Fr. Vincent Fitzpatrick
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COMMENTARY
Let's reform schools and let's do it right
Charley ReeseJuly 24, 2001
Lest someone think I have no ideas about solutions to problems, I'll tell you the first steps necessary to reform government education. As soon as I do, you will quickly realize that there is no political will to do any of them. Ergo, government education cannot be reformed and must be scrapped.
Step one to real reform is to repeal compulsory attendance laws. Don't worry. The kids will show up. In the first place, there are no farms where their labor is needed anymore. In the second place, the worst parents view schools as free baby-sitters or a brat-watching service. They'll make sure their little monsters show up in the classroom.
The virtue of repealing compulsory attendance, however, is that it gives the school administrators and classroom teachers leverage they have lost. With no compulsory attendance, they could kick disruptive kids out of school permanently.
They also could explain to parents that, while this service is available, it is conditional. And the conditions are that parents must civilize their little savages -- teach them manners and personal hygiene -- before they will be accepted for attendance. And should the students fail either to meet behavior or academic standards, back home they go.
The second necessary step is to repeal tenure laws. One school administrator put it well when he said firing a tenured teacher is not a task, it's a career. I know personally that it took one school more than five years to fire a teacher everyone agreed from the gitgo was an alcoholic and appeared in all his classes sloshed.
Paying a bad teacher more money will not make that person a better teacher. In fact, paying a good teacher more money will not make that person a better teacher. Good teachers are good because of their character and talents, not because of their paychecks. The noxious and false notion that you can acquire quality with money should be forever discarded from our thinking.
What rewarding good teachers can do is encourage them to stay in the profession, but you need more than pay to do that. You have to make sure that no student can insult, much less assault, a teacher, which means school administrations must back up their teachers without question.
To help principals develop some backbone, state legislatures should pass laws or amend their constitutions to grant school districts and all of their employees sovereign immunity from lawsuits. Don't kid yourself. It is fear of litigation that has corrupted many of our institutions. So, let's review for a moment. We're going to repeal compulsory attendance laws; we're going to abolish tenure; we're going to set strict behavior and performance standards for all students and toss 'em when they fail to meet them; we're going to back the classroom teacher 100 percent; and we're going to grant school districts immunity from lawsuits to keep the ambulance chasers off the campus.
The next step is to destroy the false god of egalitarianism once and for all. Students are not equal. They vary in IQ, a crucial factor in academic performance.
To expect teachers to wave magic wands and produce uniform results is a fool's errand and cruel example of child abuse. Yet today's politicians and editorial writers seem to be fixated on uniform performance.
The students need to be tested and assessed early to determine their IQ and their aptitudes. Students with below-average IQ's are not college material and should be directed into vocational and commercial training courses. Students with talents for art and music should be given that kind of an education.
Of course, you can't provide this kind of varied education in the monstrous concrete institutions that stupid school boards keep building.
Finally, Congress has to repeal the students-with-disabilities act. Students with serious mental or emotional problems should be segregated, taught in a special facility by specialists. Putting these children into the normal classrooms has probably done more to destroy public education than anything else.
These are only preliminary and necessary first steps. The curricula need to be seriously reformed and bland or ideological textbooks burned in one big pile.
The main point, however, is the system is a political system and there is not the political will to make these changes.
That's why I say abandon government education. It cannot, or perhaps I should say, will not ever be reformed.
Home-school your children, and if you can't do that put them in a good private school. No public-school system, which employs armed guards, barbed wire fences and metal detectors can be called even an acceptable system, much less successful.
Copyright � 2001, Orlando Sentinel
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