.

Anyways /end soapbox. Bottom like: a business model does not meet the needs of enough students to even make it truly valuable. It puts too much power in the hands of people who don't understand learning and who see students as potential tax payers, not people. (Gross generalization, I know... but with the current government we have in BC, I have a very dim view of politicians and education).

[SwampdonkeyPLD]

Just like hospitals, right?

We have the best in the world don't we?

Can you quote a second person w/o having to type it out? @Beck: Cary, NC. I'm not aware of any around here. And vouchers would let you go to any school you want. Right now if you're in the ghetto you go to a ghetto school, under vouchers you wouldn't have to.

[Maxxthepenguin]

We have the best in the world don't we?

Depends on how you measure best.

[Kuya]

Why does the country with the best hospitals in the world also have the largest incidences of disease amongst first world countries?

[netz]

Why does the country with the best hospitals in the world also have the largest incidences of disease amongst first world countries?

Hospitals are emergency medical care, which they do very well (generally speaking; I'm sure that you might have heard about the hospital that basically watched a grandma die in the waiting room recently). The incidence of disease is due to poor health practices and shittacular preventative care, which is squarely in the hands of our fantastic health care systems.

[Maxxthepenguin]

Why does the country with the best hospitals in the world also have the largest incidences of disease amongst first world countries?

Because our country eats tons of shitty food and doesn't practice much preventative medicine. We have a high occurrence of disease, but it gets cured. That was found to be a more profitable business model than making people not get the disease in the first place.

[Ksandra]

medical is actually a good defense to not having schools as a business. Having medicare run for profit has ruined this country imo. health insurance is getting more and more expensive and covering less, yet hosiptals wont do anything major to you unless you have it.

having schools run for profit and show their "best products" could lead to the same kind of skewed thinking, that in the end it's the next generation that loses.

[SwampdonkeyPLD]

medical is actually a good defense to not having schools as a business. Having medicare run for profit has ruined this country imo. health insurance is getting more and more expensive and covering less, yet hosiptals wont do anything major to you unless you have it.

having schools run for profit and show their "best products" could lead to the same kind of skewed thinking, that in the end it's the next generation that loses.

Here's some snip-its from an article about why health insurance keeps going up.

In Connecticut, for example, it isn't possible to buy an individual health insurance policy that doesn't include coverage for hair pieces. In Alaska, you can't buy a policy that doesn't cover naturopaths. The citizens of California must pay for acupuncture coverage or go without insurance. In eleven states, it's impossible to buy an individual policy that doesn't cover marriage counselors. Fifteen states require that all health policies cover in vitro fertilization.

The Council for Affordable Health Insurance (CAHI) estimates that mandated coverage of dental care adds 3% to 5% to average premiums. Likewise, mandated coverage of Psychologists, Podiatrists, Optometrists, and Chiropractors add from 1% to 3% each to the cost of coverage.

According to Victoria Bunce and JP Weiske of CAHI, "mandated benefits currently increase the cost of basic health coverage from a little less than 20% to more than 50%, depending on the state and its mandates."

CAHI has identified no fewer than 1,961 mandated benefits and providers

[Feedmenow]

I like the current system inplace that allows you to choose between public and private schooling.

Public education could use a raise of standards for teachers, and something to help stave off the growing apathy for education. Considering it doesn't need any direct payment, it works okayish. Having it turn all private is just going to crush a lot of the formerly public schools.

[SamanosukeShiva]

i like commercialized school, more competition = better school quality

as of right now public school monopolize the education system, which leads to poor school quality and american high schoolers r getting way behind compared to students @ other countries. ranking 25th out of 50 countries is sad for a country as big as US.

[Elesirdur]

Dalmbraast that was a great post, do you teach in a HS in the East End or Burnaby somewhere?

