Lecture 4: “Barriers to Effective Education I ”
We are going to start a new series of four lectures on barriers to effective education. These are four of the most important barriers to effective education. Those four barriers are equity, accountability, mobility, and obsolescence. Today we are going to deal with equity as a barrier to effective education. We need to start with the definitions of equity? There are three kinds of equity. The first kind of equity is equity in time in years of education. Everybody in the U.S. gets thirteen years of education for free. Grades K-12 are free. Beyond that you have to start paying, some people more than others, some places more than others. One would think then that everybody has at least the equity of thirteen years of education. That's not completely correct, because in having twelve years of education and kindergarten free, not everybody finishes. Some kids drop out at the end of grade ten. They are gypped out of two years of their entitlement (if you want to think of equity of education as an entitlement). Even if you think of that as equity you have a hard time, because all of you who are taking this course are having your education subsidized. The in-state people more than fifty percent and the out-of-state people about twenty percent. No one is paying the full cost of education even at the higher education level. So this represents another kind of subsidy and of course the greatest subsidy comes to medical education. Medical education is the most expensive education around and isn't it interesting that doctors who go on to have the highest income of anyone in the society have the most public subsidy of any profession in the society. That itself speaks to the issue of equity.
The second kind of equity is equity of resources. Equity of resource is how many dollars you are spending on each kid. Not the dollars spent on the facilities and the materials students use, but the equity of resources distributed. The kids who have the most money spent on them are the kids who need it the least. These are the kids from the higher socio-economic households. The kids who need it the most often have the fewest resources available and that is not equitable. It is also shortsighted on the part of society not to provide the resources to the kids who need them because then these are the kids for whom education doesn't work. These are the kids who end up in jail and on welfare and so we pay for it another way. It really is in the self-interest of the society to make sure that education works for everybody and to have more equity of resources.
We also need equity of results. That's the third kind of equity. Not to say that everyone should go on to college, which would be one result, but rather equity of results in terms of everybody getting as much education as will benefit them. Notice the term equity rather than the term equality. Note also that Dr. Allen is opposed to equality in education. Equality is first of all a bad idea, it is impossible to achieve and it is undesirable. We are not all the same and depending on one's special talents, abilities, and interests one would have different needs. So equity is providing for everybody what he or she need and what he or she can profit from not giving everybody an equal dose. In my opinion the way we fund education is wrong. About half of the funding comes from the state and the other half from the local community. The half from the local community comes from property taxes. I would like to see a vast majority of the funding come from the federal government. That is the only way to really make it equitable and the argument for that is very simply that the American population is very mobile (we'll talk about that issue on its own later.) But with that mobility if a kid comes from Mississippi who is poorly educated, in Virginia we have to pick up the pieces or the other way around whichever it is. We have that interdependence of population. I would argue that the funding should be federal. But equity of results would be that every kid would get the results that they needed. Now we really have some attempt at the equity of results in terms of recognizing for example, in Special Ed it is going to take more resources to educate Special Ed kids to the same level of other kids. For my purposes I would like to see every kid treated as a Special Ed kid and give every kid the resources they need to educate them to the level that they can benefit from. If you gave the bilingual kid more intensive education at the kindergarten and first grade levels, then that bilingual kid would have a better shot at medical school later on. If the public purse is going to subsidize medical school, then I would like to make sure that everybody had an equal shot at it, which at present time is definitely not the case.
