The Opinionated Bastard

Ok, so the child is in the classroom. Their main teacher has to stop what they’re doing, get the Title XII kid packed up and ready to go. Then the kid has to go to the Title XII classroom and get settled in.

The kid has so far lost 30 minutes out of their school day. I don’t care if the Title XII teacher is Jesus Christ himself, the child who was behind in school is now even more behind. There’s no way you can “catch up” a kid by having them get less class room instruction.

After an hour of instruction, the kid leaves, and goes back to his original classroom, disrupting it in the process, and has to settle in again. Now the kid is 45 minutes behind.

Now perhaps the concentrated instruction is 50% more effective then his original classroom (its not, but say it is). To break even, the child will have to spend an hour and a half in the Title XII classroom. Otherwise, it would have been better to leave the kid there. Since they only spend an hour there, a Title XII child steadily falls behind. This is any kid who’s behind in school for any reason.

That was at 50% more effective. In practice, having only 10 kids instead of 30 only makes a teacher 10% more effective, because most of the time the kids are all doing the same thing, so whether you have 10 or 30 doesn’t matter. The only reason the teacher can be 10% more effective with a smaller class because they have more time to work individually with the kids as needed. At 10% the kid would have to spend 10 hours in the Title XII classroom, which is impossible. So Title XII, as implemented by the typical school district bureaucracy just doesn’t work. If your kid gets put into a Title XII classroom, get him a tutor quick or he’s going to be spending the rest of his life saying “Do you want Fries with that?”.

All they had to do to prevent this? They had to make the Title XII classroom after school for extra time. If they did that, then every hour spent in a Title XII classroom would be additional school work.

In fact, what would be even more effective would not to have a Title XII classroom at all, but to instead provide the original teacher with an aide. Adding an aide to a classroom makes a teacher 90% more effective. Why does having a aide make the original teacher 90% more effective while adding a Title XII classroom doesn’t? Because now you’ve got 2 adults in the same classroom. While one adult is leading most of the kids in an activity, the other adult can be interacting with the children individually. Almost every minute of teacher’s aides time gives the teacher another minute she can spend on the kids in her classroom.

But that’s not how Title XII gets implemented, instead, it gets implemented in this well-meaning way that ultimately leads to making things worse for our schools. That’s the problem with all of the educational bureaucracy is that they don’t realize that the person who has the largest ability to affect a student is their teacher, and anything that diminishes the effectiveness of that person diminishes the effect of the entire school.

Here’s another typical example of how the education bureaucracy screws the pooch. Let’s say they find out that certain kids aren’t learning to read. The first thing the bureaucracy will do is commission a study, which will invent some sort of complicated reading program of instruction. (Yes, the bureaucracy uses terms like program of instruction.) The bureaucracy will then decree that all students must be taught to reading using this new program of instruction. That means that teachers will have to attend classes to be trained to use this new program of instruction. The new materials will have to be purchased and provided to every student. Generally this new program involves new tests that have to be given to the students, with the results sent to the district office so they can track progress.

All of this is a lot of activity to teach kids to read, its totally unnecessary, and it accomplishes nothing as they soon find that the kids are doing even worse. The reality is that the teacher in the classroom already knew that certain of the kids weren’t learning to read, and in most cases they even knew why. What they needed was more time or more materials to help them reach those kids, not less time and a bunch of new stuff to learn that probably didn’t work. For one-tenth the cost of all this sound and fury, if you just gave the classroom teacher a yearly budget to spend on discretionary materials, the kids would learn to read. If you just stopped distracting the teachers with the program of instruction du jour, more kids would learn to read.

Sound farfetched? Ask a teacher, its not. In fact, if anything, I’m being generous, sometimes these new programs of instruction don’t even come with new materials for the classroom, its just assumed that their “new method” is so “superior” to the “old methods” that the children will learn to read magically without actually having anything to read.

In case you haven’t gathered yet, the real problem with education is not the teachers, students, parents, or socioeconomic factors. Its the educational bureaucracy that continually ignores the basic fact of life when it comes to teaching children. Now those people mean well, but its like having Arnold Schwarzenegger in a rowboat with you, rowing the wrong way.

There are in reality only 3 tests you need to apply to any educational initiative to see if it makes sense:

1. Does this educational initiative give the existing teacher more time to spend with students? Bottom line, anything you can do to make an existing teacher one minute more productive is like adding one minute of time to the school day. Conversely, any bureaucracy you force a teacher to placate removes time from the school day for the kids. If you make a teacher fill out a form to order $1 worth of pencils, how much time are you taking away from her students?
2. Does this educational initiative provide the existing classroom with additional materials? Teachers need classroom materials to teach with, its as simple as that, and programs that don’t provide additional materials to the existing classroom are highly suspect. It’s better to put 1 computer in 30 classrooms then to have a computer lab with 30 computers in it.
3. Does this educational initiative provide the student with additional classroom time? From my description of how Title XII was implemented in California where I grew up, you can see why this is important. Many initiatives actually reduce the time spent in the classroom by a child.

If it doesn’t pass any of these 3 tests, it doesn’t do any good. The person with the most power to affect a students life is their teacher, and their main classroom. That’s where the money needs to be spent.

All too many of our educational programs fails these tests. It would be nice if more of them could pass, but that would mean that the educational administration would have to give up control, and thats a very hard thing to do. It’s very much against human nature for the administrators to realize that ultimately, its the teachers that have control and not them, that they need to enable the teachers, not control the teachers.