I also agree with your statement, or perhaps I should say disgust, at the incredibly low standards of reading and writing that are considered acceptable in today's public school system. As a bit of an aside, I recall taking a 100-level (freshmen) PoliSci course in my last year of my BA. I never took it during my first few years as I was not interested in basic Canadian Politics, especially given my participation in actually volunteering and working for the Liberal Party of Canada. Anyway, as part of the tutorial sessions, a peer-editing session was included for our term papers. I was absolutely blown away by the generally low quality of writing these first-year students were turning out. There was one student who actually could not form a coherent sentence, let alone a paragraph that continued a single idea. If what I've seen at the university level is bad, I shudder to think what it is like in high schools.

I've only read a little bit about school vouchers in an American Politics course I took a few years ago at UVic, but that is a system we do not have in Canada. Are the vouchers issued by the federal government, the State, or the local government/school board?

PS: Feedmenow, your sig is so distracting while I'm trying to type lol

[SamanosukeShiva]

http://youtube.com/watch?v=Bx4pN-aiofw

[Beckwin]

i like commercialized school, more competition = better school quality

as of right now public school monopolize the education system, which leads to poor school quality and american high schoolers r getting way behind compared to students @ other countries. ranking 25th out of 50 countries is sad for a country as big as US.

that's cute, except those top ranking countries have extensive public school systems too. Not to mention many of them offer free college as well.

[SamanosukeShiva]

but the only difference is they can actually shut the school down if they're not performing up to standard because money is attached to every student. they can pick whichever public school they wanna go to, unlike in US, we must go to the school assigned to our residential zone. if the public schools in other countries is failing, obviously the parents not gonna want their children to go there, no student going there = school shut down.

edit: not to mention we got shit like "teacher union", it would take years to fire an incapable teacher here.

[Feedmenow]

I've spent my freshman year at a public school and my Sophomore at a nice private school. To compare and contrast:

The English Honors class at the public school had a system where you read ten books, and wrote about them online. There were three categories you had to write in: Plot summary, Symbols/details, and dictionary words you didn't know. The final for that would be finishing your books and the online blog, nothing more. No other classes had essays.

In my Sophomore year, I only read 6 books (8 including the ones for summer reading) but I had to write 3-5 page essays on each one, most of them being argumentative. Then I wrote about another essay about how my writing improved. This was just English class: my World History class had 5 essays (including a 8 min. paged research paper which needed 5-6 books to have enough resources) and an elective class where I wrote three more essays.

I, again, don't see a way for public schools to get a radical improvement in education for everyone. Making all schools into private ones won't necessarily improve the system for everyone; you'll get a lot of complaints from those who can't normally afford to pay for schooling. A former public school might decide to even charge a high price for the same schooling. Due to locations you're probably going to end up forcing people to either have to pay or simply not have their children go to school. Mediocre public schooling > No education at all.

[SamanosukeShiva]

true but we got voucher system now (soon to be cutoff though /sigh)

[Elesirdur]

Oh, and with a little reading I've got some more background on vouchers. Interestingly enough, here in BC non-public schools, including the non-denominational private school I went to, do receive government funding on a per student basis. However, the amount they receive is quite a bit lower than the amount of per student funding that would be calculated in a public school. Nobody bats an eye about this here, but the same is true of universities and colleges receiving funding regardless of their public/private status (although post-secondary institutions in Canada are different from their US counterparts under the law and how they are chartered).

So, I've skimmed through that 20/20 video that was posted above and it does raise another very pivotal issue in public schools; teachers unions. I will preface my statements by saying that I do have a fundamental problem with public service unions (which is frustrating because I just started a career with the BC gov't where I have to be a member of the public service union) and teacher's unions in particulair. I feel that unions in many places do very little for the public or the members they preside over, and only are tools to bring about political change that favors their limited interests, often at the expense of citizens and residents in a given jurisdiction. I firmly believe in an egalitarian society that also incorporates a good measure of meritocracy; those who perform the best should receive the best rewards, and those who fail to perform adequatly should be repremanded. While it may seem that skills and competecy based competition and egalitarian values may be at odds, I do not believe it so if the understanding is made that all persons are equal in their intrinsic individual status, but their abilities and performances to specific applications are not equal and thus must be specialized - a step away from socialism.

