Every child should be able to receive an education that opens the door to success later in life; to achieve this, there needs to be reform and increased accountability in early, elementary and high school public education.
In communities where the education gap is most apparent, teachers should be graded on how well their students are succeeding. If employees fail to produce successful outcomes for a company, they are fired for the good of the company. Similarly, if these teachers are failing to produce successful students, then they should be removed from their positions.
Teachers should be in the business of producing successful students, equipped with the tools to succeed in their adult lives.
Teachers’ unions are protecting those teachers who are failing to perform. It is extremely difficult and costly to fire a tenured teacher. Instead of these teachers being fired, they are simply moved around, continuously enabled to poison the already failing system further.
Think of these failing teachers as the AIDS virus. This virus constantly mutates and this is what makes the disease so hard to cure.
The system cannot be cured of these teachers because they are so difficult to fire. Because the system cannot be flushed of their presence, they are simply moved around and continuously allowed to infect the education system.
Teachers’ unions are not all bad; they provide protection to those good teachers, those “antibodies” — but where they appear to be so inherently dangerous is that they also protect bad teachers, the “viruses,” as we might call them.
The Hechinger Report ran an article, on Quitman Street Renew School, in New Jersey, which fired all of its teachers and hired a whole new staff. According to the article, for a school to be “staffed to succeed” it must first remove the ineffective teachers and then “put a highly effective teacher in every classroom.”
This school should be an example to every other failing school in the country, because what it’s doing is working. What’s broken needs to be fixed, and that’s what this school did in a very dramatic and poignant manner.
Our country has the highest percentage of the population incarcerated in comparison to every other nation in the world. Out of the individuals incarcerated in this country, the highest percentage are black and Latino.
Susan L. Taylor, in the documentary, “The Lottery,” revealed the staggering fact that companies who build prisons look at the failure rates of black boys in the fourth and fifth grades to determine how many prison cells they need in the future. The documentary also revealed that only 51 percent of African-American students and 55 percent of Latino students graduate high school, compared to 76 percent of white students.
This suggests there is a direct correlation between the education system failing these students and the percentage of incarcerated individuals.
If this is supposed to be the home of the free, then why is a solution not being found in this area so every person has the opportunity for a life of freedom? In essence, the failure of the public education system is stripping children of their freedom early in life. If they are not bound in prison, they will likely be bound in poverty.
The failure of the public education system ensures that the wealthy stay wealthy and the poor stay poor. According to “The Lottery,” 90 percent of incoming freshmen come from families in the top half of U.S. annual income statistics and attend the top 150 colleges in the nation.
Pepperdine is one of those top 150 colleges, and just by asking around, you’ll discover that a large portion of the student body attended a private school at some point in their educational journey before embarking on this one.
Whether or not some would agree that going to college will guarantee success in life, it at least gives you the opportunity to reach success.
Out of 30 developed countries, the United States ranks 25th in math and 21st in science. So not only is the public education system failing the children it serves, but it is also failing the nation as a whole.
We have the tools to cure the ailing public educational system in this country. Those tools need to be used to their fullest potential so children are given the opportunities they deserve.
Every child should have the opportunity to be something and do something great in life. The current system, however, is stripping them of their inherent right to these opportunities and instead providing them with the opportunity to fail, just like the system that has produced them.
