We're screwed.
Let me introduce myself: I am an educator. I work in Orange County, one of the wealthiest counties in the State of California. And, regardless of how you voted this last Tuesday on the issue of whether you'd like to see a financially solvent state, I'd like to personally address two key bugaboos that WILL result in the further disintegration of a state public school system that was already in the proverbial toilet.
How often do we hear that the “real” problem with public education is that teachers unions possess massive clout, making it nearly impossible to fire a bad teacher? Given the massive numbers of good ones receiving layoff notices, I'd like to suggest that any such union clout is perhaps a gross mischaracterization of what ails public education. But, for the sake of discussion, let's grant the argument. Now – quick pop-quiz: who considerably out-earns said bad teachers and is even more difficult still to eliminate from the budget? Bad management.
Or, for that matter, any management. And, of course, the problem with management of any type is that it tends to procreate most prodigiously. Who prepares and presents financial plans to governing agencies? It's not teachers or groundskeepers or cafeteria cooks. For the sake of transparency and fairness, it'd be nice to see an employment audit of public education, from K-12 through higher ed, charting the growth in management/upper-level staff versus educator positions over the last 30 or 40 years. I'm betting there's a reason we haven't seen one already.
Management makes some incredibly dumb decisions, sorry, impositions, when it comes to creating new jobs. At my institution, for instance, it was decided we were short on funds; management decided we needed glorified fundraisers who made nearly 6 figures each and who, in the early years at least, managed only to bring in a small fraction of their own salaries, let alone costs of benefits and support staff (remember my earlier comments about management-spawning practices). Those awful public employee unions? They absolutely opposed the creation of these positions. Guess who won? (hint: it wasn't the unions). And when layoffs come to my institution, as they most assuredly will this fall, as they have semester after semester in a precipitous free-fall, guess who has zero chance of receiving a pink-slip? (hint: it's not me). So, please: yes, there are bad teachers, but we're grossly outmanned and out-maneuvered by management, bad or indifferent, but always well-paid and everlasting.
Let's move on to my next pet-peeve: Government can't be expected to trim its budget because the public foolishly thinks that there is such a thing as the “waste, fraud and abuse line-item.” I'm gonna let you in on a little secret the politicians and management don't want you to know: this beast exists; I've seen it. While the fraud and abuse line-items are well-typified by management spawning practices (see above comments), it doesn't take much introspection to find the waste line-item. You probably know it as “the technology budget.”
How many billions (yes, that's billions with a “b”) have we spent at the federal, state and local levels to put computers in K-12 classrooms that go almost entirely unused? Nearly a decade's worth of research shows that teachers don't trust technology, don't want to use technology, and, largely, ignore technology in the classroom. The only thing my children have ever used a computer for in their three years in public school was to read a story online. You know, because that's so much more cost effective and easier to maintain than a physical library with paper-based books. When considering computers in the schools, we should remember that physical libraries don't require the hiring and management of entire IT departments. They don't need e-rate money. They don't consume anywhere near the amount of electricity used by computers and computer networks. They don't become obsolete every couple of years and result in the dumping of incredibly toxic chemicals into the landfills and water tables. They don't require the purchase of operating systems or routers; they don't require retrofitting entire buildings and require much less air conditioning than does a datacenter. And, as an added benefit, humans have pretty much known how to use them for a good 500 years AND we can still read some of those 500 year old books.
Try that with a computer sometime...
