Public Schools: Corrupt Administrators, Out of Control Judges and the NEA

What are the prospects of reclaiming systematic schooling so it serves the general welfare? Surely the possibility of recharging the system when so many seem to desire such a course would be the best refutation of my buried thesis—that no trustworthy change is possible, that the school machine must be shattered into a hundred thousand parts before the pledges made in the founding documents of this country have a chance to be honored again. No one serves better as an emblem of the hopelessness of a gradual course of school reform or one that follows the dictates of conventional wisdom than Judge Russell G. Clark, of Kansas City, Missouri.

For more than ten years Judge Clark oversaw the spending of a $1.6 billion windfall in an attempt to desegregate Kansas City schools and raise the reading and math scores of poor kids. I arbitrarily select his story from many which might be told to show how unlikely it is that the forces which gave us our present schools are likely to vanish, even in the face of outraged determination. Or that models of a better way to do things are likely to solve the problem, either.

Judge Russell G. Clark took over the Kansas City school district in 1984 after adjudicating a case in which the NAACP acted for plaintiffs in a suit against the school district. Although he began the long court proceedings as a former farm boy raised in the Ozarks without an activist judicial record, Clark’s decision was favorable to the desegregationists beyond any reasonable expectation. Clark invited those bringing the suit to dream up perfect schools and he would get money to pay for them! Using the exceptional power granted federal judges, he unilaterally ordered the doubling of city property taxes.4 When that provided inadequate revenue, he ordered the state to make up the difference. How’s that for decisive, no-nonsense support for school reform as a social priority?

Suddenly the district was awash in money for TV studios, swimming pools, planetariums, zoos, computers, squadrons of teachers and specialists. "They had as much money as any school district will ever get," said Gary Orfield, a Harvard investigator who directed a postmortem analysis, "It didn’t do very much." Orfield was wrong. The Windfall produced striking results:

Average daily attendance went down, the dropout rate went up, the black-white achievement gap remained stationary, and the district was as segregated after ten years of well-funded reform as it had been at the beginning. A former school board president whose children had been plaintiffs in the original suit leading to Judge Clark’s takeover said she had "truly believed if we gave teachers and administrators everything they said they needed, that would make a huge difference. I knew it would take time, but I did believe by five years into this program we would see dramatic results educationally." Who is the villain in this tale? Judge Clark is. He just doesn’t get it. The system isn’t broken. It works as intended, turning out incomplete people. No repair can fix it, nor is the education kids need in any catalogue to buy. As Kansas City proves, giving schools more money only encourages them to intensify the destructive operations they already perform.

Footnote: 4 - They actually were raised 150 percent, from a base already not low. With what effect on homeowners just holding on was anyone’s guess. Here, as in the case of Benson, Vermont, up ahead, the institution’s aspect as predatory parasite appears in stark relief.

At the 1996 annual convention of the National Education Association, delegates were delighted to learn that the union would pay them a $1000 bounty if they could succeed in getting themselves elected as a delegate to the upcoming Democratic National Convention. No similar prize was offered for selection as a Republican Party delegate. The offer proved a powerful motivater, about an eighth of all the delegates who nominated Governor Clinton for President were NEA members and the union carried more weight at the DNC than California, America’s most populous state.

President Clinton had been the featured speaker at the NEA gathering. When he entered a convention hall hung with Clinton-Gore signs and crisscrossed with strobe lights, Clinton T-shirts and buttons were everywhere, the band blared out rock and roll, and Arkansas delegates pretended to play huge make-believe saxophones. The teacher crowd rocked the room. This was its moment to howl.

The NEA bills itself as "education’s most powerful voice in Washington." It claims credit for creating the U.S. Department of Education, for passing Goals 2000, and for stopping the Senate from approving vouchers. Its platform resolutions and lobbying instructions to delegates include the following planks: "mandatory kindergarten with compulsory attendance"; opposition to "competency testing" as a condition of employment; "direct and confidential" child access to psychological, social, and health services without parental knowledge; "programs in the public schools for children from birth"; a resolution (B-67) criticizing homeschooling as inadequate and calling for licenses issued by the state licensing agency for those who instruct in such schools; and a curriculum "approved by the state department of education."

