Monday, November 24, 2014

Education for Some

Here’s why it should work: my nephew, Tyler, went to a public school in New York City. But before you conjure up the visions of a greying, decaying public school—complete with the boarded-up windows—you should know that this was Stuyvesant High School. And what’s so special about that? Well, Wikipedia provides part of the answer:

Stuyvesant High School /ˈstaɪvəsənt/, commonly referred to as Stuy /ˈstaɪ/,[7] is one of the nine Specialized High Schools in New York City. Operated by the New York City Department of Education, these schools offer tuition-free accelerated academics to city residents. The only way to be admitted into most of the Specialized High Schools, including Stuyvesant, is to take the Specialized High Schools Admissions Test (SHSAT). Stuyvesant traditionally holds the highest cutoff score out of the Specialized High Schools; each November, over 28,000 eighth and ninth graders take the 212-hour exam, and roughly 800 students (less than 3% of applicants) are accepted annually.

So Tyler had done well—but did Stuy do well by Tyler? The answer is yes and no—since Tyler went on to go to an excellent university and then to Colombia for a master’s degree. But Stuy did have a little problem, in the form of a physics teacher from China or India whose accent was so thick that nobody could understand him. Nor was that the only problem: there were stories of teachers drunk in class, of mediocre lectures, of the academic laziness and boredom that afflict the average American high school. What made Stuy great? The students, not the teachers. Merely by being so exclusive, it attracted the finest students.

News flash—brilliant students don’t need brilliant teachers: they’ll thrive in the rockiest soil. Who needs good teachers? Kids for whom television has been their primary window to the world, not kids who, like Tyler, could identify a Monet haystack at the age of six. That’s how often he had been to the Metropolitan Museum of Art….

So I should be for it, shouldn’t I? Because look, if I had shown up drunk for work at Wal-Mart, they would have marched me down to Human Resources and fired me. Why should a New York City schoolteacher be allowed to hold on to a job, just because he has tenure?

And I should be proud of my state, the great state of Wisconsin, which twenty-five years ago did something that I found chilling at the time, and still do. Here’s what one writer, Christopher Fons, has to say:

25 years ago the Bradley Foundation and a number of other right wing “free market” oriented think tanks convinced the Republican Governor Tommy Thompson, a majority of Republicans, “New Democrats” like Milwaukee Mayor John Norquist and a few Democratic Black Nationalist legislators like Polly Williams that it was time to help the poor of Milwaukee by allowing them to accept state money to attend private or charter schools instead of their neighborhood schools.

The Milwaukee Parental Choice Program initially allowed a few hundred low-income students to participate in the program. Today the program has expanded to over 28,000 students and the means test for getting a voucher is $78,000 if the student’s parents are married. The last Wisconsin budget also expanded the program state-wide and allows a tax deduction of $10,000 if your child goes to a private high school and a $4,000 deduction for an elementary school student.

Wisconsin, in short, is leading the country in using public money to pay for private schools. Here’s the scheme: identify a “failing” school, close it down if it doesn’t improve, and then give parents vouchers for them to spend in the charter school of their choice. And listen to Steve Jobs, if you need convincing:

The problem is bureaucracy. I'm one of these people who believes the best thing we could ever do is go to the full voucher system.

I have a 17-year-old daughter who went to a private school for a few years before high school. This private school is the best school I've seen in my life. It was judged one of the 100 best schools in America. It was phenomenal. The tuition was $5,500 a year, which is a lot of money for most parents. But the teachers were paid less than public school teachers - so it's not about money at the teacher level. I asked the state treasurer that year what California pays on average to send kids to school, and I believe it was $4,400. While there are not many parents who could come up with $5,500 a year, there are many who could come up with $1,000 a year.

If we gave vouchers to parents for $4,400 a year, schools would be starting right and left. People would get out of college and say, "Let's start a school."

Hard to argue with Steve, right? But then again, the thought does cross the mind that any child of Steve Jobs will get a good education. Why? Because Jobs will not have parked his kid in front of a TV for the first five years of the kid’s life; neither will Jobs be feeding his kid fast food in the car on the way home from one job before going to his second job. And Jobs will have the mentality and the skill set to go into a school, observe, ask hard questions, interview students and teachers—who knows, maybe even take a look at the books, to make sure the school is financially solvent. White guys who are CEOs of major corporations can do that.

But on this side of the café where I’m writing we have Amir, whose child just turned six months. On the other side, Elizabeth, whose two children are fourteen and twelve. Are either Amir or Elizabeth capable of doing what Jobs did? Good people they are, but are they capable of evaluating a school? Could they be fooled by fancy brochures or the latest technology, when in fact an old-fashioned, low-tech teacher—standing in front of her or his blackboard—would serve them better?

“Hey,” I just asked Elizabeth, “whatever happened at your daughter’s school? You guys did a strike, and demanded the resignation of the principal, substitute teachers, a security guard—even had a meeting with the Department of Education about the school. Anything ever happen?”

“Not a thing,” said Elizabeth. “Well, let’s see what happens.”

So she’s savvy, in one sense—savvy enough to organize, to make a bit of a stink. But there’s something missing, something that I recall from a book by Malcolm Gladwell. And that was? That the ruling classes—meaning the people who buy the Starbucks coffee, not serve it—train their children quite unconsciously, but no less effectively, how to mediate the world. Is there a simpler way to put it? You bet—the movers and shakers teach their kids how to get what they want.

For three months, Elizabeth’s youngest daughter didn’t have an English teacher. I think now of my mother—would she have let that happen?

In fact, she didn’t. She had stirred around when needed, at one point joining a group of parents who forced the city to enclose a storm sewer that had swept away a child playing in it after a hard rain. The moms came down so hard on the official that they drove him to tears.

Do either Elizabeth or Amir have those skills? Do they have the mentality? And lastly, do they have the clout to back up a threat?

If they don’t, then they need Jobs’ child to be sitting next to their kids in a public school. And guess what? Jobs needs his child to be there, too. Because having a system where the entitled get one education and the downtrodden get another leads to a world and a system that ultimately doesn’t benefit anyone.

Sure, for the short-term it works. But pretty soon, you end up with a society so stratified that it looks like Mexico, which, by the way, is about to unravel.

Could anyone seriously want that?
   

    

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