NOTE: Although this commentary was first published in 2002, its conclusions have been revalidated every single year in our annual Education Quotient study of public school districts.
Except for the War on Terrorism, no single subject occupies the hearts and minds of the American people more than does education.
Clearly, the quality of public education in this country is on everyone’s mind these days, this being an election year. At the local, state and national levels, politicians of all political persuasions argued that more resources were the solution to the problem.
In Florida, voters passed a constitutional amendment requiring reduced class sizes throughout the state’s public schools. In an era of tight budgets and rising deficits, that’s a lot of money, especially if it doesn’t do much to improve the situation.
In state after state, politicians ran successfully by promising to spend more money on education, the beneficiary of that largesse being less important than the fact that more money was being thrown at the problem.
Perhaps it’s just something in our make up as Americans that we reflexively believe that we can spend our way out of serious problems. After all, the New Deal, the Marshall Plan, the first American on the moon, these were all bold dreams backed up by endless amounts of money.
The dismal state of many of our public school districts is just the latest “big idea” to capture the imagination of the American people. The stakes are high, and most of the country is in agreement about the problem. What we don’t agree about is the solution.
It’s hard to argue that increasing teachers’ salaries and reducing class sizes are bad things. They clearly are not. Nor is spending more money (per-pupil expenditures, which is how we as a society seem to measure how much we care about our children and their education) necessarily a bad thing.
The problem is that, when you look at the spending characteristics of academically high-performing school districts and compare them against the spending characteristics of our academically worst-performing school districts, the differences almost never lie in per-pupil expenditures or student-teacher ratios, or even in teacher salaries. I base this observation on years of examining the financial, academic and demographic data we collect each year as part of our annual Education Quotient TM study of school districts throughout the country.
Consequently, there is no reason for me to believe that improving the quality of a particular school or district rests in improving one or more of those financial variables.
Nor do I believe that simply improving the quality of our teachers, through testing or whatever the current rage may be, will eliminate the problems in our under-performing schools. That’s because, contrary to the rhetoric coming from both sides in the current debate over public education, I don’t believe that focusing our efforts on the teachers represents the solution because I do not believe bad teachers are the primary problem.
The solution, in my opinion, rests with establishing an equal partnership between teachers and parents, similar to what exists in just about every high-achieving suburban school district in America.
That's because one group can’t succeed without the support and cooperation of the other. More money might make the teacher part of the equation a little better, but it does nothing to address the problem of lazy or disinterested parents (also known as mentors).
You have to put air in both tires if you want a bicycle to function properly. The same is true for the parent-teacher partnership that fuels our most successful schools. Right now, many of our school districts are trying to run with one flat tire.
It sure would be nice if we could take some of the hot air from the most recent elections to fill up that tire.
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