John Stossel's 'Stupid in America'
How Lack of Choice Cheats Our
Kids Out of a Good Education
http://abcnews.go.com/2020/Stossel/story?id=1500338
Jan. 13, 2006 — "Stupid in America" is a
nasty title for a program about public education, but some nasty things are
going on in America's public schools and it's about time we face up to it.
Kids at New York's Abraham Lincoln High School
told me their teachers are so dull students fall asleep in class. One student
said, "You see kids all the time walking in the school smoking weed, you
know. It's a normal thing here."
Related: Stossel Responds to Angry Teachers
Stupid in America
Unhelpful Unions?
We tried to bring "20/20" cameras into New York City schools to
see for ourselves and show you what's going on in the schools, but officials
wouldn't allow it.
Washington, D.C., officials steered us to the best
classrooms in their district.
We wanted to tape typical classrooms but were turned down
in state after state.
Finally, school officials in Washington, D.C.,
allowed "20/20" to give cameras to a few students who were handpicked
at two schools they'd handpicked. One was Woodrow Wilson High. Newsweek says
it's one of the best schools in America.
Yet what the students taped didn't inspire confidence.
One teacher didn't have control over the kids. Another
"20/20" student cameraman videotaped a boy dancing wildly with his
shirt off, in front of his teacher.
If you're like most American parents, you might think
"These things don't happen at my kid's school." A Gallup Poll survey showed 76 percent of Americans
were completely or somewhat satisfied with their kids' public school.
Education reformers like Kevin Chavous
have a message for these parents: If you only knew.
Even though people in the suburbs might think their
schools are great, Chavous says, "They're not.
That's the thing and the test scores show that."
Chavous and many other education professionals say
Americans don't know that their public schools, on the whole, just aren't that good. Because without competition, parents don't
know what their kids might have had.
And while many people say, "We need to spend more
money on our schools," there actually isn't a link between spending and
student achievement.
Jay Greene, author of "Education Myths," points
out that "If money were the solution, the problem
would already be solved … We've doubled per pupil spending, adjusting for
inflation, over the last 30 years, and yet schools aren't better."
He's absolutely right. National graduation rates and
achievement scores are flat, while spending on education has increased more
than 100 percent since 1971. More money hasn't helped American kids.
Ben Chavis is a former public
school principal who now runs an alternative charter school in Oakland, Calif.,
that spends thousands of dollars less per student than the surrounding public
schools. He laughs at the public schools' complaints about money. "That is the biggest lie in America. They
waste money," he said.
To save money, Chavis asks the
students to do things like keep the grounds picked up and set up for their own
lunch. For gym class, his students often just run laps around the block. All of this means there's more money left over for teaching.
Even though he spends less money per student than the
public schools do, Chavis pays his teachers more than
what public school teachers earn. His school also thrives because the principal
gets involved. Chavis shows up at every classroom and
uses gimmicks like small cash payments for perfect attendance.
Since he took over four years ago, his school has gone
from being among the worst in Oakland
to being the best. His middle school has the highest test scores in the city. "It's not about the money," he said.
He's confident that even kids who come from broken
families and poor families will do well in his school. "Give me the poor
kids, and I will outperform the wealthy kids who live in the hills. And we do
it," he said.
Monopoly Kills
Innovation and Cheats Kids
Chavis's charter school is an example of how a
little innovation can create a school that can change kids' lives. You don't
get innovation without competition.
To give you an idea of how competitive American schools
are and how U.S. students
performed compared with their European counterparts, we gave parts of an
international test to some high school students in Belgium
and in New Jersey.
Belgian kids cleaned the American kids' clocks, and
called them "stupid."
We didn't pick smart kids to test in Europe and dumb kids
in the United States.
The American students attend an above-average school in New
Jersey, and New Jersey's kids
have test scores that are above average for America.
Lov Patel, the boy who got the highest score among the
American students, told me, "I'm shocked, because it just shows how
advanced they are compared to us."
The Belgian students didn't perform better because
they're smarter than American students. They performed better because their
schools are better. At age 10, American students take an international test and
score well above the international average. But by age 15, when students from
40 countries are tested, the Americans place 25th.
American schools don't teach as well as schools in other
countries because they are government monopolies, and
monopolies don't have much incentive to compete. In Belgium, by contrast, the money is
attached to the kids — it's a kind of voucher system. Government funds
education — at many different kinds of schools — but if a school can't attract
students, it goes out of business.
