A Defector's Thoughts on Education Reform

I came across Diane Ravitch's opinion piece in the Journal today and was intrigued. She was the Assistance Secretary of Education to Bush Sr. and an ardent supporter of Bush Jr.'s education initiatives while working for private non-profit education think-tanks and such.

Basically, she was a former imbiber of the accountability, charter school kool-aid and is getting on the wagon to liberate herself from said kool-aid, citing some of the following as reasons:

• No Child Left Behind (NCLB) is flawed for two principle reasons: It allows states to define their own levels of "proficiencies" which pale compared to federal standards, and it focuses on reading and math at the expense of other important subjects.
• Regarding charter schools, they now serve 3% of the nation's children, 17% of which do better than public schools, 46% do no differently, and 37% do worse.
• Culture of teacher accountability, while important in principle, is creating a punitive culture not conducive to actual teaching improvement.

Ms. Ravitch brings no new ideas for reform to the table, but finds it sufficient to announce her defection. Fair enough. I've got some thoughts of my own and your takes are welcome.

First, it's got to be understood that what you send your child to school with is vastly more important than what you expect them to get while there. Ms. Ravitch rightly points out that, again and again, poverty is the best indicator of child performance in schools. Parents in poverty-stricken homes are often raising their children alone or have two parents both working in low-paying jobs indicative of the poverty in which they in turn were raised. In either case, this is not an environment where kids are engaged after school in discussion of what was learned, encouraged in their homework or even assisted in it, or given opportunities to learn through the summer while not in class or after school in things like music lessons, trips to zoos and museums, concerts, etc.

Second, even in higher-income family situations, not having a parent at home when the kids are done with school has to have an effect that I don't believe has been adequately documented. Again, it's the parent at home, who's not stressed out about working at a crappy job, who's focused 100% on nurturing the children, who has time to be involved in parent-teacher conferences and parent-teacher organizations, who can have a much bigger impact on their kids' education than anything we do in school.

It's not PC to talk this way, and I'd happily be a stay-at-home dad if the situation called for it, but two full-time incomes, a phenomenon being called "necessary" more and more these days, comes at a non-monetary cost paid by the children more than anyone.

Taking these principles into application, there's got to be a way we can take a load off of single-parent families a bit and on families with children:

1. Is there a way that trips to museums, zoos, concerts, purchases of books, vacations to national or state parks, etc. can be deductible or that some sort of tax credit can be given as in-home education expenses? Maybe that kind of deductible/credit can only be available below a certain income, but then again, a lot of these poverty-or-close-to-it families don't pay taxes anyway.
2. Can we say that at a certain income level above poverty but still not amazingly high, that single-parent families or families with children just straight pay no federal income tax? Take the stress off a bit?
3. What about a huge tax break for single-income families? It would have to be big enough to tip the scales for two-income families, already debating whether it's worth it as the second paycheck gets dumped into day care or nannying, can have a real financial incentive to ditch the second income.
4. Unrelated to the principles I mentioned, the only way we can really expect better performance and heightened accountability in public teachers is to jack up their income. I can imagine how frustrating it must be to be a teacher accused of being a slacker having been paid like one your whole career. Those of you who've been to IN-N-OUT outside of Utah (they're still rookies) have hopefully noted that apart from a different quality of food, the service is better. They require a different level of service from their employees than other fast-food burger joints, and it's simply because their cashiers make as much as competitors' managers. The bottom line is the bottom line sometimes.
5. Rather than hold teachers accountable for their performance in class (or perhaps in addition to it), hold accountable the administrators of state and federal funding at the district and school level. If an administrator is not able to show results in student performance by some metric (TBD by people smarter than me), that's the administrator mis-managing and not knowing how to get an ROI. That's their problem, not the teacher's. A solution I have is to keep administrators in the classroom. I know they're busy, but make them teach a class a day or something--maybe a 1st period class or sub part of the day in elementary schools (probably just let them do whatever they did before they got promoted) so they can keep their feet wet and stay close to the ground. It'll take a load off the teachers and help generate some empathy.

So yeah, that's what I got. I'm starting to stress about this as our first home purchase will have as much to do with the local school district as it does the home itself.

What do you guys think?