The social notion of what a teacher is complicates matters further. Union organizers do enjoy puffing up their union teachers to the state they think they can do no wrong and are the annointed divine chosen ones sent down from above to raise the ignorant and unwashed masses from darkness. The fall out that this can create is a can-do-no-wrong culture, which is very dangerous in a vocation that should be held very highly accountable. However, that accountability is a two-way street. Both the teacher and the student are accountable to perform their duties in a scholastic environment. How this dual accountability should be measured is a very, very difficult question, and one I do not think I posess the requisite knowledge, experience, or objectivity to answer with any certenty. The tough thing is that this issue here is the very crux of understanding the modern society of primairy and secondary public education.

On a slightly different topic, this time focusing on universities and post-secondary education more than K-12, I would like to bring up an article I read in The Atlantic Monthly back in June. This article, written by an associate professor who taught at two unnammed second-string colleges and universities, was about dispelling the new American (and Canadian as well) myth that everyone has not only the right but the intellectual ability to attend university. (For the sake of clarity I will use the phrase university because in Canada the phrase college means something like the American junior college institution, ie. one that cannot confer degrees.) As an english prof teaching the first-year english course that is required by all students, he sees a lot of pupils who are just not fit for university, in many cases because they are just not smart enough to cut it. Long story short, the myth that everyone is capable of going to university is fundamentally destructive patently untrue. The problem lies in that it is now so unacceptable in the public realm to say, or even imply, that one pupil in an education system is less intellectually capable than another. I suppose the dark side to a public education system that is founded on egalitarianism is that it assumes that all persons have the same capability to learn and achieve scholastic goals, while this is simply not true. Through biology, genetics, early childhood development and a number of other factors, kids even in kindergarten are already divided between the "smart" and the "stupid" - even though such a simple dichotomy should not be used because it fails to take into account all the other forms of human development that can't be measured through reading, writing, and scientific skills. Nevertheless, there are just some people who are less intelligent, just as there are those who are more intelligent than average. All the public schooling and public funding in the world cannot get rid of this simple fact. Where some criticize teachers for 'failing' students that cannot (or will not) perform in schools, does anyone ask if the student actually has the mental faculties to achieve the task at hand? I suppose I've opened up an entire pandora's box of racial and bioligical issues, and kind of left the concept that public K-12 education is considered the standard that everyone, except those with mental retardation or learning diseases, can and must achieve.

[Dalmbraast]

Elesidur - actually, I teach in Surrey. Our catchment is kids from the Guildford and Whalley area, which believe it or not actually ranks lower on the poverty scale than even areas on the East Side.

You bring up some good points. Unions, while I support the principal behind them, I will have to agree do tend to become focused on their own goals and not those of the membership in general. However, without these unions, I quite strongly believe a government with the mindset of our current one (go go BC Liberals - who are actually conservatives in disguise!) would take advantage of many public sector employees, which is simply unacceptable. However, the debate over unions belongs in another thread entirely. Regardless, in Canada or the USA, there are teachers who are terrible and cannot get fired because of the union. This is truly a disservice to the students they teach... but for each of those teachers, I'm willing to bet there are many, many more who are great teachers who truly deserve the protection of the union.

My issue with what you're saying about accountability, however, is this: while you acknowledged that the success of a student is dependent on both the student AND the teacher, the general public puts more of the onus on teachers and the education system in general. If a kid fails, people want to know why the *teacher* failed the student, NOT what the student did (or did not) do to fail the course. Most teachers present their students with a marking scheme for projects, assignments, etc. before they are graded. Students know what's expected of them to pass, to get an "A", whatever. If a student CHOOSES not to study and does poorly on a standardized test, despite a teacher's efforts to review often, talk to parents, provide students with many different ways to review that don't need to take up hours of time outside of school, why should that reflect poorly on a teacher? If the teacher truly didn't do anything to help the student, of course there should be some kind of ramification for this. But those teachers are far and few between.

