Jan. 13, 2006 — "Stupid in
America" is a nasty title for a program about public
education, but some nasty things are going on in America's public schools
and it's about time we face up to it.
Kids at New York's Abraham Lincoln High School told me their teachers
are so dull students fall asleep in class. One student said, "You see
kids all the time walking in the school smoking weed, you know. It's a
normal thing here."
We tried to bring "20/20" cameras into New York City schools
to see for ourselves and show you what's going on in the schools, but
officials wouldn't allow it.
Washington, D.C., officials steered us to the best classrooms in their
district.
We wanted to tape typical classrooms but were turned down in state
after state.
Finally, school officials in Washington, D.C., allowed
"20/20" to give cameras to a few students who were handpicked at
two schools they'd handpicked. One was Woodrow Wilson High. Newsweek says
it's one of the best schools in America. Yet what the students taped
didn't inspire confidence.
One teacher didn't have control over the kids. Another
"20/20" student cameraman videotaped a boy dancing wildly with
his shirt off, in front of his teacher.
If you're like most American parents, you might think "These
things don't happen at my kid's school." A Gallup Poll survey showed
76 percent of Americans were completely or somewhat satisfied with their
kids' public school.
Education reformers like Kevin Chavous have a message for these
parents: If you only knew.
Even though people in the suburbs might think their schools are great,
Chavous says, "They're not. That's the thing and the test scores show
that."
Chavous and many other education professionals say Americans don't know
that their public schools, on the whole, just aren't that good. Because
without competition, parents don't know what their kids might have had.
And while many people say, "We need to spend more money on our
schools," there actually isn't a link between spending and student
achievement.
Jay Greene, author of "Education Myths," points out that
"If
money were the solution, the problem would already be solved …
We've doubled per pupil spending, adjusting for inflation, over the last
30 years, and yet schools aren't better."
He's absolutely right. National graduation rates and achievement scores
are flat, while spending on education has increased more than 100 percent
since 1971. More money hasn't helped American kids.
Ben Chavis is a former public school principal who now runs an
alternative charter school in Oakland, Calif., that spends thousands of
dollars less per student than the surrounding public schools. He laughs at
the public schools' complaints about money.
"That is the biggest lie in America. They waste money," he
said.
To save money, Chavis asks the students to do things like keep the
grounds picked up and set up for their own lunch. For gym class, his
students often just run laps around the block. All of this means there's
more money left over for teaching.
Even though he spends less money per student than the public schools
do, Chavis pays his teachers more than what public school teachers earn.
His school also thrives because the principal gets involved. Chavis shows
up at every classroom and uses gimmicks like small cash payments for
perfect attendance.
Since he took over four years ago, his school has gone from being among
the worst in Oakland to being the best. His middle school has the highest
test scores in the city.
"It's not about the money," he said.
He's confident that even kids who come from broken families and poor
families will do well in his school. "Give me the poor kids, and I
will outperform the wealthy kids who live in the hills. And we do
it," he said.
Monopoly Kills Innovation and Cheats Kids
Chavis's charter school is an example of how a little innovation can
create a school that can change kids' lives. You don't get innovation
without competition.
To give you an idea of how competitive American schools are and how
U.S. students performed compared with their European counterparts, we gave
parts of an international test to some high school students in Belgium and
in New Jersey.
Belgian kids cleaned the American kids' clocks, and called them
"stupid."
We didn't pick smart kids to test in Europe and dumb kids in the United
States. The American students attend an above-average school in New
Jersey, and New Jersey's kids have test scores that are above average for
America.
Lov Patel, the boy who got the highest score among the American
students, told me, "I'm shocked, because it just shows how advanced
they are compared to us."
The Belgian students didn't perform better because they're smarter than
American students. They performed better because their schools are better.
At age 10, American students take an international test and score well
above the international average. But by age 15, when students from 40
countries are tested, the Americans place 25th.
American schools don't teach as well as schools in other countries
because they are government monopolies, and monopolies don't have much
incentive to compete. In Belgium, by contrast, the money is attached to
the kids — it's a kind of voucher system. Government funds education —
at many different kinds of schools — but if a school can't attract
students, it goes out of business.
