Last night my darling wife and I got free tickets to see the new documentary “Waiting for Superman”. It was a very interesting movie covering the way our public education system in America has been broken. There are school systems that consistently churn out under-performing students and drop-outs. There are school systems in America that if your child goes there, they have less than a 30% chance of actually graduating and being prepared for a four year college. These are numbers that are terrifying and they are made all the worse by the fact that parents know these bleak numbers and are at a loss for solutions. Their only hope is to get their kid into a charter school that has a much higher success rate, some charter schools graduate as many as 96% of their students.
Watching this movie the thing that struck me most was the absolute despair these parents felt when their children was only 6 or 7 years old and they knew that if they couldn’t get them into a charter school they were almost guaranteed to not graduate from high school. Because entry to these charter schools is held by public lottery, your kid’s future was totally in the hands of fate. It was hard to believe this reality existed in America, the greatest country on Earth and one with a totally free public education system available to all. What caused this problem and what are the solutions? Let’s take a look.
Problem #1 – Teacher’s Unions
The main problem the movie focused on was the teachers themselves. What made for a higher success rate in graduation wasn’t the income of the student’s family, or the niceness of the school’s facilities, or even parental involvement. The number one factor in student success (according to the movie) was the quality of the teacher and how much that teacher was invested in making sure their students succeeded. The main stumbling block to this was the fact that the Teacher’s Unions were so powerful that they had negotiated tenure for all teachers that had more than 2 years experience. So after a teacher has gotten tenure they can do anything and no one can fire them. Some teachers just read the paper, some ignored the children, but most of them just went through their day by rote with none of the passion necessary to engage students and get them excited about learning.
Communism always leads to trouble
These problems have arisen because the unions have found a way to divorce results from reward. In other words, in a capitalistic society if you do excellent work it should lead to excellent pay, if you do average work it should lead to average pay, and if you do poor work it should lead to poor pay or you getting fired. A lazy hand should lead to poverty and a diligent hand should lead to wealth. (Prov 10:4) As soon as this God ordained incentive to excel is removed the natural human tendency towards sloth takes over and it turns all but the best teachers into mindless drones doing just enough to get through their day. You would think the obvious solution here is to remove these tenure rules and let the districts reward their best performers and fire the worst but the unions are too powerful and will not let that happen.
Problem #2 – It’s not the state’s job
The second problem is one that’s not even addressed by the film and that’s the mindset that we Americans have that it is the government’s job to educate our children. According to the Bible, the responsibility for education falls solely on the shoulders of Mom and Dad. (Prov 1:8) While it’s certainly not sinful to send your child to public school and to hold those schools responsible for their performance, it’s not the teacher or the principal that God will hold accountable for how your child was educated; it’s you, the parent. We cannot abdicate our responsibility to our children by relying solely on their school, we must roll up our sleeves and make sure our kids are getting what they need. It can be as simple as making sure they read a book for an hour a day and have memorized their multiplication tables but we must make sure that our kids are progressing at the rate they should. That’s not the school’s job, that’s ours and unless we start taking this responsibility seriously, this nation is headed for trouble.
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