Mike Connell: School reforms doomed to failure
In terms of mediocrity — spending lots of money for ho-hum results — which system performs more poorly, American education or American health care?
Pat yourself on the back if you picked health care.
It's really not close. As bad as our schools might appear in global comparisons, our health-care system looks even worse.
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OF EVERY $100 spent in the U.S. economy, not quite $18 goes for health-related expenses with another $7.30 spent on schooling.
Only a handful of nations — Luxembourg, Norway, Switzerland — rival the United States in per capita spending on education.
When it comes to health care, we Americans are in a league of our own. No other nation comes close to spending as much as we do.
In fact, on a per capita basis, we fork over more than twice as much money on health care as the average for all developed nations.
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LAST YEAR, the Commonwealth Fund compared health costs in the United States and 10 other prosperous nations — Australia, Canada, France, Germany, Netherlands, New Zealand, Norway, Sweden, Switzerland and the United Kingdom.
Americans spent an annual average of $8,508 per person. Norway was the next highest at $5,669, while the United Kingdom spent the least at $3,405 per person.
Unfortunately, more cash is no guarantee of better outcomes.
The free-spending United States ranked last among the 11 nations in affordability, efficiency, equity and — the big one — healthy lives.
Also, when the World Health Organization compared overall health-system performances for 191 nations, the United States placed 37th, wedged between Slovenia and Costa Rica.
With no disrespect to the fine people of Ljubljana, that's discouraging.
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OUR COUNTRY ranked a middling 14th — just ahead of Australia, New Zealand and Israel — in the Pearson Global Index, which measured educational attainment and cognitive learning in 40 developed nations.
If you're curious, South Korean schools took the No. 1 spot followed by Japan, Hong Kong, Singapore, Finland, United Kingdom, Canada, Netherlands, Ireland and Poland.
The National Center for Education Statistics reports that Michigan spent $10,447 per pupil in 2011-12, or slightly less than the national average of $10,667.
Michigan's investment was $1,100 less than the expenditure in my home state, West Virginia, and $4,400 less than Massachusetts, which has the nation's best schools as measured by test scores.
On the other hand, Michigan spent $4,000 more per child than frugal Utah and $2,200 more than Texas.
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WHAT I FIND fascinating is how American society reacts to the great challenges we face in health care and education.
Generally speaking, no one blames the family doctor for a health-care system that costs too much and delivers too little. Nor should they, not in a bountiful land with seas of corn syrup and islands of french fries.
If only the same grace extended to education, where teacher vilification runs rampant.
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IN LANSING, legislators who stand mute before ever-rising health costs and abysmal health outcomes are busily passing law after law to reform education.
They're only too eager to demonize teachers, by implication if not directly, and to condemn traditional public schools as bastions of ineptitude and waste.
The way I see it, there is a well-funded, orchestrated quest to kill off traditional schools with a thousand cuts, replacing them with privately owned charter academies.
What's the end game?
Mostly, there are fortunes to be made in the privatization of education. Politically, it's no small thing that the collateral damage would include the gutting of teachers' unions and the demise of local control of public schools.
What it's not about is the kids. The reforms of the past four years have no chance of putting Michigan on a flight path to world-class schools.
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CURIOUSLY, THE FOLKS who lament the so-so performance of U.S. students in global rankings rarely look to the rest of the world for solutions.
If nations such as Finland and Poland can make dramatic improvements in education in a single generation, do you think American reformers might learn something from studying them?
There is a peculiar and regrettable but very American form of hubris where we insist on doing things our own way, making our own mistakes and dismissing the rest of the world as our inferiors.
It's all the more strange that such an attitude flourishes in a nation of immigrants, a society built with ideas borrowed from cultures around the globe.
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JAL MEHTA, of the Harvard Graduate School of Education, has studied how American public schools might prosper by borrowing strategies that work elsewhere.
Writing in Foreign Affairs magazine two years ago, he offered a succinct analysis of where our public schools fail and how other nations could show us the way to the top of the world rankings.
One hurdle is that many of his solutions are counter-intuitive. They're not easy sells.
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FOR INSTANCE, how many Americans think teachers spend too much time in the classroom?
Not many, I suspect, and yet it's a major failing. U.S. teachers spend an average of 1,110 hours a year in the classroom, twice as many hours as their counterparts in top-ranked South Korea and Japan.
The nations with the best schools give teachers adequate time for planning and collaboration with colleagues. This isn't an anomaly. It is fundamental to the educational systems of all nations with top-ranked schools.
Depriving teachers of time to plan and collaborate makes no more sense than asking NFL franchises to do away with game plans and team practices.
"Culturally, for growth through professional collaboration to be effective, U.S. teachers need to feel as though they are members of a shared profession with a common knowledge base, rather than freelancers accountable only to what they think is right," Mehta wrote.
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THE EDUCATIONAL SYSTEM as we know it took shape a century ago.
"In one generation, between 1890 to 1920, a group of civic elites transformed a country of one-room schoolhouses into a set of district school systems," Mehta observed.
"Influenced by prevailing models of business organization, which prioritized efficiency, this system empowered mostly male superintendents to act as CEOs of school districts, where mostly female teachers would follow the rules and programs that their superiors chose."
Modern reforms — No Child Left Behind, Race to the Top, Common Core and the like — are efforts to add layers of new regulations and expectations without changing the fundamental structure of public education.
"Created in the era of the assembly line, it was never intended to push all of its students to engage in the kind of complex learning and critical thinking that the 21st century U.S. economy demands," Mehta said.
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TEACHER VILIFICATION is a fool's play. Michigan schools will never improve in any meaningful, enduring way until the demonizing ends.
In high-performing nations, teachers are elevated rather than vilified. In Finland, a survey of 15-year-olds found that the kids admire teachers more than doctors, lawyers, engineers or any other profession.
Finnish teachers are paid fairly, too, earning salaries that compare favorably to the average paid in other fields.
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IN PORT HURON, a newly hired teacher with a bachelor's degree starts at $35,265 a year, or $10,000 less than the average starting salary with a bachelor's degree in all fields.
Because of the inflationary spiral in health costs, which no one in Lansing seems very eager to address, a Port Huron teacher now pays from $2,000 to $5,000 a year for health care that once came with the job as a fringe benefit.
A teacher who chooses to add a master's degree, often a necessity for promotion, will fork over another $60,000 or so.
Statewide, teacher salaries have been flat at best in the four-plus years since Republicans took control of state government.
In cash-strapped districts such as Port Huron, veteran teachers have absorbed double-digit pay cuts — $15,000 a year or so — since Rick Snyder's first day on the job as governor.
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THE PROBLEM with slashing salaries and demoralizing teachers is that it guarantees failure. It's not reform; it's delusion.
The road to better schools would begin, in Mehta's words, "with attracting better teachers, retaining them and helping them develop their practice."
Pay is part of that. So is culture.
The U.S. has about 1,300 colleges of education, and even the best of them accept at least half of their applicants.
By contrast, only one applicant in eight gets into Singapore's teacher-training programs. The acceptance rate in Finland is one in 10.
"Licensing exams for teachers lack the rigor of the bar and board exams that exist in law, medicine, engineering, accounting and many other professions," Mehta wrote. "Some teachers master their craft over time, but others merely learn to control a classroom."
Mike Connell is a freelance writer and a retired reporter for the Times Herald. Contact him at fortgratiot@gmail.com.