The Stupid List: Education Edition

The Stupid List: Education Edition

First appeared at the website take-charge.org and is one part of a bipartisan campaign to fix broken government. Reprinted with permission.

America is in a tough spot. The truth is, it’s not that hard to make education work. “The Stupid List” is our call to stop the madness and make things work.

America’s public schools are mired in a bureaucratic jungle. Basic daily choices — how to teach, maintain order, let kids play, plan field trips, serve food, deal with other educators,you name it — are controlled by mind-numbing rules and procedures. The predictable result is to suffocate the most important resource needed to educate America’s youth: the energy and spirit of teachers and principals.

Find any successful school, in America or in any other country, and you will see educators making decisions all day long based on their instincts of right and wrong. Good teachers know how to engage their students, each in their own unique way. And students learn because teachers inspire them. That’s why America needs to bulldoze school bureaucracy — and that means doing away with senseless rules, useless forms,excessive union requirements, and the outlandish threat of frivolous lawsuits.

So, what’s the right thing to do here? Instead of shackling teachers and principals in thousands of pages of red tape, they need to be empowered to use their best judgment, and then be accountable for how they do it. Daily choices are much more complex than can be prescribed in rigid rules. Let teachers maintain order, and draw on their unique personality to inspire students. Let principals distinguish between a tiny toy gun and real threats, and decide which teachers are doing their jobs and which are not. Monitor educators from a distance, and don’t judge school performance by one metric — say, test scores — but by the overall judgment of how well educators are training children to be productive members of our society.

What if educators make bad decisions? Hold them accountable, and have checks and balances on important decisions. In matters of student discipline, for example, we don’t need a legal process for every decision. In most cases, a fairness committee consisting of parents, students, and teachers can instead serve as a check against arbitrary injustice.Courts are needed mainly to draw sensible legal boundaries about risk and liability — so that educators no longer are fearful to put an arm around a crying child or to let students run at recess. There’s one essential reform needed to fix America’s schools, and prepare new generations to succeed in global markets: Put humans in charge again — and show students by skill and example what it means to take responsibility.

Student Discipline

It’s not that hard to maintain order in a classroom. If a student acts up, the teacher just sends him to a classroom set up to handle students having a bad day — overseen by a monitor or two who helps the students find online educational material or work on an alternative assignment.

However, in today’s schools, it’s not that simple. Removing an unruly student requires layers of bureaucratic compliance. A teacher must allow the student to present his version of relevant events, fill out student removal forms, and ask a school resource officer to escort the student. Suspensions require multiple meetings and hearings with parents and administrators. In NYC, suspending a student can take over 60 steps.

These due process and documentation requirements — originally designed to protect students protesting the Vietnam War — leave teachers and principals at a daily crossroads: whether to spend precious energy and time to remove a disruptive student, or to simply accept the constant interruptions. Most teachers pick the latter, dooming many classrooms to chaos as students quickly “read” that the teacher’s hands are tied.

Absurd zero tolerance policies underscore the absence of authority to do what’s fair: an 8-year-old is suspended for pointing a chicken finger at a teacher and saying “pow, pow, pow,” and an elementary school student is placed in detention for picking dandelions from the ground. The principal’s explanation for the ban on flowers? Some kids had been throwing rocks during recess — so the school banned picking up anything from the ground. Rather than allow teachers to physically restrain a 5-year-old acting out in class, the cops are brought in to arrest the child.

And all this because we are afraid of the unjust principal — and the accompanying lawsuits. Surely there is a better alternative?

A culture of Mindless Compliance

If there’s one clear symptom of the disease of growing school bureaucracy, it’s the culture of rote compliance — and it has taken over classrooms, principals’ offices, and government agencies.

• Robots in the classroom. In schools across America, bureaucratic compliance dictates basic choices in the classroom. Teachers are required to write out and follow — like robots — scripted lesson plans to demonstrate compliance with mandated curriculum. A teacher is pulled aside for teaching To Kill a Mockingbird rather than preparing her students for state tests. On the first day of school, one Chicago teacher was required to read aloud a list of disciplinary rules: “You may be expelled for homicide.” Teachers have been turned into compliance machines, leaving little room for personality and judgment. No wonder good teachers are unhappy with their jobs, and are leaving the profession in droves every year.

