“Public Education” or “Education For The Public?”
August 4th, 2008 § 2 Comments
The arguments, debates, conversations and wailings are traditions. “We must do more for public education!” Usually, “more” means spend more.
Yeah, THAT’S worked.
South Carolina – not a rich state – does a pretty fair amount of spending for education.
As pointed out in my posts “Do Public Educators Hate South Carolina’s Children” and “Who’s Responsible For South Carolina’s Schools?,” a likely factor in the state’s poor education system isn’t the amount of money spent, but how the education dollars are allocated.
C’mon… over HALF A BILLION DOLLARS a year for just for administrator salaries? What’s that … 22% of the general fund appropriation?
Put another way, 75% of revenues derived from South Carolina’s sales tax earmarked for K-12 education goes for school administrators’ salaries.
Forty-eight percent of the state’s general fund and over 18% of total funding went to K-12 education. So, please, don’t keep belly aching for more money. The stewardship of those funds is and has been a scandal for decades.
So… Is The Spy just gonna whine and not offer a solution? An idea, maybe – and not a new one. But an idea doesn’t have to be new to be effective.
What do major companies do when they have tremendous overhead that threatens profit? [In the case of education, "profit" is measured in student success - a unique situation wherein the product and the bottom line are the same.]
Yeah… outsourcing education. Google it. Not new.
The National Association of Elementary School Principals (NAESP) tried to make an argument to discredit outsourcing in 2003:
Although outsourcing is attractive to cash-strapped school districts, there are a number of potential drawbacks. Those include:
• A possible loss of control of day-to-day operations;
• Higher costs over time if contracts aren’t carefully written;
• Inability to respond quickly if district or school needs change;
• Loss of employee morale should long-time employees lose their jobs to outside companies; and
• Exposure to risk. (i.e., What if the contractor goes out of business?)While NAESP takes no position on outsourcing, other education organizations vehemently oppose the practice. Among them are the National Education Association (NEA) and the American Federation of Teachers. The NEA states that outsourcing “amounts to an attempted private sector takeover of the entire system of public education.”
I say “tried to discredit.” Look at the list of “potential drawbacks:”
• A possible loss of control of day-to-day operations;
• Higher costs over time if contracts aren’t carefully written;
• Inability to respond quickly if district or school needs change;
• Loss of employee morale should long-time employees lose their jobs to outside companies; and
• Exposure to risk. (i.e., What if the contractor goes out of business?)
Which of these aren’t already happening with a public school system?
By 2007, though via a different author, the NAESP posted another take:
As it is currently organized, it is obvious that our education system is incapable of helping enough of our children develop the high-level knowledge and skills that they need to succeed in today’s flat world. Today our children are living in a complex, dynamic, and hi-tech world; however, the schools they attend are still operating much like they did a century ago. The problem is that as long as we continue to educate people in usual ways, they will carry on the present way of doing things. Our public schools are still structured for an industrial economy.
Lou Gerstner, the former chief executive officer of IBM, stated: “Transformation of an enterprise begins with a sense of crisis or urgency. No institution will go through fundamental change unless it believes it is in deep trouble and needs to do something different to survive.”
Outsourcing could well be the “crisis or urgency” that leads public education in America to fundamental change.
The National Education Association (NEA) – which is to education what Stalin was to the Bill of Rights – pretty much makes the case FOR outsourcing when it says:
If these forces [to outsource] were allowed to continue unabated, one could imagine a system of public education where nearly all administrative, teaching, support, and even cultural functions would be controlled by private companies, reducing the role of elected school boards to glorified contract administrators.
Kinda like hearing Bill Clinton denouncing promiscuity, isn’t it? I’ll change the above wording just a touch. See if it looks familiar:
“If these forces [to continue throwing money into an ineffective system] were allowed to continue unabated, one could imagine a system of public education where nearly all administrative, teaching, support, and even cultural functions would be controlled by self-serving, unionized administrators, reducing the role of elected school boards to glorified contract administrators.”
The American Federation of Teachers approach is hilarious in this 2004 posting:
Outsourcing is often done in the name of saving taxpayer dollars, but it can cost communities dearly—in exorbitant consulting fees, mismanagement, waste and undocumented “overheads.” Private companies sometimes “cut corners” in services to ensure a profit. And communities suffer as a whole when public employee jobs that provide decent salaries, healthcare benefits and pensions are lost, hurting local businesses and the taxpayer base that supports our schools, public safety and other services.
AFT Public Employees believes that state and local government officials should consider all these factors—and study the track records of private companies that bid on public services—before making a decision that affects so many members of the public.
OK… outsourcing “can cost communities dearly—in exorbitant consulting fees, mismanagement, waste and undocumented ‘overheads.’ “ Would this happen in the current structure?
This is cute, too: “And communities suffer as a whole when public employee jobs that provide decent salaries, healthcare benefits and pensions are lost, hurting local businesses and the taxpayer base that supports our schools, public safety and other services.” So, outsourcing doesn’t mean the same jobs run differently, it means there will be NO jobs?
And the last paragraph is just stupid. Of course the companies would be vetted. Probably better than the administrators we have now.
John Stoessel of ABC had an interesting piece a couple of years ago that touched on South Carolina:
I talked with 18-year-old Dorian Cain in South Carolina, who was still struggling to read a single sentence in a first-grade level book when I met him. Although his public schools had spent nearly $100,000 on him over 12 years, he still couldn’t read.
So “20/20″ sent Dorian to a private learning center, Sylvan, to see if teachers there could teach Dorian to read when the South Carolina public schools failed to.
Using computers and workbooks, Dorian’s reading went up two grade levels — after just 72 hours of instruction.
His mother, Gena Cain, is thrilled with Dorian’s progress but disappointed with his public schools. “With Sylvan, it’s a huge improvement. And they’re doing what they’re supposed to do. They’re on point. But I can’t say the same for the public schools,” she said.
Getting away from “the importance of public education” and focusing, instead on “educating the public” is essential if South Carolinians are going to have the schools they need and deserve.
The current – long-failed – way of educating kids has become an ugly fiefdom and comfortable oasis for administrators and even some teachers.
There’s $3.2 billion that says there’s a better way.
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