The American education system has an unfortunate dichotomy: while our universities are among the finest in the world, our public K-12 system has consitently gotten low marks.
The question is, of course, why there is such a dichotomy.
People often point to an obvious fact: teachers’ salaries in public schools tend to be too low to reliably attract the best people. That is, of course, a plausible reason. There is also the fact that the actual education process tends to be underfunded-especially in schools in less affluent neighborhoods.
Another factor that people point to is the teachers’ unions. A standard claim is that these unions serve to protect poor teachers from being fired and that they obstruct attempts to assess and evaluate teachers based on their performance. If this is the case, then these unions would serve to preserve and protect a system that would tend to work poorly. After all, people tend to be less motivated to do their best if they are not being held accountable for doing poorly or rewarded for doing well.
Universities also have unions and these are typically affiliated with national educational organizations. For example, being part of the United Faculty of Florida also makes me a member of the NEA. While some unions have considerable power and can even dicate terms to administrators, they generally tend to lack the clout of public school unions. Perhaps this helps explain the disparity between the university system and the public K-12 system.
Another factor might be the tenure process. Most universities have fairly rigorous requirements for tenure and promotion. While the system can be corrupted and misused, the process is generally applied properly at most school. I know of several people who did not receive tenure-and in most cases this was fair and just. Under this system, a new faculty member is effectively on probation for about 6 years and has to achieve various professional goals and demonstrate competence. Because of this, faculty tend to work fairly hard to get tenure and this tends to keep the quality of education in decent shape.
Of course, it might be worried that once a faculty member gets tenure, s/he will start coasting. That is a legitimate concern and I have seen it happen. However, our pay raises depend a great deal on getting promotions. To get a promotion, a faculty member has to be appropriately productive. They are not just handed out based on time served. As such, people are still motivated to remain quite active and doing their job well.
Even after getting that final promotion, faculty are still evaluated. I’m a full professor and I have to go through the process each year. My chair, who does an excellent job, has no qualms about pointing out any shortcomings or praising success.
Also, there is the matter of pride and status. Faculty tend to be rather competitive. Part of this is ego but part of it is that we have to compete for things like grants. As such, there are always incentives to stay at the top of one’s game.
While this just scratches at the surface, it seems well worthwhile to look at what works in the university system and see if that can be applied to the K-12 system. Perhaps none of it will be useful, but perhaps there are some useful things that could be applied.
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“. . .why there is such a dichotomy.”
No denying the various causes you’ve listed. The public usually focuses on salaries and unions and tenure. 1/ It hits their pocketbooks. 2/ No one likes to think that someone else’s job is protected from political machinations. 3/ As long as there’s a liberal/conservative split, there’ll be a union/non-union split. 4/ Too many people who have been educated in our schools can’t think about more than three things at a time.
But this is truly only scratching the surface. Unions are only part of a weak-linked chain that stretches from self-interested school board members with axes to grind to incompetent administrators who cannot or will not evaluate their employees to parents whose children are ‘perfect’ to teachers who play the game to survive until retirement to students who’ve never been taught (by parents, teachers, their peers, the system) to value learning. These weak links will most likely require mending before systems that work in universities will work in the public schools.
One of the more obvious reasons for the dichotomy you have omitted: The public k-12 system ‘must’ cope with students and parents such as those mentioned above. Universities, I think you’ll agree, can obviously be much more selective in their admissions. And even if they do broaden their admissions policy, to increase enrollment for example, they cull out the weakest quickly, not too long after they’ve wrung as much money as possible out of the parents.
In light of all of the above, the dichotomy seen between public schools and universities is most likely much greater than might be seen between private schools and universities.
True-the fact that college is a choice and not compelled does make a difference. Plus, we get the people who did well (or at least semi-well) in the K-12 system. K-12 has to take everyone. We do get a somewhat similar model in state schools-they tend to have lower standards and hence tend to be more like the K-12 system.
It is always interesting to get people in politics attacking education. After all, the typical goal of a politician is to get into a position, milk it for as long as possible and try to be free of accountability.
Good post.
School choice and competition among schools is the key. That is why our universities are good, and our public schools are no good.
Stop me if this seems off the mark, but it seems to me that the matter of choice in education might be loosely compared to the idea of choice in Social Security reform. As a solution to that system’s financial woes, Pres. Bush tried to introduce private/personal accounts. His efforts failed—likely because of the messenger more than the message :). At any rate, one argument that seemed to bear some weight in that debate was that allowing participants to opt out of the SS system would deprive a system–one already, for many reasons, financially unbalanced– of much needed income. Thus, though Mr Bush proclaimed his interest in saving Social Security, the ultimate outcome of private accounts would, down the line, likely have been SS failure. Note:Our recent financial Crisis has underscored at least one other weakness of the private account option. No elaboration needed here.
We have not yet seen the effect of the nationwide application of school choice. We know that some plans have succeeded, but we don’t know, for example, what would happen if school choice were universally available. What would happen when the public schools collapsed, as they likely might under the pressures of universal choice (as SocSec would have with the PA option)? What would happen when all potential recipients of compulsory education (35-45M—I can’t find the specific number) would flood into the private and parochial schools of our nation which are currently designed to handle 5-10 million students? Would those smaller schools begin to look more like public schools? With larger classes? With more disciplinary problems because the private schools could no longer ‘choose’ their students on the basis of emotional stability, intelligence, etc.? With more complex administrative structures? Would the public outcry about increasingly inferior student performance increase as the parents of more and more average and below average and unruly students opt into the private schools of their choice?
biomass: “We have not yet seen the effect of the nationwide application of school choice.”
Yes we have: Belgium. School choice is not synonymous with vouchers. In Belgium, parents have a broad choice as to which public school to send their kids.
T.J.:
“We have not yet seen the effect of the nationwide application of school choice.
I was referring to the United States. I hesitate to compare program results from country to country. The effects of privatization of Social Security in England and Chile,for example, are available for public consideration, but I don’t think they bear relevance to our SS situation. And we might think democracy is a great idea for countries in the Middle East, but the form of democracy that finally emerges in any one of those countries is often pretty unsettling and ‘foreign’ to us.
Comparing/contrasting the success or failure of school choice in a country smaller than the state of Maryland to what might occur in a country of 3.9m square miles and population of 300m+. is problematic. Of course, we not only have to consider the differences in population and geographical size but differences in the political/economic systems the countries begin with. How is funding achieved? How does the size of the public school population compare with that of the private school community? Add in several of the unanswered questions I raised in the second paragraph of my last post, and I believe there are valid reasons to question to what degree the US/Belgium comparison is meaningful.
Until such questions are answered, comparing school choice in the US and Belgium is like comparing he US to Chile or England on Social Security. Apples to oranges.