Walter Williams on Education

In his column today, Black Education, Walter Williams touches on some of the same things I touched on last April in my post on how to save education.

They have parents with little interest in their education. These students not only sabotage the education process, but make schools unsafe as well. These students should not be permitted to destroy the education chances of others.

I agree for any student that is disrupting others.  Education is expensive.  We pay $10,000 – $15,000 per student per year of K-12 education.  In return for spending this money, we should expect students to be on their best behavior and problem kids need to be removed from the population so other can learn.

Another issue deemed too delicate to discuss is the overall quality of people teaching our children. Students who have chosen education as their major have the lowest SAT scores of any other major. Students who have an education degree earn lower scores than any other major on graduate school admission tests such as the GRE, MCAT or LSAT. Schools of education, either graduate or undergraduate, represent the academic slums of most any university. They are home to the least able students and professors. Schools of education should be shut down.

This goes along with my belief that we need to remove bad teachers and reward good ones.  Teachers seem to hate the idea of performance measurement.  It’s not hard to see why based on Williams’ paragraph above, they aren’t that good.  Teaching is not an entitlement.

Yet another issue is the academic fraud committed by teachers and administrators. After all, what is it when a student is granted a diploma certifying a 12th grade level of achievement when in fact he can’t perform at the sixth- or seventh-grade level?

Agreed.  In my post, I wrote that teachers need to assess accurate grades that truly reflect the students’ proficiency of the subject matter.  There should be no other criteria when giving a grade.

In summary, public education is not good because it has stifled or simply has wrong-headed ideas on several important levels of feedback.

1. Student grades.
2. Student behavior.
3. Management of teacher quality.
4. Ultimately, the most important level of feedback that is stifled is funding.  Public education receives funds no matter what.   #4 enables #1 – 3.