The Joker Who Run Our Schools
editors, The
The Jokers Who Run Our Schools The Editors “The fundamental causes of poor academic performance are not to be found in the schools but rather in the institutions by which the schools have...
...Even he doesn’t know for sure, but the bureaucracy-the stupid delays, the rigid notions-are never far from his thoughts on the subject...
...A year and a half of waiting at lower wages without job security or health insurance because no one could be bothered to grade your exam...
...In many of these cases the school was not paid for the devices...
...Efforts to improve schools are therefore doomed unless they eliminate or sharply curtail the influence of the institutions that cause the schools’ problems in the first place...
...it’s child abuse...
...The Jokers Who Run Our Schools The Editors “The fundamental causes of poor academic performance are not to be found in the schools but rather in the institutions by which the schools have traditionally been governed,” write John E. Chubb and Terry M. Moe, authors of the recently published Brookings Institution book, Politics, Markets, and America’s Schools...
...In any sort of organization, too much bureaucracy causes trouble, but the need to streamline the public schools is especially urgent...
...And the city’s residents should be furious about the superintendent who spent $10,000 of special education funds to decorate her office...
...Most tales from today’s public schools make it clear that this is true...
...Each of the following dispatches from the front lines of American public education illustrates that point...
...One that spends about $536 less per student on instruction than comparable urban systems...
...An inefficient post office loses mail, an overstaffed auto plant makes lousy cars, but poorly administered school systems do far worse-they ruin kids’ lives...
...Just starting out, he was paid at a much lower rate than fully licensed teachers, had no benefits, and couldn’t accumulate any seniority until he passed written and oral exams...
...These vignettes also make clear one of the essential reforms: cutting down and reorganizing the public school bureaucracy so that most of its energy goes into supporting, maintaining, and improving the subject knowledge and pedagogical skills of its teachers...
...America is just beginning to realize that you can’t clean up messes like these with a little light housekeepingyou need to condemn the building and lay a new foundation...
...That’s the standard time...
...It was also discovered that the district had spent $17,000 a year so that 68 of its officials could have beepers...
...Our friend-bright, energetic, and socially concernedis no longer a public school teacher...
...Like when a friend tells us about his experiences as a young teacher in the New York City school system...
...The process never seemed designed to encourage people to teach...
...Of these, 40 ended up going to relatives and friends of district employees...
...That’s why New Yorkers should be enraged that on a single day last year, investigators visiting 17 schools in a district in the southwest Bronx found that 80 computers17 percent of those purchased for the schools-and 37 printers-26 percent of those purchasedwere nowhere to be found...
...Who knows what finally drove him out...
...That’s a paper-pusher-to-pupil-ratio 46 times greater than in the Chicago parochial schools...
...Much of what public school bureaucrats do nowadays isn’t education...
...The school administrators who spend their days churning out complicated memos that say nothing, who flock to Disney World at the taxpayers’ expense to drink in the wisdom of George Steinbrenner, who place unnecessary and irrelevant burdens on teachers without helping them do their jobs, are all doing their part to doom America’s children...
...That’s why it verges on criminal that, as a recent survey of the Chicago public school system revealed, 21 percent of the employees work in nonclassroom jobs...
...The period between the day I took the first exam and the day I received my license, which included weeks and weeks of trying to get the tests scheduled and a six month wait after the second one,” he says, still astonished, “was 565 days...
...That’s why Washington, D.C.’s citizens should be outraged that there have been no layoffs or early retirements of public school bureaucrats a full year after a special committee of civic leaders called for cutting 400 administrative positions-this in a school system that lists such questionable positions as “attendance aide,” “employee development specialist,” and “position classification specialist...
Vol. 22 • September 1990 • No. 8
