Education: The Punishments Will Continue Until Morale Improves

[Music] [Music] welcome back Richard it's it's good to see you this morning for this last day March it's what the last day of March day of March the first no Mar tomorrow's the last day of March yeah well today's I see to me yeah you're always a little step ahead right you let away you let let our secret out we recording no it's not a secret I'm just um I got my days and days confused um how are you you doing okay doing all right we had we had a great time yesterday evening because um you know we haven't said this on the podcast at all but um this past week marked the 10e anniversary of our of our practice here in Lakeland and we started it in March of 2014 and here we are March of 2024 and happy 10 years right been eventful 10year period good but a good 10 year period I I agree I agree so so we're gonna continue huh we're gonna next week we are because last week we talked about um the some of the our concerns with education and we focus on two primary things right we talked about the teacher shortage and how you know one of the assumptions we have is that there's a a highly effective uh qualified teacher in every classroom and well that that just doesn't necessarily be the case yeah there's a you know um I I'm sure that most people know about this but education is really in a at a um critical point right now um there there is much going on in education today far too many things even even make a list but we have these concerns we have we we mentioned two of them last week one of them was uh teacher shortage and the other was um efforts to reform education because those have been ongoing for the last 50 or 60 years right but the teacher shortage is especially acute in Florida because we have more there are fewer people going into education uh to study education to become teachers and at the same time um as with most um other professions the Baby Boomers are leaving and so teachers are leaving in larger numbers not only because they're retiring they're reaching retirement age but also because of dissatisfaction with with te with the profession with with the with the job of teaching it's become so much more difficult um I taught years and years and years ago when it was easy to teach today it's very it's much more difficult I'm not sure I'm sure I'd have and and I like to point about the how fast the population growth is booming here in Florida we and just this small area that we live in there's just a couple of elementary schools but we you know within the past year or year and a half or so the the county approved the the um building of over 800 new homes um as well as several large apartment complexes and so one of the questions we keep asking is where where all the kids going to go to school you're going to need several school buildings to accommodate the I mean you're talking about thousands of people I me the fastest growing County in the country is is our our County where are these kids going to go to school and where are the teachers who are going to um fill the classrooms right so it's it's an acute problem it's a huge problem in Florida second thing we talked about were efforts to improve education and these started back in the 50s and for about 25 or 30 years um the reforms were mainly about two things one was in we have infusion and inclusion there was an infusion of money uh the National Defense Education Act to um improve Math and Science Education because the Russians were a little ahead of us in the Space Race so we wanted to catch up and so we had to produce more scientists than mathematicians so the government made this massive infusion of money money to uh build educational facilities everything from preschools to uh graduate schools the second reform major reform in those years was inclusion and that's when we saw the SE um separate is not equal Brown versus Board of Education where um you can't have separate classes for black students and white students because they were not equal it wasn't equal uh education second the uh women came into their own with Title Nine women's sports and also um exceptional student education so that's the inclusion part that we included more people in the in Educational Opportunity so we have the infusion of money the inclusion of more students yeah this took a dramatic turn in the 1980s where with a publication called um a nation at risk and it was a 48 page publication that said we have a serious National crisis in our schools and the other thing that happened is that teachers started to get blamed for the problem it was that teachers said schools were not doing their job but what it really came down to was that teachers weren't doing their jobs and there was a huge shift in in educational reform efforts that really began in the 1990s right yeah and and and it changed everything for the next you know 20 or 30 years where we went from as you said sort of this infusion of money and and the inclusion of other groups of people that weren't as included um weren't necessarily included before to high stakes testing and you know the all these slogans and and mods that we've heard you know teaching to the test and um kill and drill and and all of these kinds of things where the the goal wasn't really just to educate the goal was we have to get them to perform well on a particular test or on a particular skill so that schools would get the funding that they need or that teachers would be paid what they should be paid and it it really created a a really challenging and competitive and I'm not using competitive in the in the good sense that you know we usually use it in capitalism we're I'm using um competitive in the sense that we have what you and I have referred to in many in many podcast as a two-tiered education system right right you know the the what what happened in the in the 90s and into the 2000s is that um when when teachers were blamed then somebody had to step up to make sure the teachers were doing their job that that was the idea and so we had something called teacher with recess we did away with PE we did away with all the special classes certain subjects weren't even taught until late in the year like social studies so education was distilled to the teaching of these very discret facts the other problem that occurred was if your school scored high if your students scored high on the test you were given more money you were rewarded with more money right well the high performing schools with high- performing students got more money but the low performing schools with low performing students didn't get money so the very buildings that needed the money were denied the money and this is called the Matthew effect where the the rich get richer and the poor get poorer right the good schools got very good and had an infusion of money and the teachers shared that and they got bonuses because their students did well and the schools with underperforming students didn't get anything that demoralizes people it sounded like a good idea at the time but it was a government policy from the top down that had nothing to do with education it