Sunday, June 10, 2007

DC schools don't educate, big surprise

From The Washington Post:

Kelly Miller Middle School opened its doors in a struggling Northeast Washington neighborhood in 2004, a $35 million showcase for the District's public schools, every classroom equipped with a whiteboard and computers. A particular source of pride was a media production room, where students could broadcast announcements and produce programs to be viewed on TVs wired in each classroom.

Three years later, there have been no broadcasts. The room still needs a last, critical piece of equipment, which fell into a bureaucratic chasm. Until a few days ago, the principal had never been told what the part was or when it was coming. For now, the $150,000 production room is a storage closet for unused books and furniture.

As Mayor Adrian M. Fenty (D) prepares this week to become the first Washington mayor with direct control of the schools, his team promises a clean slate and a rapid turnaround. Yet a detailed assessment of the state of the school system, based on extensive public records, suggests that the challenge is enormous: The system is among the highest-spending and worst-performing in the nation. Kelly Miller is one small example of a breakdown in most of the basic functions that are meant to support classroom learning.

· Tests show that in reading and math, the District's public school students score at the bottom among 11 major city school systems, even when poor children are compared only with other poor children. Thirty-three percent of poor fourth-graders across the nation lacked basic skills in math, but in the District, the figure was 62 percent. It was 74 percent for D.C. eighth-graders, compared with 49 percent nationally.

· The District spends $12,979 per pupil each year, ranking it third-highest among the 100 largest districts in the nation. But most of that money does not get to the classroom. D.C. schools rank first in the share of the budget spent on administration, last in spending on teachers and instruction.

· Principals reporting dangerous conditions or urgently needed repairs in their buildings wait, on average, 379 days -- a year and two weeks -- for the problems to be fixed. Of 146 school buildings, 113 have a repair request pending for a leaking roof, a Washington Post analysis of school records shows.

· The schools spent $25 million on a computer system to manage personnel that had to be discarded because there was no accurate list of employees to use as a starting point. The school system relies on paper records stacked in 200 cardboard boxes to keep track of its employees, and in some cases is five years behind in processing staff paperwork. It also lacks an accurate list of its 55,000-plus students, although it pays $900,000 to a consultant each year to keep count.


None of this is an accident. The DC school system was not designed to educate children. It was designed to serve the interests of politicians, education bureaucrats and the teacher's union.

Politicians' interests are served by turning jobs in the school system and contracts to provide supplies and services to the schools into political patronage.

Education bureaucrats interests are served by the creation of an enormous massively top-heavy and impossibly complex administration which employees large numbers of bureaucrats who fill their days filling out forms, writing memos and attending meetings and get through their entire career without ever actually teaching a child anything.

And the teachers' union is served by creating a system so dysfunctional that poor student performance is explainable by causes other than teacher incompetence. Problems which they can claim are only solvable by higher teacher pay and hiring more teachers.

On top of all of this is the fact that dysfunctional schools serve the greater interests of the political left. After all if schools are broken they need to be fixed and if they are really badly broken they need really strong measures to fix them. And if the left is good at anything it is showing up with a cornucopia of ever more hair-brained "solutions" to problems.

Of course the interests of the left are well served by the school system exactly as it is. If children are not educated they will never learn to think for themselves. They will never develop the perspective and knowledge of history which allow an intelligent person to see through the distortions of the Democrat Party's propaganda machine (otherwise known as the mainstream media). They will never be able to earn enough money to become truly independent of the public dole.

People who are educated in dysfunctional public schools like those in DC will never be able to escape from the feelings of grievance and entitlement which chain them to the Democrat Party. They will never know the feeling of earned self-respect and will therefore always be vulnerable to the spiel of racial snake-oil salesmen like Al Sharpton and Jesse Jackson. The public schools which are most firmly under the control of the left (and the DC public schools are as firmly under left-wing control as any in the nation) will never produce people who are free, responsible, self-owning individuals capable of living in a society of free, responsible, self-owning individuals. And the left knows that free, responsible, self-owning individuals only need the federal government to perform certain very limited functions which mostly involve external affairs (war and diplomacy).

This is why government schools will fail far more than they will succeed and why the true fix will involve removing the schools from government control.