Education

 I have two children: one in middle school and the other in elementary. We chose a different elementary experience for our sons and went with a charter language school. The culture is different and definitely has a more disciplined style than a traditional elementary. It works well for us, but it is not for everyone. We chose a Jeffco school for sixth grade middle school and had a terrible experience at Creighton. Not only do I think the administration and principal are quite ineffectual, but we also ran across a teacher who made my son’s academic struggles the butt of his jokes to the class (and while he admitted to this misstep, never offered an apology to my son), and despite my pleas to the counselors and the district for oversight, none was ever achieved. I do realize these experiences are quite individual. Many have great regard for Jeffco and Creighton. I do not, so my children will not attend school in Jefferson County again. Additionally, I was denied access to the superintendent- which seemed odd because my belief of the individual school districts was to gain more access for the parent. I initially requested an audience three months before the end of the school year and was followed up by a vice superintendent who emailed me that the staff of the school “means well and sometimes it takes a while to do the right thing”. So, it is my personality to try and make sure that similar experiences are avoided by others and no child suffer the year my own son had. I’ve spent a lot of time reading and a lot of time talking- most teachers are wonderful and honest about their experiences in the classroom. So far in this journey I have spoken to no less than 15 teachers and have had positive response to my ideas, save my opinions on teacher tenure which I think is understood as smart but very much goes against the culture and their extremely powerful union. I doubt any teacher’s union will ever endorse a candidacy of mine after I publish this website- but I know that a lot of these ideas will be embraced by the teachers in the classroom.  

We all know about the continued poor scores of American students on the world stage- it is published every year in news stories around the country. I don’t think I’m bothered by this as much as some. The strength of America hasn’t come from academics in the past. Our strength has always been from innovation, invention, and hard work (and from stealing away intellectual talent from other countries, but that will come up elsewhere, where it’s more topical). What I do find distressing is that we typically rank in the top two or three countries in the world in spending per student, per year. So where is our innovation and invention if we have been in those top expenditure spots for decades and continue to see decline? Despite the complaints of low teacher salary, we can’t simply throw more money at the problem to make it go away- that’s what we’ve been doing. And an increased focus on testing doesn’t seem to be working either- as this has been a focus for some time. Maybe it’s time to take some of the reins on education away from the people who continually demand them as they aren’t really getting us results. 

Right now, your schools spend four to six weeks studying and taking a test (CMAS) to largely evaluate the school and the district, not your individual child. The administrations pressure the teachers because they believe it will get better results, and the teachers in turn pressure the children to get better test scores. And the two to three weeks the teachers spend on cramming this test information lends the question from any logical person- why isn’t this being taught year long, particularly as this test is to gauge their preparedness for their next grade? And every state has something like what we are putting our teachers and students through here in Colorado; it’s all pretty standard across the country. We have sacrificed the love of learning for excessive testing and intense study. If these children are anything like me, hard core cramming a night or two before a test only helped a single performance and my retention of the material in the long term was nothing. When I loved a subject, I have retained the information for my entire lifetime. Don’t ask me for any examples, there are a lot… just take my word for it 😆. But to be serious, I‘m sure we can all recall that special project or assignment that we particularly loved and can easily list off tidbits of information. For me it was a fifth-grade report on Portugal, which main export was potash in 1986 and has a sailing heritage that has been historically embraced by its culture, and explorers who changed the face of the world.

The federal government provides about 11percent of the total spending for elementary and secondary education, and the total spending per child is about $15,500 per year. The state provides the lion’s share of funding at 46 percent, and while local government does provide a large share at 44 percent, the local district seems to want us to believe they provide almost all the funding, and the state and local governments are to have little control of the classroom experience, despite continued failure with test scores and increasing incidents of inappropriate teacher behavior, violence between students, and issues with mental health.

Our schools have a major mental health crisis going on. The ever-lingering effects of a year and a half of COVID online learning, cyber bullying, increased violence in the halls, and even gun violence in schools all speak to this. We need more people and mental health professionals. Right now, the schools are denying access to their schools even to parents using the justification of safety. This actually flies in the face of reason as more trusted adults and parents in the halls give the children more resources to feel protected, offer more support of children through different individual experiences, and can be used as volunteers in place of paid positions providing much needed flexibility in school budgets. The federal government can push medical universities to establish mental health residency programs directly in the schools through the school districts by threatening federal loans for institutions unwilling to participate (94 percent of all student loans are through the federal government and somewhere between 70-80 percent of medical students use student loans) and those numbers do not include the grants used by medical schools. Simple political pressure can provide schools better mental health resources and ultimately hands on field experience for the next generation of pediatric psychiatrists. Pair this with the retiring mental health professionals doing national service to help, and suddenly schools have a lot more resources at little to no cost to benefit our children’s health and happiness. 