The NEA also called for statehood for the District of Columbia, and announced its undying opposition to all voucher plans and tuition tax credit plans "or funding formulas that have the same effect." It threatened a boycott against Shell Oil for alleged environmental pollution in Nigeria. The NEA had a foreign policy as well as a pedagogical agenda.

For all this flash and filigree, while the NEA and other professional unions have had some effect on micropolitics in schooling, they have surprisingly little effect on public policy. For all the breast-beating, vilification, and sanctimony which swirl about the union presence in schooling, where real power is concerned the professional organizations are not the movers and shakers they are reputed to be. Mostly unions are good copy for journalists and not much more.

When I began teaching in 1961, the student population of School District 3 on the prosperous Upper West Side of Manhattan was over 20,000, and the cry was heard everywhere from the four district administrative employees (!) that schools were overcrowded.

But I was fresh from western Pennsylvania and saw something different, a small but significant fraction of the school’s enrollment was made up of phantom kids in several categories: kids on the school register who had never shown up but were carried as if they had; kids who were absent but who for revenue purposes were entered as present; kids who were assigned to out-of-school programs of various sorts, some term-long, but who continued as phantoms to swell the apparent school rolls. Then there were the absentees, about 10 percent a day, who were actually marked absent, and the curious fact that after lunch attendance dipped precipitously sending that fraction soaring, although there seemed to be a gentlemen’s agreement not to document the fact.

So it was that when the press announced horrendous class sizes of 35 and 50, in my school, at least, the real number was about 28—still too many, of course, but manageable. Although everyone agreed there was absolutely no space available anywhere, by greasing the custodian’s palm I was able to obtain a master key and a priceless document known as the "empty-room schedule." Would you believe there was never a time when multiple rooms in that building weren’t empty? By training my kids in low-profile guerrilla tactics I was able to spread about half my class into different cubbyholes around the building where they worked happily and productively, in teams or alone.

Beginning in the 1980s this tactic became impossible because all the empty spaces did fill up—even though the number of students District 3 was managing fell sharply from 20,000 to 10,000, and with even more lax procedures to account for them than when I was originally hired. This latter development caused phantom children to multiply like rabbits. A simple act of long division will explain in outline what had happened: by dividing the number of students enrolled in my building by the number of teachers on the class register, I was able to discover that average class sizes should have been 17 kids.

And yet actual class sizes were about 28. The mystery of the now unavailable empty space vanishes in the ballooning numbers of "coordinators," "special supervisors," "community programs officers," and various other titular masks behind which deadwood was piling up. Each of these people required an "office" whether that be the former Nurse’s Room, the dressing room behind the stage, or a conveniently large storage closet. It had happened to the Army and to IBM, why should schools be exempt?

The above is a brief selection from John Taylor Gatto's fascinating book The Underground History of American Education. The entire book is available for free online.

This book has really opened my eyes as to the original purpose of compulsory schooling in America.

I'd love to hear your comments.

I read the whole book online. I highly reccomend reading it.

Here in Mississippi the Democratic Congress is hounding Gov. Haley Barbour because he may not fund schools to the projected funding (which was projected 5 years ago) and howling about him slashing the educational budget. He quickly pointed out that the schools have millions IN RESERVES and shouldn't worry if the new budget was going to allocate more money than the 1999 projection. I am becoming a teacher, but I dont dread it so much in Mississippi.

The Democrat Party is terribly dependent on teacher unions to GOTV. It's similar here in Texas.

Excerpt from article dtd 5-04-05, www.cato.org:

New Study Gives Public School "Accountability" An 'F'
In a new Cato Policy Analysis, education policy analyst Neal McCluskey reveals how the federal bureaucracy contributes to inefficiency and abuse in America's schools. Public accountability has not only failed to defend against corruption, it has rendered many districts impervious to change.

"Could you post a link to that? Thanks!"

http://www.cato.org/pressroom/index.html

You're welcomed, Zack.

Disclaimer: Opinions posted on Free Republic are those of the individual posters and do not necessarily represent the opinion of Free Republic or its management. All materials posted herein are protected by copyright law and the exemption for fair use of copyrighted works.