What are the barriers to equity of education? Remember that I have defined equity as being three kinds of equity: equity of time, equity of resources, and equity of results. Now I talk about one of the barriers in that there is a lack of resources where the need is greatest. For example in the city of Chicago they did a study some years ago that showed that even after you added all the federal entitlements and you looked at the amount of money being spent per kid in every school in Chicago, you found that the poor kids were having less money spent on them in the city of Chicago then the kids of wealthy backgrounds. Now how can that be? The reason is that in the inner-city schools many of the teachers are beginning teachers or permanent substitutes. Permanent substitutes are at the bottom of the barrel in terms of salaries. Since 80 to 85 percent of the school budget is in salaries, you have teachers at the high end of the salary schedule out in the nice schools and teachers at the low end of the schedule at the not so nice schools. That means that the amount of money being spent on those kids, because you're hiring low cost teachers in the inner-city and high cost teachers in the periphery, that's where the difference comes. If you are a teacher it only makes sense for you to go and teach where it is easy. That is a good decision on the part of the teacher. If you give me the same resources and say that over here you can teach the kids that are easy to teach and over here you can teach kids that are hard to teach, where are you going to go teach? It is a very sensible decision to go teach where it is easy. I applaud the teachers who for whatever reason of social conscience decide that they want to teach where it is tough, I think that is really neat and I want to encourage it, but these are teachers who are going against the system, they are teaching the tough kids in spite of the system rather than because of the system. The system makes it much nicer to teach kids out on the periphery where there is good family support. One of the results of that of course is the kind of PTA's that have both the family involvement and the resources in the parent community to help. But the argument I would make for equity would be that sense we know that teachers would prefer to teach the nice kids rather than the other kids, then we should provide incentives for teachers to teach the kids where it is tough. Either you give them battle pay or you give them smaller classes or you give them more help. There are a lot of ways of adding to the resources to make it a desirable assignment to teach tough kids. New teachers get the hardest assignments. Isn't that a great system? New teachers will have more preparations, they will have three or four different preparations and after you've been there awhile you can get your classes organized so that you maybe have two preparations, that is a very nice, comfortable assignment and of course the senior teachers all assign themselves the honors classes in the name of we want the brightest kids to have the best teachers. The fact of the matter is that the brightest kids don't need the best teachers. As a matter of fact all kids need the best teachers and the teachers can make more of a difference with the kids whose lives are marginalized one way or the other than they can with the kids who tend to be the honors kids. I don't want to shortchange the honors kids, I want to give them their due too, but the consequences of not giving the honors kids their due are less than the consequences of not giving the kids from the wrong side of the tracks their due. The honors kids will at the worst get bored but they'll still go on to college because most of those honors kids have family support behind them. So, new teachers have the hardest assignments and I would like to give new teachers the easiest assignments and let teachers work in the hardest assignments as they go along. I promise you, you'll go in and work your way up through the system and then when it comes your time to teach the honors classes you'll line right up and say, "Hey these are the kids I want to teach," and I don't blame you for that because that is the system. You see I would like to create a system where the most desirable assignments would be the ones where the teaching was toughest. To make those the most desirable you make them desirable in terms of pay and status but also most importantly in terms of the kind of support that you need so that you have a good shot at getting the job done. Right now you are not getting any extra resources and so you are going to come away from that task much more frustrated then if you have kids that are easier to teach; that is where the system is off. So it all adds up to the fact that the fewest resources, financial and human, are in the poorest schools. Bad system. Inequitable.
There is a lack of real time remediation. Now what do I mean by that? Real time remediation is the time it takes to resolve a student's academic problem. If a kid is having a difficult time learning something then you stop and you help with it. But the system doesn't allow for real time remediation. What is the major remedial pattern in American remediation? At the end of the year you are either promoted or you are not. If you are not promoted then you are remediated for a whole year. That is not real time remediation so you allow the remedial to pile up and it finally gets overwhelming and so you start all over again. That produces the double problem: starting all over again, the kids tend to be bored in the first part of the year when they know it all and so by the time they get to the second part of the year they have already developed bad habits in terms of the way they are responding the second time around. It doesn't even turn out to be effective remediation. Real time remediation means that when there is a problem you fix it. A good example of this comes from a masters degree program at UCLA. In every program there is always some kind of a gatekeeper course, the one that is the hardest one. In the masters program in elementary education at UCLA the gatekeeper course was statistics. A good friend of mine at UCLA, a woman named Madeline Hunter, decided that she would like to try and do something about that. So there is a summer version of this course that was taught in eight weeks. So she decided they would divide the subject matter in this statistics class into eight pieces, one week units and then they would organize it so you couldn't go on to the second week until you passed the first week's test. In a typical class you have a midterm after four weeks and by the time you get the results of the midterm five weeks have passed and after five weeks you find out for the first time that you are really behind. Isn't that a great system? Then you have three weeks to catch up all that you were behind plus learn all the stuff you have to learn in the next three weeks. Dumb system but typical. So in this system that Madeline set up, at the end of the first week you had a test and unless you met the criteria of that test you had to keep working and it turned out that some people had to work as much as eighteen hours before they could pass the test. Now a summer class accelerated five hours, was the ordinary lecture time for the class, so the range was between five and eighteen hours. But they were not allowed to start the second week until they really had the first week under their belt. The next week they had to pass the second week's test before they could go on to the third week. If the semester began requiring eighteen hours for the student that took the longest, how many hours would it be at the end of the semester for the weakest student? More or less? It turned out that by the end of the eight weeks the longest amount of time required to pass the test was eight hours, not eighteen. It came down dramatically. If you think about it, if you get off to a good start and you really understand the information, as you progress you can understand it better and you'll gain confidence and that helps you really master it. At the end of those eight weeks, 90 percent of the kids got an A in statistics. These students weren't special in any other way other than the fact that they had real time remediation.
