The Failing Education System, Charter Schools, The Tenure System

English First Semester Final Speech

The Failing Education System, Charter Schools, the Tenure System

How scary is it to think that there is no one coming with enough power, to save us. Us? Who is us? Save? Save us from what? What’s really going on and who is going through it? From the day we were born we've been learning. Learning to live and breathe and speak and eventually to calculate the square root of 64. 8. The answer is 8. But it’s all not that simple. Yeah, on a math test if it had the little radical sign with a littler 64 inside and you wrote down 8, you would get it right. You would get the points. Because that’s the answer. Schools in America teach us things that we don’t need. And maybe it’s teenage angst and the hate for homework that you think I’m just honing in on right now, but think for a second. This sucks. It all sucks a lot. 13 years of our lives spent getting an education. We learn about ethos and logos and pathos and calculus and anatomy and things that don’t actually help us become better people.

Teachers today, teach to the test. They shove information in our faces and then have us vomit it all up onto a page in a week, and then they expect us to remember it for the final 4 months later. Seriously? Sorry to anyone who has found a PowerPoint effective, but that’s not teaching. Teachers don’t have to get the information across these days. They get by for two or three years until they become protected by the union and tenure and the stupid system that focuses on the teachers before the students. The students. Tenure was originally developed at universities to protect them from arbitrary reasons of being fired, and even then it wasn't granted until they had been successful for 7 years, and then they had to apply and go through a grueling process that sometimes wouldn't even work. Now, in the government run public school system, it’s just given away.

The dance of the lemons. Teachers that have acquired tenure, but suck, are known as lemons. And at the end of every school year, school administration does the dance of the lemons. The schools in the district trade lemons and attempt to make lemonade with the equally horrible teachers they get in return. In the state of Illinois, there are 876 school districts. Only 61 have ever attempted to fire a tenured teacher. 38 were successful.

Unions are good, I guess. Teachers unions though, suck. There are currently 23 steps to firing a tenured teacher, and if you miss just 1, you start all over again. And if a teacher is totally just kicking ass, and being the best teacher you have ever seen, you cannot pay them more. You cannot. That’s ridiculous. Under the rules of the unions, teachers may not be paid more or less dependent on their performance in their jobs.

When a teacher is awaiting a tenure trial or a disciplinary hearing, they are often put into rubber rooms. Rooms where they sit playing cards and watching TV for years while they await their trials for actions ranging from extreme tardiness, to sexual abuse on their students. They sit in a room for 8 times as long as a law trial, earning their full salaries when they aren't even allowed to teach. They aren't allowed. But we can’t fire them. Rubber rooms cost the state of New York over 100 million dollars every year.

One in 57 doctors will lose their medical license after a disciplinary or mal-practice hearing. 1 in 97 attorneys will lose their law license after a similar issue. 1 in 2500 teachers will lose their credentials after a trial. That’s staggering.

Michelle Rhee was a 37 year old woman with no prior administrating experience who was placed as the chancellor of the DC public school system a few years back. She was the 7^th superintendent in 10 years. And she decided to get stuff done. She fired 25% of school principals, she closed 23 schools, and she cut 100 people from the central office. She pointed out that the whole issue is a lack of accountability. Her teachers, were pushing kids through the system and not realizing the damage they were doing, or maybe they just didn't care. “I get paid whether you learn or not.” Excuse me?

68% of Pennsylvania inmates are high school drop outs, the average cost of taking care of one inmate per year is 33 grand. Average sentence, 4 years. The average private school is 83 hundred dollars a year. Sending one person through the private school system for 13 years for that amount of money would be less than paying for their 4 year sentence, and they would have over 24 grand left for college. Improving our education system could very well bring down the amount of prisoners we have, as well as save us an incredible amount of money.

Just to get some perspective, America is ranked 8 out of 8 for math scores in countries who are developed with “good” education systems. But our students, rank number 1 in confidence in their math skills.

If we were able to eliminate the bottom 6-10% of our teachers, our scores would be projected to exceed those of Finland, who currently holds the best scores in the world. But we can’t. Because of the unions.

Magnet schools were created a while back as an alternative to the normal district area school, and they worked for a little bit. Though, they were rare and very hard to get into. And even then, the unions took over and bad teachers still got their way in. They stopped working, or at least working well enough.

Charter schools are what we need. Charter schools are funded by government money but they are run completely independently. There is a lottery to get in, because prior knowledge and test scores don’t mean anything. Charter schools are founded on the idea that there is a no child left behind policy, but they follow it. There are no advanced or remedial classes at a charter school. Every student is on the same track, and they all graduate with 100% the credentials they need to go to a 4 year university. The system works. And maybe we don’t like it because we are all supremacists and we want our kids to be the best and be in the best classes. But honey, that doesn't work.

The top charter schools in America send over 90% of their kids to a four year college, and those students are placed immediately into college level classes. They are ready and they are prepared and they succeed. Students who were in the 32% in reading and the 40^th in math, were up to the 60^th and the 80^th after just four years of chartered education. We don’t get those numbers anywhere.

So what’s the end game? What’s the solution?

 We completely restructure teachers unions, or abolish them as a whole, we outlaw a tenure system, we pay our teachers more when they kick ass, and we fire them when they don’t. We form charter schools, and a lot of them. We fix the laws that allow the state and federal government jurisdiction over schools. We get stuff done. It starts with activism, not throwing money into the issue. Be aware of what we wake up at 6 am every day of the first 18 years of our lives for. Then work to fix it.