Michael L. Hays
Public education as an election-year issue
According to the conventional wisdom, one of the big divides between Democrats and Republicans, or liberals and conservatives, is the willingness to spend money on public programs. However, when it comes to public education, we seem to have no such divide between New Mexico’s gubernatorial candidates, Democrat Diane Denish and Republican Susana Martinez.
Although their performance in the first debate did not promise an outbreak of bipartisanship, both candidates agreed in separate declarations that they will not cut one cent from the education budget. (Susana wants to earmark some of the education budget for vouchers, but the voucher issue is not my issue here.)
Of course, it is an election year, each candidate wants votes, and neither wants to offend any constituency (much less rouse it to support her opponent). Both indulge the time-honored traditions of sticking to talking points, promising everything to everyone, and pledging gain without pain. In the ritual of campaign dodge or deception, both candidates pretend to prove their commitment to public education with claims that they will not do what the state must do if it is to fulfill its constitutional mandate to balance its budget.
Post-election budget as the ultimate truth serum
One fact faces the new governor, as well as state senators and representatives: The flow of funds from the federal government’s economic recovery stimulus program will cease. Even with those funds, the state had to cut the public education budget this year; without them, the state will have to cut it next year. Elected officials will have to make choices that will offend or outrage most or all constituencies because they will have to examine all line items and spread the discomfort of cuts to many of them. Their mission to protect personal or political favorites or keep campaign promises will be difficult, if not impossible.
The education budget will be no exception.
In a tough economy, the state must make a special effort to allocate diminished resources according to the worthiness and effectiveness of supported functions or programs. Those failing to provide reasonable bang-for-the-buck benefits should face reductions or termination of funding, operations and staff.
Targets of opportunity abound, because good times always lead to an expansion or proliferation of programs and an upsurge in personnel. Such targets are particularly abundant in public education because its programs, once established, and its personnel, once employed, abide in the absence of informed and regular scrutiny. The result is too often the waste, fraud and abuse by constituencies that perform poorly and serve mainly their special interests.
Three programs as candidates for education budget cuts
I name three such workfare programs that have conspicuously failed to make a measurable, meaningful or lasting contribution commensurate with their costs.
Early childhood education programs. Like Head Start, these programs produce only short-term improvements in academic performance. Within a few grades, educational differences between students who have participated in them and those who have not are virtually non-existent. What students have not learned at home by the time they reach kindergarten should be taught in kindergarten.
Dual-language programs. These programs have demonstrated no enduring benefit in terms of lasting academic improvement. Worse, they provide sub-standard instruction that latter handicaps previously enrolled students when they enter regular classes. Language segregation and instruction do not work as well or as quickly as immersion.
Reading specialists. These employees are a failed “solution” to the “problem” that emerged as elementary school teachers proved unable to teach reading as previous elementary school teachers had been able to do, and did. The “solution” has been an expensive failure: Despite additional staff and their salaries, about half of all students fail to achieve reading proficiency before fifth and ninth grade. The time is now to cut this staff (except for the few able and needed to help students with independently identified reading disorders like dyslexia) and save money. The “new solution” is the “old” one: proper training of prospective elementary school teachers to teach reading.
One no- or low-cost proposal for reform as a substitute for all three
The proposed cuts or reductions in these three areas will arouse powerful resistance from their entrenched constituencies, perhaps the most powerful resistance from schools of education. Their main interest is training large numbers of students. To sustain or swell their enrollments, they train more students badly than train fewer students well. Thus, they train elementary school teachers to teach reading not at all or so badly that schools hire reading specialists to make up for their inadequacies; but, despite their training, they cannot teach reading either.
But if schools of education effectively trained elementary school teachers to teach reading, as they once did, they would need to train fewer reading specialists, offer fewer courses, and have fewer professors of education.
The greater problem is that schools of education have little regard for what K-5 teachers can or cannot teach once they graduate. Whatever the reason, they do not train them, or train them well enough, to teach the curriculums implicit in state benchmarks and standards of public education. (Some say that the reason is that they care more about the politics of equality than the quality of education, which they regard as elitist.)
The proof is the persistent, long-term mediocrity of fourth- and eighth-grade proficiency in reading and math. Otherwise, schools of education would long ago have aligned their programs to those curriculums. (Meanwhile, the state is focusing on the alignment of high school instruction with college courses, teaching to the transcript, or coaching to the college course catalogue.)
A no- or low-cost reform in public education would require schools of education to align the training of future public school teachers with the curriculums which they are expected to teach, especially in the elementary grades.
Michael L. Hays (Ph.D., English) is a retired consultant in defense, energy and environment; former high school and college teacher; and continuing civic activist. His bi-monthly Saturday column appears in the Las Cruces Sun-News; his bi-monthly blog, First Impressions & Second Thoughts, appears on the intervening Saturdays at firstimpressionssecondthoughts.blogspot.com.