Belgian school principal Kaat Vandensavel told us she works hard to
impress parents.
She told us, "If we don't offer them what they want for their
child, they won't come to our school." She constantly improves the
teaching, saying, "You can't afford 10 teachers out of 160 that don't
do their work, because the clients will know, and won't come to you
again."
"That's normal in Western Europe," Harvard economist Caroline
Hoxby told me. "If schools don't perform well, a parent would never
be trapped in that school in the same way you could be trapped in the
U.S."
Last week Florida's Supreme Court shut down "opportunity
scholarships," Florida's small attempt at competition. Public money
can't be spent on private schools, said the court, because the state
constitution commands the funding only of "uniform . . .
high-quality" schools. Government schools are neither uniform nor
high-quality, and without competition, no new teaching plan or No Child
Left Behind law will get the monopoly to serve its customers well.
The longer kids stay in American schools, the worse they do in
international competition. They do worse than kids from poorer countries
that spend much less money on education, ranking behind not only Belgium
but also Poland, the Czech Republic and South Korea.
This should come as no surprise if you remember that public education
in the United States is a government monopoly. Don't like your public
school? Tough. The school is terrible? Tough. Your taxes fund that school
regardless of whether it's good or bad. That's why government monopolies
routinely fail their customers. Union-dominated monopolies are even worse.
In New York City, it's "just about impossible" to fire a bad
teacher, says Schools Chancellor Joel Klein. The new union contract offers
some relief, but it's still about 200 pages of bureaucracy. "We
tolerate mediocrity," said Klein, because "people get paid the
same, whether they're outstanding, average or way below average."
Here's just one example from New York City: It took years to fire a
teacher who sent sexually oriented e-mails to "Cutie 101," a
16-year-old student. Klein said, "He hasn't taught, but we have had
to pay him, because that's what's required under the contract."
Only after six years of litigation were they able to fire him. In the
meantime, they paid the teacher more than $300,000. Klein said he employs
dozens of teachers who he's afraid to let near the kids, so he has them
sit in what are called rubber rooms. This year he will spend $20 million
dollars to warehouse teachers in five rubber rooms. It's an alternative to
firing them. In the last four years, only two teachers out of 80,000 were
fired for incompetence. Klein's office says the new contract will make it
easier to get rid of sex offenders, but it will still be difficult to fire
incompetent teachers.
When I confronted Randi Weingarten, president of the United Federation
of Teachers, she said, "They [the NYC school board] just don't want
to do the work that's entailed." But the "work that's
entailed" is so onerous that most principals just have just given up,
or gotten bad teachers to transfer to another school. They even have a
name for it: "the dance of the lemons."
Zoned Out of a Good Education
I talked with 18-year-old Dorian Cain in South Carolina, who was still
struggling to read a single sentence in a first-grade level book when I
met him. Although his public schools had spent nearly $100,000 on him over
12 years, he still couldn't read.
So "20/20" sent Dorian to a private learning center, Sylvan,
to see if teachers there could teach Dorian to read when the South
Carolina public schools failed to.
Using computers and workbooks, Dorian's reading went up two grade
levels — after just 72 hours of instruction.
His mother, Gena Cain, is thrilled with Dorian's progress but
disappointed with his public schools. "With Sylvan, it's a huge
improvement. And they're doing what they're supposed to do. They're on
point. But I can't say the same for the public schools," she said.
Lying to Beat the System
Gena Cain, like most parents, doesn't have a choice
which public school her kids attend. She followed the rules, and her son
paid the price.
In San Jose, Calif., some parents break the rules to get their kids
into Fremont Union schools. They're so much better than neighboring
schools that parents sometimes cheat to get their kids in by pretending to
live in the school district.
"We have maybe hundreds of kids who are here illegally, under
false pretenses," said District Superintendent Steve Rowley.
Inspector John Lozano works for the district going door-to-door to
check if kids really live where they say they live. And even seeing that a
child is present at a particular address isn't enough. Lozano says he
needs to look inside the house to make sure the student really lives
there.