Now real time remediation is very powerful, so why don't we do it all the time? Because in the system that we now have, teachers can do whatever individualization they can do thirty at a time. The system doesn't allow for the kind of individualization that Madeline's system provided. Individualization doesn't necessarily require that some people go this way or that way and some people go faster and some people go slower and everyone goes plugging along at their own rate. Individualization doesn't require that. Individualization doesn't allow for a lecture on Monday and then a lecture on Wednesday and where some people as a result of the Monday lecture are immediately ready for Wednesday. Some people may have to have a supplementary presentation and then they're ready, some people may have to have some small group discussion to get ready, or some people may require a lot of individual study and they're ready, but eventually everyone is ready for the next common experience on Wednesday. That's a different model of individualization than if you have lots of time in-between classes for additional help. But we don't have that kind of system. We shouldn't blame the teacher for not doing it; blame the system for not providing it. The next thing we need to talk about is premediation. Premediation is different from remediation in very simply, PRE rather than RE. Premediation means that you are trying to figure out what is going to go wrong before it goes wrong. In other words, a teacher who has had the experience of knowing that something didn't work can then take steps ahead of time to make sure that it does work. You spend extra time in anticipation of this being a tough thing to teach.
Premediation is easier than remediation, because it can be done easily thirty students at a time. With remediation teachers can kind of say, "Well there is a limit to how much I can do because the system hasn't given me the time and resources to do it." Premediation is a lot easier because teachers, if they understand the sticking points of certain material, they can choose to spend more time on those points and anticipate it. So premediation is a much stronger and a more practical kind of thing if we get organized to do it. A third element is that frequent alternatives to annual accountability and promotion. There is no reason to wait till the end of the year to figure out that a kid is behind. As a matter of fact I know too many schools where it becomes a big deal whether a kid is going to get promoted or not and parents don't know until the last minute. Parents should be right up to the minute from the time that there is any question about the promotion of their child. Kids in individual subjects in junior high and high school should know anytime they are in jeopardy of failing. We need to have enough feedback and encouragement in the system to make sure that everybody knows what is going on and when that feedback and encouragement is not there, the system is off.