 On average, teachers sign contracts for 180-190 days a year. While this may not seem like a lot, an approximate 90 percent of teachers work over 40 hours a week, and many districts require working days that are not included in this contract for training and classroom set up. With my plan of increased classroom assistance through national service, we decrease budgets using volunteers through that same program and the path to citizenship program in support staff roles; decrease budgets in less administration and districts officials through a quasi-nationalized system for curriculum, standards, and district oversight. I believe we can see the ability to extend the school year another 20-30 working days, afford to pay teachers substantially more, and provide teachers with the help they need to decrease their average work week. On top of that I think if we begin to emulate some of the systems utilized in other countries, we can split the teacher workday while extending the students day. There is currently a German system that is providing a lot of success showing evidence-based results of having the academic school day end in the early afternoon after lunch. After 12 or 1 o’clock, the children engage in their art classes, physical education, life skills classes, and the like- many elementary schools call these “specials” now. Every elementary level teacher I have discussed this plan with has reacted with support as they say there is a lot more distraction in their students after lunch, and learning is a lot more difficult. If the teaching day was split between the core academic teachers working a day starting early for teaching plan and set up, extending just past lunchtime to help with the transition into the specials and clean-up of the classroom, handing over the duties at say 1-2 o’clock to fully-dedicated specials teachers starting at 1o’clock or so, we could provide both sets of teachers with a seven-hour day and our children with a smarter, fuller academic experience with more dedication to physical development and arts. Additionally, extending the school day could benefit those children who suffer from food inequality as a “supper” or early dinner meal could be provided at the end of the day. The classrooms themselves could be shared between the morning academic teachers and the afternoon specials teachers allowing for easing of schools that are wanting for space (we’ve all seen the mobile classrooms in school parking lots) and once again giving the ability to further save on the school budget and can use that savings to be applied directly to the teachers and the classroom.  

Through all this process I have learned there is a lot of fear in this country regarding nationalizing the school system. There is a belief that large, local bureaucracy is somehow preferable to a more efficient national one. 

We have different levels of education being taught at the same grade level across the country in different districts - all the while the statewide testing remains the same across all the districts in that state. Simple manipulation of what is taught when in different districts is throwing the testing curve, and typically is a poor gauge of the student performance but is providing the evidence of the failures of the districts and their curriculum. The federal government should be responsible to standardize the curriculum across the country so the third graders in New Hampshire get the same base level of education as those in Louisiana or Hawaii. We need to eliminate the local oversight of this in order to guarantee the right of equal opportunity provided by education. We all know the inequality of the school districts in this state - look at the spending in Cherry Creek schools versus rural Colorado Springs - imagine the divide between Louisiana and New Jersey. We do a greater disservice to the children of this country by not providing an equal access to resources in their education as these will provide a clear pathway to move out of poverty, move toward better opportunity, and the path to a brighter future. And by eliminating local officials sucking up precious financial resources (superintendents average $182,000 a year while teachers average $60,000, additionally administrators pay is adjusted at the same rate negotiated  by the teachers union yet they pay no union dues) of the local school while never setting foot in a classroom or consulting with the teachers they are supposed to be acting in support of, we can start a direct national dialogue with the teachers to directors in a much larger regional capacity that can use the simple savings of bulk buying of resources to decrease the individual school budget. A partially nationalized education system actually provides less intervention and more trust in teachers, simply by covering a larger region than the districts. The number of administration jobs that tell the teachers what they need reduces, teacher efficacy in the classroom increases, as they will be put in direct responsibility to obtain their needed resources, and the budgets all go down as redundancy is reduced in high-paying, unnecessary administrative jobs. With the increased volunteer positions in schools, we have more eyes where they are supposed to be, so the rates of inappropriate interactions go down, less and less intervention from a school board and superintendent staff, and less need to utilize the district lawyers that quickly become involved when incidents occur. The only argument against this for the district relies on a country 40-years ago that was an unconnected nation of neighborhood-style economies- this is no longer the country in which we live. Administrators can do their jobs from an office 1,000 miles away, with about as much success as someone who lives in your town, as I can assure you the communications will still all be through phone and email. 

Nationalizing curriculum and superintendent duties would decrease the amount of specific, tested knowledge required, as it would be applied across a larger area of schools, freeing up the teacher time to teach directly to the needs of their individual classroom and has a much greater opportunity to engage the children in their interests and spur a lifetime of love in learning.