Think about what he's doing. The school district police send him into
your daughter's bedroom. He even goes through drawers and closets if he
has to.
At one house he found a computer and some teen magazines and pictures
of a student with her friends. He decided that student passed the
residency test.
But a grandmother who listed an address in his district is caught. The
people who answered the door when Lozano visited told him she didn't live
there.
Two days later, I talked with the grandmother who tried to get her
grandson into the Fremont schools.
"I was actually crying. I was crying in front of this 14-year-old.
Why can't they just let parents to get in the school of their
choice?" she asked.
Why can't she make a choice? It's sad that school officials force her
to go to the black market to get her grandson a better education. After we
started calling the school, the school did decide to let him stay in the
district.
School-Choice Proponents Meet Resistance
When the Sanford family moved from Charleston to Columbia, S.C., the
family had a big concern: Where would the kids go to school? In most
places, you must attend the public school in the zone where you live, but
the middle school near the Sanford's new home was rated below average.
It turned out, however, that this didn't pose a problem for this
family, because the reason the Sanfords moved to Columbia was that Mark
Sanford had been elected governor. He and his wife were invited to send
their kids to schools in better districts.
Sanford realized how unfair the system was. "If you can buy a
$250,000 or $300,000 house, you're gonna get some great public
education," Gov. Sanford said. Or if you have political connections.
The Sanfords decided it was unfair to take advantage of their position
as "first family" and ended up sending their kids to private
school. "It's too important to me to sacrifice their education. I get
one shot at it. If I don't pay very close attention to how my boys get
educated then I've lost an opportunity to make them the best they can be
in this world," Jenny Sanford said.
The governor then proposed giving every parent in South Carolina that
kind of choice, regardless of where they lived or whether they made a lot
of money. He said state tax credits should help parents pay for private
schools. Then they would have a choice.
"The public has to know that there's an alternative there. It's
just like, do you get a Sprint phone or an AT&T phone," Chavous
said.
He's right. When monopolies rule, there is little choice, and little
gets done. In America the phone company was once a government-supported
monopoly. All the phones were black, and all the calls expensive. With
competition, things have changed — for the better. We pay less for phone
calls. If we're unhappy with our phone service, we switch companies.
Why can't kids benefit from similar competition in education?
"People expect and demand choice in every other area of their
life," Sanford said.
The governor announced his plan last year and many parents cheered the
idea, but school boards, teachers unions and politicians objected. PTAs
even sent kids home with a letter saying, "Contact your legislator.
How can we spend state money on something that hasn't been proven?"
A lot of people say education tax credits and vouchers are a terrible
idea, that they'll drain money from public schools and give it to private
ones.
Last week's Florida court ruling against vouchers came after teacher
Ruth Holmes and other advocacy groups brought a suit to block the program.
"To say that competition is going to improve education? It's just
not gonna work. You know competition is not for children. It's not for
human beings. It's not for public education. It never has been, it never
will be," Holmes said.
Why not? Would you keep going back to a restaurant that served you a
bad meal? Or a barber that gave you a bad haircut? What if the government
assigned you to "your" grocery store. The store wouldn't have to
compete for your business, and it would soon sell spoiled milk or stock
only high profit items. Real estate agencies would sell houses advertising
"neighborhood with a good grocery store." That's insane, and yet
that's what America does with public schools.
Chavous, who has worked to get more school choice in Washington, D.C.,
said, "Choice to me is the only way. I believe that we can force the
system from an external vantage point to change itself. It will never
change itself from within. … Unless there is some competition infused in
the equation, unless that occurs, then they know they have a captive
monopoly that they can continue to dominate."
Competition inspires people to do what we didn't think we could do. If
people got to choose their kids' school, education options would be
endless. There could soon be technology schools, science schools, virtual
schools where you learn at home on your computer, sports schools, music
schools, schools that go all year, schools with uniforms, schools that
open early and keep kids later, and, who knows what else. If there were
competition, all kinds of new ideas would bloom.
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