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Education has been a topic generally avoided like the plague by this country’s politicians. President George Bush made a surprisingly bipartisan effort to reform education with the No Child Left Behind Act. Sadly, the substandard bill quickly lost funding following Sept. 11, and this nation’s public schools have suffered ever since.
I was disappointed to find out Secretary of Education Arne Duncan is gunning for NCLB to be reauthorized. As someone who attended a Maine public school for nine years, I feel secure in saying this is the wrong way to proceed.
The fault of the bill lies in its very foundation – good schools get more money, while poor schools lose money. It would certainly be counterintuitive to punish good schools for doing well, but taking money from badly performing schools is probably the worst possible way to increase school performance. Let’s not pretend race isn’t a issue: Well-to-do schools in well-to-do suburbs serving well-to-do white kids will have titanium jungle gyms and organic lunches while dilapidated schools in dilapidated inner city neighborhoods serving poor black kids will soon lose their orchestra programs and jungle gyms and leave children playing in the dirt lots behind the schools instead.
Not to say organic meals and titanium jungle gyms aren’t great, but they also aren’t important. While my e-mail pings with the sound of a thousand organic farmers, let me also say money does not necessarily equate a great school system. It is an oft-cited statistic that the D.C. school system spends one of the highest amounts per student in the country, yet remains one of the worst systems in the country.
It’s more than just money and playgrounds. It’s teachers and after-school programs. Debt forgiveness programs that encourage new teachers to spend a few years in inner city school districts are the only way to get competent teachers to those areas. After-school programs such as orchestras and theater groups are just a few ways of ensuring students stay out of trouble after the bell rings.
Testing students into oblivion is the antithesis of educational success. When students feel their time spent in school goes toward padding administrator’s egos, not learning a skill they can actually use in life, drop-out rates rise and test scores plummet. If you want your students to do well, you have to – surprise! – keep them interested.
Which isn’t an unreasonable request. When you force a student to spend half of his or her waking life between the ages of 5 and 22 in classes they don’t care about, they’re going to resent you. The least you could do is throw some mental stimulation their way.
It’s easy to say we need to punish the weak and reward the strong, but it’s a dangerous trap to fall into. When a school performs poorly, you need to find what the school needs to succeed, not strip away its funding. Do more than buy the school a few textbooks – buy it a few violins. Do away with teacher tenure and scare them out of jadedness. If that doesn’t work, they shouldn’t be working there anyway.
William P. Davis is Web editor for The Maine Campus.
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