The next issue I want to talk about is the right to a bad education. That may sound strange, but a lot of communities feel that they have a right to a bad education. We really believe in local control of schools in this country; every community has a right to have its own curriculum, make its own decisions, and do its own thing. Does that include the right to a bad education? Take, for example, two communities in the same metropolitan One does an excellent job with special education and the other does a miserable job of special education. Special education is costly. You get federal and state subsidies for it, but beyond that, special education is costly. It requires more facilities and more resources. If you are a parent moving into this metropolitan area and you have a special ed. kid, are you going to check out which schools do a good job with special ed.? Of course you are. So which school are you going to pick? You are going to pick the school that is doing a good job. So the reward of the school district that is doing the good job is that they are going to have more kids that are going to cost them more money to educate. What is the reward for the school that is not doing a good job of special ed.? Their special education department is small and doesn't require much money? Bad system isn't it? They are being rewarded; their taxpayers have less of a tax burden because their schools are doing a bad job. Or you have a situation like some of the school districts in Arizona, where retirement communities deliberately have bad schools in order that families with kids will not move into that school district. There are some communities in Arizona that have no schools because families know that the schools are bad and they don't want their kids educated there. So in the end, you have a reward for bad education, which is absolutely unconscionable. Right now as one of the by-products of local control of schools, the official position is that communities have the right to a bad education. Another problem is no external accountability. Here the problem is that schooling is so complex that it is very hard to pinpoint where problems are. The kindergarten teacher may have done a great job, but by the time you get to the 12th grade, it is hard to see any results. The kindergarten teacher may have done a lousy job and by the time you get to the 12th grade the other teachers may have done enough good things that it's been wiped out. But that is not to say that the effect of the kindergarten teacher isn't substantial, it is just to say that often times other circumstances will negate either the good or the bad. It is very hard to pinpoint any kind of accountability.
Another problem is simply selfishness and prejudice; it's the kind of problem that comes from the right to have bad schools. If we could eliminate selfishness and prejudice we would have better school systems and we would all have better educations. But you have the DINKs (double incomes and no kids). If you have a lot of DINKs in a school district, they are not likely to vote for higher taxes to tax themselves to pay for education because they don't have any kids. They find all sorts of ways to justify low tax rates for support of schools or lack there of. That is just one example of a relatively affluent group of people who have a vested interest in not supporting schools and that’s selfishness and that's prejudice. Often times there is a prejudice against putting a lot of money into schools where there are substantial minority populations. Finally, let's consider the barrier This is even more important than selfishness and prejudice, because it is the ignorance of not realizing that bad schools penalize all of society. We are penalized by having to build more jails, by having more welfare, by having people who just don't fit into the society, and that punishes all of us. The ignorance of the reality of what makes a society work and lack of foresight is perhaps one of the biggest barriers to effective education. It is just ignorance for example that people don't realize global interdependence. It is just plain ignorance. Now what are some of the elements of equity? What goes into making things equitable? First, is funding equity. If you have equity of funding, you are going to do better. Secondly, you are going have a better school if you have staff equity with good teachers spread out to deal with all of the kids rather than the good teachers teaching the easy kids. You are going to have a better school if you have organizational equity. This means that everything from equity of facilities to supplies and materials to the kind of support you need in terms of vice principals and curriculum developers and all that kind of thing, organizational equity is a big factor. Equity in terms of remediation so you have access to remedial help when you need it. And one of the things we talked a lot about earlier is equity in terms of homework. Here, if I had to make a decision right now one way or another, I would make the decision to eliminate homework and require schools to reorganize themselves to not have homework. I would still like to find ways to have parents involved, but I don't think having kids complete homework is the only way to get parents involved. I want access to school. Here, if the school is really concerned about equity, for example they would organize teacher's days so that at least one day a month teachers would come in at noon and be available until eight or nine in the evening, because parents who work all day don't have access to school unless you have a teacher who is willing to make themselves available in the evenings on their own time. The average teacher's workweek is fifty-four hours. The image to the public is that teachers have a really short workweek.
Another issue is equity in transport and we don't have a lot of equity in transport. In some school districts the bus goes home at three and then if the kid participates in extracurricular activities the parent has to provide transport. Another element of equity is parent access. We need to give parents more access to schools, but we also need to give schools more access to parents. Right now schools don't have access to parents. We need curriculum equity. There are some schools that offer four or five languages and others that offer just one language. There is just a whole range of places where there is not curriculum equity. Finally, let's discuss facilThere are all sorts of horror stories about leaky schools and roofs and they are true and in the same school district there is a diversity in quality between school buildings. Some of that diversity is inevitable because you can't build all of the schools new at the same time and you kind of have to phase things in, but it would be more credible if the phasing in were done in different schools for different things. Usually the same schools always phase into the new things first.