glyph theory

The authors of this education study, the “best” young economists hired by the country’s premier economic think tank, are not the kind of people who ever got a “B” in school. Such people can hardly help coming to think of themselves as superior to the common man. They’ve spent their whole lives proving that they are not “ordinary”—which, if the rest of us had any sense at all, should utterly disqualify them from influencing policy for ordinary people. I’m not being flippant; this is a specific problem.

These guys have swallowed completely the axiom among Business Administrators that “if you can’t measure it, you can’t manage it.” Naturally, since they are focused entirely on economic activity and climbing to the top of the slippery pole, they don’t even pause to wonder whether higher test scores or a higher income might not be the be-all-and-end-all of success in education or in life.

This tendency is not just a deficiency of logic, or even of principle; it’s a deficiency of character. Somewhere in the course of establishing their “brilliant” careers, many eminent people seem to lose sight of their essential humanity. They stop being able to see the human story as a single narrative, of which they themselves are a tiny part. It’s the same deficiency of character that leads, for example, the rich to imagine that wealth inequality in this country isn’t a problem worth addressing.

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It isn’t healthy what we are doing to kids, smashing their curiosity and sense of play. Making everything about Achievement with a capital A. By high school they’re often facing four or six or more APs, SAT prep classes, plus sports, music, church, Boy Scouts, whatever. They don’t put this kind of pressure on kids in Finland, or even in American military schools, where they seem to understand that you take your last SAT in this world around age seventeen, after which point life begins to arrange itself along other lines entirely.

But what we’re doing to teachers is far worse. There are real, longstanding problems with identifying and removing really terrible teachers, but anyone who works in education can tell you that none of this is as simple as it looks. A teacher friend decocted the issues for me perfectly.

Unions tend to resist merit pay and firing based on student scores, and some of that is sheer protectionism, but there’s more to it, as everyone knows there is a big political dimension beyond the numbers. Principal evaluation, peer evaluation, student evaluation, these are all about feelings. But even when a numerical measure is involved, if your supervisor likes you, you don’t get the problem class, you get the resources you need, etc. The system is manipulated to keep the ones that are favored, and lean on the ones who aren’t. But too often known bad ones are tolerated because it’s too much of a pain to replace them and there’s no guarantee that the next ones will be any better.

Teachers now have zero time to think about how to encourage a specific kid because they are laden down with a crippling amount of bureaucratic claptrap and test preparation. They can’t get to know their kids because they have to conform to a regimented nonsense make-work politically-motivated schedule every second. There are crazy parents to attend to, staff meetings, testing, testing, testing. Somewhere in there are lesson plans to develop and work to grade. There’s not enough money for anything whatsoever because of budget cuts. They have to worry about every syllable that comes out of their mouths in case some fool goes all haywire over their views on politics or whatever. The stuff you see in even a really good public school would curl your hair, seriously.