rewarded some teachers at the expense of other teachers the teachers who were working the hardest with the lowest performing students didn't get a bonus the teachers with the highest performing students got a Bonus it it just didn't make any sense and so these these top- down reforms of we know best we we know how to improve education we in government know how to improve education these all these were catastrophic I think now we look back and say these were catastrophic failures okay most of the reforms of the 90s and 2000s so that was the second thing we talked about was reforms but we want to introduce one more thing today right and that is the plight of today's classroom teachers absolutely because everything is different today when when we talk about all these other things it was before the internet it was before cell phones it was before technology it was before the pandemic today is completely different and today's teachers face a completely different set of of challenges right and I think in many ways with it where it is today in regards to those things it is in in many ways to blame you know we can blame the last 30 years the last you know since the 90s what we've done because um you know it's as we've said many times before you know it's not just that we have Electronics it's not just because we have cell phones and all that kind of stuff schools have become boring they've become you know nobody's really there's not very many people really having fun school and and if you think about teaching to the test all those things you just talked about it makes School very rote and very um not you know for a long time remember they took they took some of the creative Parts out of school where they were taking out art and PE and recess they're removing all those things from schools and and some schools still don't have some of that U some of those extracurriculars um which which makes School less appealing to students I mean students don't really want to be there and so student discipline is my goodness I have I've never seen or heard of the disciplinary problems that we're having now um it it's it's pretty unbelievable and and what what is anybody doing about it right exactly that's right we have all these discipline problems but who who has come up who's who's addressing these problems the teachers are saying I I send the kid out of my class class and he comes back in and I send him out and he comes back in nobody's really dealing with these things um and then we have parent attitudes you know teachers know that they're going to get blamed if there's a problem the teacher is probably going to be in trouble somebody somebody down the line is going to say something about the teacher absolutely well and and let's not forget just about the the student attitude in general you know right parents will very quickly today I mean there's so many memes available that you can see where about how parents now blame the teachers instead of looking at the child for not doing their their school workor they blame the teacher for the kid not doing their school work yeah even the students have a different attitude and and they see it as almost like I'm here for you to entertain me I'm here for you to engage with me and I'm a customer and you know you know you just you just aren't doing it for me right now so I'm not really going to pay attention or I'm not really going to do what ask and students are overtly denying or refusing or just not participating in what's happening in the classrooms that's right yeah they've dropped so you have these deadly doll boring lessons of killing and it is boring I mean school is not fun when I dropped my kids off at school as they walked onto school property they had to walk through this gate when they walked into school property they had to stop talking yeah and they could go to a place and read until the bell rang yeah until they waited for school to start so they could go to their home room they weren't allowed to talk silent lunch they'd go to lunch and they weren't allowed to talk okay there's probably good reasons for a lot of these things but it in it together made School very dull very boring not a place where kids wanted to go okay and so the other thing was happening is that schools tend to schools are our mental health facilities for children there are no hospitals there are no programs for children with mental illness they go to school every day okay so now schools are being asked to do that so teachers teachers became teachers are completely aware that they don't have confidence public confidence they don't have parental support and they're aware of that they also know that what they think and what they believe and they need doesn't matter to the decision makers they know that their voices have been silenced okay so the question becomes is anyone addressing the plight of today's teachers and when we pose that question there's sort of there's only one starting point if you're going to improve education one is does it help teachers to be more effective I if you're not helping teachers you know I don't care whether you're talking about a sports team or a doesn't matter a factory if you don't help teachers to be more effective is is this going to help teachers become more effective and the second question is does it improve education for all students it's easy to educate some students the problem is in this country we want to offer a high quality education to all students and so does does the does the reform improve education for all students and the big push for reform since the 90s or so have been um this this shift towards what we call school choice and in school choice you know people have proclaimed that school choice will fix education because it lets parents choose what school that they want their that they let their child go to um instead of going to their neighborhood schools they can choose um what school they want and what within the District or within um particular range so when you look at what that has meant that has sort of led to yes parents having some Choice it's led to the voucher systems that we see it's led to you know uh as we'll talk about in a moment you know charter schools and magnet schools and things like that but we have to ask you know let's look at what what parents are actually choosing what are they what kinds of schools are parents choosing to have their kids go to and you know some choose faith-based education um you know there's a fee and a cost to that but some some are choosing that option that's right yeah and that's legitimate yeah people have been sending their kids to Catholic schools and Christian schools and Jewish schools forever it was on hundreds of years um since the Industrial Revolution parents have opted to send their children to a parochial school rather than a public school because they wanted a religious based uh faith-based education no problem with that they paid tuition they paid extra and because they wanted their kids to get that for most parents however it's not a faith-based decision what they're choosing is they're fleeing they want to get out of a low performing