Education Woes

Starting around my junior year of high school, I was convinced that I would spend my life as an educator.  But, after spending five years jumping through the hoops in college to earn an education degree and then spending three years working in an elementary school, I realized I'm not cut out for the bureaucracy that is the education system.

As a conservative/libertarian, I was constantly frustrated about being a cog in the wheel of Big Education.  I entered my first year as a teacher filled with fresh ideas and full of energy.  I left three years later beaten, battered, and burned out.

The current system is designed to meet the needs of the middle 60% of students, which holds back the progress of the top 20% of students and drags along the bottom 20%.  And, now that I can see the forest from the trees, it occurs to me that the system does the same to teachers.

I left teaching almost two years ago knowing that if I were to ever return and want to survive a career in teaching, I would have to lower the standards to which I held myself as a professional because the reward for such work would not (and did not) equal the effort I felt I had to put forth.  I love incentives, and the public education system discourages incentives.  Why put forth extra effort and work to be innovative when rewards are not based on those qualities, but are based upon how many years you've stuck around and/or how many college classes/degrees you've accumulated?  And while I'm not making a judgment about someone who can work in that environment, I knew it was not for me.

With that said, I still maintain an interest in all things education and a couple of stories caught my eye this past week.

First came the Kansas City school board’s decision to shutter 28 of its 61 schools.  According to the NY Time's report, former Pueblo, CO, superintendent Dr. John Covington spent the early part of his tenure as the Kansas City schools superintendent creating a plan to close the $50 million deficit in their $300 million dollar budget, and a big part of that plan was to close nearly half of their schools after almost 18,000 students left the district in the past 10 years, leaving only 17,000 students in the district.

(And at his blog, Rod Dreher gives a big picture explanation of why Kansas City's public schools failed.)

Then I read a great rant against Big Education from Matt Welch at the blog of The World's Greatest Magazine.  From that post:

These three sentences appeared consecutively in today's New York Times:

But the real question, still unanswered, is whether you can cut school taxes without damaging schools. The average teacher salary in Hastings is $96,597. The superintendent makes $228,000.

Let's see, is this mic on? Can I get a little more reverb? Good. WE ARE OUT OF MONEY, ASSHOLES.

Not only that, but we are out of money because YOU STOLE IT, FROM THE CHILDREN. And the rest of us. 

(...)

Here is how the system works, ladies and germs: First, during the good times, when people are (rightly) paying attention to concerns outside the dreary slog of politics and public policy, go ahead and double the cost of state government, in like five years, without a shred of detectable increase in the quality of services. Next, when times get bad, complain bitterly about "savage" and "annihilating" budget cuts, threaten to eliminate the very favoritest of all public services (say, access to the gorgeous state parks in California), and then cut your payroll by all of ... a quarter of one percent. After all, why fire a single teacher when the stimulus package will pay for all of them? Finally, when all else fails, raise taxes, to "close the budget deficit" and "restore our education budget to current levels."

One of my biggest frustrations about the education system stems from the fact that the people in charge of the education system (the government) are poor stewards of our money.  The people in charge seem to think that there is no problem that more money can't solve, when money is the least of our problems in education.

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SONG:  "Haven't Meet You Yet" by Michael Buble

LOOKING FORWARD TO:  playing a round of golf in 2010.  The weather this weekend only allowed a brief trip to the driving range today.  But, on a positive note, I was able to try out my new driver for the first time, and I was more than pleased.

The Wizard of Westwood

Today is the 99th birthday of the greatest basketball coach of all time and, in my opinion, one of the greatest men to have lived during the 20th Century, John Wooden.

John Wooden was the coach of the UCLA Bruins from 1948 to 1975.  During his tenure at UCLA, Coach Wooden lead his team to 10 NCAA championships in an 11 year span.  The next closest coaches have each won 3 championships.  He had a career winning percentage of 80% (664 wins with 180 loses).  He was the first person to be enshrined in the Basketball Hall of Fame as both a player and a coach, an honor that only two other people have accomplished.

The LA Times has an excellent article in celebration of his 99th birthday, where they inform of 99 things about John Wooden.

Yet all of these accomplishments pale in comparison to who he was as a man and the way he lived his life as a husband, coach, and teacher.

I first learned about Coach Wooden 30+ years after he retired from coaching.  I was in college and stumbled upon a television show on PBS entitled "Values, Victory, and Peace of Mind".  In this program, John presents his philosophy for success in life.  He gives a history of his childhood, his early teaching career, and his success as a basketball coach.  During this show, he walks the viewer through the genesis and development of what would eventually be called the Pyramid of Success. 

Following the program, I went to the bookstore and found a copy of the book "Wooden: A Lifetime of Observations and Reflections On and Off the Court".  This book would become my foundation for my brief, but successful, career as an elementary school teacher.  I learned more about pedagogy and classroom management from this book than I did in 5 years at a teacher college.

Because of my libertarian world view, I structured my classroom differently than most of my co-workers.  I didn't want to have to police my students or my classroom, so I did not have "rules" in the traditional sense.  Rules are made to be broken, the saying goes, and when a rule is broken, it is not a good thing.  So instead, I set up goals, with built in supports for reaching those goals, because when a goal is "broken", it is a good thing.  And when a goal isn't met, it is a teaching opportunity; it is a time for learning.

While I always had this classroom "management" philosophy in the back of my mind, it wasn't until I read the "Wooden" book that I was able to figure out how to implement it into my classroom.  The first two years of teaching, I read out of the book to my class, but it never seemed to quite work out like I'd envisioned it.  The concepts were too abstract for them.  The pyramid was built with words that they couldn't understand.  So, I was pleased to discover, before my third year, that John Wooden had taken his previous books and had developed them into a children's book, "Inch and Miles: The Journey to Success".

The first two weeks of my third year in teaching were structured around the reading and discussing of this book.  Each day we read about and discussed each of the blocks of the Pyramid of Success, and then added each block to a bulletin board on our back wall, which we would refer back to often throughout the rest of the year.

Using Coach Wooden's simplified definition of success, trying their hardest to be the best they could possibly be, I hoped to help them develop a self-awareness and the ability to reflect on their effort, to determine on their own whether or not they were successful.  I didn't want them to rely on other people to determine their success.  I wanted them to know in their hearts and minds whether or not they were successful.

Coach Wooden is a man filled with wisdom.  His books and speeches give us a glimpse of the mind of one of the greatest motivators of our time.  

So, happy birthday Coach Wooden.