• The powerless principal. The bureaucratic stranglehold on principals extends to most areas of school management. Tenure laws and seniority policies, for example, keep them from doing one of their most basic jobs: removing bad teachers from classrooms. The legal process of building a case and firing a tenured teacher can drag on for years, costing millions of dollars. Tasks as simple as purchasing school supplies also require a rigid bidding process that doesn’t allow judgments about convenience or quality. In many schools, principals have real spending power over a minuscule portion — say, $50,000 — of annual school budgets amounting to several million dollars.

• Statisticians over teachers. Huge central bureaucracies have grown like kudzu at the municipal, state, and federal levels. For what purpose? To force teachers, principals, and other bureaucrats to wallow in thousands of pages of checklists, procedures, and data collection requirements. School districts are literally having to choose between hiring educators to teach their students, or statisticians to satisfy central bureaucracy reporting requirements.

Education bureaucracy has now become so large that 21 states employ more administrators and non-teaching staff than teachers. How does this help students?

No Running at Recess

Fear of lawsuits is like Miracle-Gro for school bureaucracy. What better way to avoid lawsuits than to have lots of rules? Among the areas transformed by the threat of lawsuits are discipline, recess, and games, physical contact, and even grading:

• Recess. School administrators across the country have banned running and age-old games of tag and dodgeball from recess, and swings and seesaws are disappearing from school playgrounds. Some schools have gone as far as hiring recess consultants to help replace free play with “more structured and inclusive play time” that eliminates competition, risk-taking, or hurt feelings. Instead of exploring their physical limits and learning to resolve conflict, children are left to constantly look over their shoulder in case they are breaking a rule — don’t say “You’re out!” — or playing a now forbidden game.

• Physical contact. Many good teachers have had their lives ruined due to mere allegations of inappropriate touching. This is all too familiar to Sean Lanigan, a former gym teacher who spent four days in an adult detention center after being falsely accused of molesting a female student. In response, teachers are told to back away from an affectionate first-grader seeking a hug and are forbidden from putting their arm around an autistic student in need of comfort, let alone restraining a violent child. Parent volunteers, too, aren’t allowed to touch students other than their own children.

• Grading. Lawsuits even affect student evaluations; teachers are now threatened with lawsuits for giving bad grades. While judges generally have the common sense to rule against the parents, no one will refund the legal fees schools have paid to defend such cases. So, many school districts will cave rather than fight. Just ask Elizabeth Joice, an English teacher in Peoria, AZ, who was threatened with a lawsuit after giving an F to a high school senior.

Students have picked up on this legal fear. According to a Public Agenda survey, 78% of middle and high school teachers are threatened with lawsuits by their students. It’s a miracle that more teachers have not left the profession.

Special Education

By all accounts, Stephanie Johnson, who teaches special education students in Lindon, UT, is a great teacher. Buther enthusiasm in the classroom masks her deep frustration about her job: “It’s all the other compliance and laws and paperwork.” In fact, she thinks about quitting every day. How did we get here?

Special education laws are an even denser bureaucratic tangle than other areas. The law dwells on legal rights instead of outcomes. And by making parents its enforcer, the law pits parents against teachers and encourages legal action: “It’s getting to the point where every disagreement turns into a bad divorce case.”

This puts schools on the defensive. As a result, educators have become obsessed with documenting compliance,spending more time on paperwork and administrative duties than teaching,and providing unnecessary accommodations and services rather than risk litigation.

Special education consumes over 25% of school budgets. Programs for gifted children get less than 1% that amount — one dollar for every $143 spent on special education, according to one estimate. Inclusion of special education students in general education classes has also become a virtue in itself even if, sometimes, it benefits neither the student with special needs nor the other students in the classroom. In one Houston elementary school,a third grade class practiced evacuation drills every time an autistic student became disruptive.

Mechanical compliance with legal mandates also leads to absurd, even cruel, results: A legally blind student with cerebral palsy in Florida was required to undergo state-mandated test prep, even being asked to describe a peach,which he had never tasted because he was tube-fed. After receiving approval from multiple state and local officials, including the secretary of education, the student was finally granted a waiver — a day before he died.

Special education in America is neither fair nor effective. It’s time to restore the authority of educators to balance the needs of all students, with or without disabilities, not to give disproportionate dollars to one group over all others.