school that has disruptive students and they're seeking schools that have a an orderly environment where their children can learn right when when when we talk about school choice you're not choosing a science academy you're not choosing we have one art school in an AR well now we have two we have one we have this this Harrison School of the Arts okay and many parents want their children to go into the Arts and they're choosing that school for for good reason but that's also um a high achieving School those kids are they're serious students they're serious teachers everybody's goal oriented that as works yeah and it's a highly competitive you you have to you have to put together a portfolio and apply to get in there and they have to choose whether or not you have the the skills and the wherewithal to be able to to go there and if you don't you're asked to leave you can't stay there so you have to continue achieving and behaving you can't be a behavior problem in that school because they can't tolerate misbehavior because it's getting in the way of the education that they're trying to get okay so that's the one exception in most cases the so the first question we have is okay I'm going to choose a high performing school now the first question becomes why are there low performing schools you know and and you and I have talked and and written about this for many many years now you can have two schools two elementary schools say within a mile and a half or two miles of each other and one can be what we what they call an a school where all the students are performing at this very high level then you can have the other school that's a we'll say a a a d school where students are struggling and and there's a lot of problems and teacher you know teacher morale is low and and all those difficulties why is there such a difference within a mile and a half of each other right right that's the first question what why do you need to flee a school well because school's underperforming well the problem is not that you the solution if the problem with education was that parents can't choose then school choice would be a solution right the problem that we're solving is that we have low performing schools right now the question why do we have low who who's tolerating low performance right why are you putting up with this if you're a governor if you're a lawmaker if you're a mayor if you're no matter what your place is who is tolerating low performing schools and who's doing anything about them right and and how why is it that we think that taking some students and if we're if we're very honest usually the students that are taken out of those low performing schools to go to another school are not the low performing students those those tend to be the students who are sh because the parents are saying look he could do so much better she could have such higher grades she really wants to be you know so we take him or her out of this low performing school and put them in another school how can we who believes who who has the idea that if we have a low performing school and we siphon off these stronger students and put them into higher performing schools that's going to make the lower performing School better like who thinks that who where where is the logic who's where yeah where's the Improvement so you still have kids who go to that school who are still going to a low performing school right it leaves those kids it leaves most of the students in a low performing school right okay tend to be students who need additional resources but they can't get them because they're at a low performing school so Choice make some schools better the the schools that are already good get to take more good students in so those schools do better choice makes education better for some students it doesn't make education better for the students who don't get selected right and choice helps and supports some teachers the teachers at the high performing schools have plenty of resources plent High morale we're doing great everything's good it leaves those teachers in the low performing schools with fewer resources and more students with special needs so to me this whole idea of choice creating choice but the problem is create if I get up and I make a speech and I say we're going to give parents a choice we're gonna we're gonna you get to choose oh that sounds great that is massively easier than me getting up and saying I am going to work with you to make our low performing schools better right okay that's a much steeper climb we've been battling that for 50 years and now instead of making low performing schools better we're simply going to give parents a choice so they can send their kids to high performing schools right so the first question is why do we have low performing schools and the second question is if a school can be high performing why can't all schools be high performing right and you know it's so it's so interesting because lot of people will say well it was the pandemic that did this and what the pandemic did was the the pandemic sort of lifted the curtain and put a spotlight on things because I I think that there are very there's a lot of people out there who do not truly appreciate the lives that many of our citizens our community PE live in right and I I will never forget because I was working in the schools during the pandemic you know I have and I had two elementary schools and one of the elementary schools you know performed a bit better very similar they had very similar populations but that school tended to perform a bit better but the other school they did not have the opportunity to shift to a purely online form of um right form of Education everybody else went virtual that school couldn't because a huge m a huge percentage of student at that school did not have internet at home they didn't have internet they didn't have computers and and so like it's really important for people to hear that they didn't all of those students or or a large portion of those students didn't have internet at home right when a teacher assigns a project that they have to do when they assign a a a a you know something that they and they say just research it you know go online and research you know what happened in you know the 1800s in in in the west okay you have to they don't have the internet at home they can't do that but they get in trouble for not doing their homework right but they didn't have the resources right we had some families that were going up to McDonald's and to get you know internet somewhere internet access right and some kids working they would they would work on a cell phone because that's the only access they had they had to go someplace had an internet access they could use a cell phone and that's how they doing these assignments if they had enough data to be able to right so so it's you know like you said it's not really fixing the problem that we have underperforming schools to to say we have school choice because we're still leaving schools as low performing schools and we're not helping them right exactly now what what forms have what what forms of school choice