Some classes are also the luck of the draw - I can teach two blocks of the same course and have to teach in entirely different ways because of the strength of the class. If I get a lower achieving class because of the students in it, their scores will be lower on any kind of test put in front of them, which would then reflect back on me as a teacher. Even the best teacher in the world cannot make a student whose capability level will only ever be a "C", more than that... though they can help them acquire different skills to help them cope with a system that doesn't have enough support for them. There is no truly fair way to put into place a system of accountability that factors in all the different facets of measuring learning, student ability, student effort, teacher ability, teacher effort, etc. As a poster in our staffroom says: "A test doesn't know if my student has eaten today." The reality of most students doesn't revolve around the classroom. Many students face issues at home that concern them far more (and SHOULD concern them far more) than some stupid test written by a bunch of suits who care about numbers.

I do agree with you, however, that there are students are varying abilities. I realize that less than 30% of my students will go on to university, and realize that this isn't unreasonable. Those of us in the classroom are very aware of the varying degree of ability in students. However, that shouldn't stop us from trying to get students to set goals, perhaps even goals that might be a bit beyond their reach. Time and again studies and classroom teachers alike have managed to show that students are capable of reaching beyond their grade point "potential". What needs to happen is not to tell these kids that they cannot go to a post secondary institution and earn a degree, but they need to get the support needed to get them there. Or alternately, there need to be more programs in place to help kids get into an area of study that they enjoy and will actually be beneficial to them. There just simply isn't the funding, nor do government officials see the need for more spending on education and yet they still expect that when this next generation of lazy, "instant gratification" people comes of age, they'll be able to take over positions currently occupied by people who have a full university education and a completely different mindset.

However, this doesn't just mean putting kids in the "dumb class". This means creating programs so that kids are still learning math, english, history, etc., but they're learning it in a way that makes sense to them, and in a way that they'll actually be able to apply it to their own lives. That's the largest difference between a "smart" kid and a "dumb" kid - or even an "average" kid. The "smart" kids learn and love to learn merely for the sake of it. They love the challenge presented to them and enjoy what they're learning. Or they're smart enough to realize that it's a hoop they need to jump through to be successful in the future and if they're there, they might as well get good grades while their at it. The rest of the students don't see beyond the immediate "OMG this class is boring, I'd rather be on MSN or texting my friends". Maybe this means different schools for different programs (arts, computer science, trades, science, etc.).

The flip side of that, though, is you get people who are trained and ready for a specific role in life who don't know anything but that. University professors are a great example of this. Many of them are extremely intelligent men and women, but they're used to dealing with academia. The language they use is academic; the people they associate with are academics. Often, when put in a social situation with "normal" people, they have a hard time relating. (I realize this is another gross generalization on my part, but it's a useful example).

I honestly don't know what the solution is. Trust me, teachers and teaching professionals are VERY aware of the problems currently faced by the system. It's a topic at most professional development days. It's not working as much as we would like; there is a great deal that education has to compete with (the largest being the Internet) these days, but there isn't enough support from the government (monetarily or through legislation) nor the public to make changes necessary to make education more immediate and important to kids. To come back to to the original topic, a business model won't help that. Kids are not robots. Teachers are not robots. What truly makes a classroom a great place is the relationship a teacher is able to establish with a class and the environment they create for students. If you are forced to teach to a test, as has already been pointed out a couple of times, you are going to lose a lot of that. And that's not learning. That's rote memorization; I'm in a classroom to teach kids, to help them acquire skills, to show them different ways of thinking about things, not to fill them with facts.

Phew. My soapbox keeps getting taller. XD

[Gwynplaine]

I highly recommend John Stossel's special "Stupid in America".
http://video.google.com/videoplay?do...23583494421392

[SamanosukeShiva]

http://youtube.com/watch?v=Bx4pN-aiofw

beat u to it