do we have so because we have some let's see how they're working let's talk about magnet schools magnet schools originally Were Meant to attract like a magnet students to them because there was something of value there um we have when I was in Austin when I was in Austin Texas um there was a science academy and we considered putting our son in the Science Academy it wasn't any different than any other school except that they they specialized in science his local school was perfectly okay we weren't going we weren't running from a bad school win the lottery wi win the Ed you know oh yeah you got we only have 100 places well we have 800 applicants well we got to have a lottery so only a 100 and then the other 700 have to go back to low performing schools right and well and and the the Harrison school that you mentioned earlier that is that is the model that you would think of with a magnet school where you know they're supposed to be they're supposed to attract students because of particular um skills or particular interests like like you said with science and we have here with the with the Arts and so you have to you have to demonstrate some you know some additional skill or strength in that area and then you can go to that school but you're right the magnet schools here did not do that they they did not um and so anybody or or many people who who knew that there was a possibility to put their name on the lottery in the first place to be able to go to that school right you know pushed and tried to find any way that they could to skirt the system so that they could get their kids in these schools and they they so they were strong schools they became High performing schools because a they got the strongest students um because they were with the most involved parents right but they also are strong because they have a selective retention and and and that's that's getting a little bit better to be to be honest it's getting a little bit better but if a student is going to that scho and is Raising too many problems is creating too many issues they're you know making poor grades or they have too many behavior issues then they're asked to leave they have to get back to their home school that's right if they're too disruptive if they're not making if they're not working at grade level you have to leave so it wasn't selective ret admission you didn't have to take a test to get in but they had selective retention and and these schools became private acms with an accelerated curriculum but anybody but heck anybody can teach the best and the brightest I mean the teachers who taught in those schools had the best and brightest students in the county right so their job was infinitely easier because if a kid was misbehaving they just coun them out of the school you you can't be here because you're getting in the way of education so the magnet schools essentially were transformed they they metamorphosi they metamorphosed into private okay the other example was Charter Schools right a originally the way Charter Schools were sold was we're going to have these charter schools that don't have to follow strict education State education guidelines so that they can experiment with alternative approaches so that then those alternative approaches can be exported to the public schools the public schools couldn't because they were restricted by state regulations so we said let's build these charter schools so that they can do things experimentally that we can use to make the public schools better that's not what happened the charter schools many of them not all many of these Charter Schools became essentially like magnet schools they they became High performing acmis that they again had that selective retention policy now again not all did that there's a there's a charter school here in in our county that does a wonderful job with special needs kids right they ultimately have that ability to say this really isn't a good fit or the family says this isn't really working and so we'll take our kid out but charter schools are not doing what they were originally designed to do yeah so what and you mentioned this a second ago what what choice does regardless of how it's done whether it's done with magnet schools Charter Schools or vouchers what choice does is it exacerbates and accelerates what we've always had which is a two-tiered school system all right years ago it was um it was segregated schools and the and the black schools Were Never As Good As the white schools I mean and that's why we had Brown vers support of Education was to make uh was to end that two-tiered school system it was based on race and so what choice does is that it not only it just maintains and oif and and and uh exacerbates the two-tiered school system because what we're creating now is is a bunch of top tier High performing schools and we're leaving behind all those kids who can't perform who don't get who don't win the lottery and don't don't win a place in those High performing schools abut tiered school system absolutely and it looks we're probably gonna have to do a third in this in this a third podcast in this in this uh ve because we need to talk about whether any of this makes anything better for anyone and um and that calls for a little bit more attention because you know we could do we could do three podcasts on the two-tier education system it's we've talked about it for over a decade now and um it it's concerning because it seems and feels as though it's only getting more exaggerated it's only and I think that's what it's and I think that probably this place where where we introduced this idea of a two-tiered school system is probably a very good a very logical place to end today because that's really that's really the problem we have to solve is why do we have these underperforming schools and and it's one of the main um causes one of the main contributors to that plight of of that teachers are experiencing right because especially those teachers who are in you know who are not in those really high performing top tier schools the other teachers the teachers in all of these other schools which are which are the majority of the schools 90% struggling they're really struggling and nobody's really listening to them you know everybody comes in and blows smoke and you know and and whitewashes and just makes things look good and and makes things sound like they're going great and that all these resources and things are available and and they're simply not no it's not there they're not available right and so the the the plate of today's teacher we're not addressing that a school choice doesn't solve the problems that our teachers are facing today and at any level of education so that's what we want to talk about that we we'll come back to this next week okay absolutely absolutely so all right well so that will be our first podcast of of April April 2024 so until then good stay happy stay healthy and forget to be [Music] afraid [Music]

Channel: The Mental Breakdown

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Id: pkbAM3ZMKbI

Length: 35min 38sec (2138 seconds)

Published: Sun Mar 31 2024