Belgian school principal Kaat Vandensavel told us she
works hard to impress parents.
She told us, "If we don't offer them what they want
for their child, they won't come to our school." She constantly improves
the teaching, saying, "You can't afford 10 teachers out of 160 that don't
do their work, because the clients will know, and won't come to you
again."
"That's normal in Western
Europe," Harvard economist Caroline Hoxby
told me. "If schools don't perform well, a parent would never be trapped
in that school in the same way you could be trapped in the U.S."
Last week Florida's
Supreme Court shut down "opportunity scholarships," Florida's small attempt at competition.
Public money can't be spent on private schools, said the court, because the
state constitution commands the funding only of "uniform . . .
high-quality" schools. Government schools are neither uniform nor
high-quality, and without competition, no new teaching plan or No Child Left
Behind law will get the monopoly to serve its customers well.
The longer kids stay in American schools, the worse they
do in international competition. They do worse than kids from poorer countries
that spend much less money on education, ranking behind not only Belgium but also Poland,
the Czech Republic and South Korea.
This should come as no surprise if you remember that
public education in the United
States is a government monopoly. Don't like
your public school? Tough. The school is terrible? Tough. Your taxes fund that school regardless of whether
it's good or bad. That's why government monopolies routinely fail their
customers. Union-dominated monopolies are even worse.
In New York City,
it's "just about impossible" to fire a bad teacher, says Schools
Chancellor Joel Klein. The new union contract offers some relief, but it's
still about 200 pages of bureaucracy. "We tolerate mediocrity," said
Klein, because "people get paid the same, whether they're outstanding,
average or way below average."
Here's just one example from New York City: It took years to fire a
teacher who sent sexually oriented e-mails to "Cutie 101," a
16-year-old student. Klein said, "He hasn't taught, but we have had to pay
him, because that's what's required under the contract."
Only after six years of litigation were they able to fire
him. In the meantime, they paid the teacher more than $300,000. Klein said he
employs dozens of teachers who he's afraid to let near the kids, so he has them
sit in what are called rubber rooms. This year he will spend $20 million
dollars to warehouse teachers in five rubber rooms. It's an alternative to
firing them. In the last four years, only two teachers out of 80,000 were fired
for incompetence. Klein's office says the new contract will make it easier to
get rid of sex offenders, but it will still be difficult to fire incompetent
teachers.
When I confronted Randi Weingarten, president of the
United Federation of Teachers, she said, "They [the NYC school board] just
don't want to do the work that's entailed." But the "work that's
entailed" is so onerous that most principals just have just given up, or
gotten bad teachers to transfer to another school. They even have a name for
it: "the dance of the lemons."
Zoned Out of a Good
Education
I talked with 18-year-old Dorian Cain in South Carolina, who was
still struggling to read a single sentence in a first-grade level book when I
met him. Although his public schools had spent nearly $100,000 on him over 12
years, he still couldn't read.
So "20/20" sent Dorian to a private learning
center, Sylvan, to see if teachers there could teach Dorian to read when the South Carolina public
schools failed to.
Using computers and workbooks, Dorian's reading went up
two grade levels — after just 72 hours of instruction.
His mother, Gena Cain, is
thrilled with Dorian's progress but disappointed with his public schools.
"With Sylvan, it's a huge improvement. And they're doing what they're
supposed to do. They're on point. But I can't say the same for the public
schools," she said.
Lying to Beat the
System
Gena Cain, like most parents, doesn't have a
choice which public school her kids attend. She followed the rules, and her son
paid the price.
In San Jose, Calif., some parents break the rules to get their kids
into Fremont
Union schools. They're so much better than neighboring schools that parents
sometimes cheat to get their kids in by pretending to live in the school
district.
"We have maybe hundreds of kids who are here
illegally, under false pretenses," said District Superintendent Steve
Rowley.
Inspector John Lozano works for the district going door-to-door
to check if kids really live where they say they live. And even seeing that a
child is present at a particular address isn't enough. Lozano says he needs to
look inside the house to make sure the student really lives there.
Think about what he's doing. The school district police
send him into your daughter's bedroom. He even goes through drawers and closets
if he has to.
At one house he found a computer and some teen magazines
and pictures of a student with her friends. He decided that student passed the
residency test.
But a grandmother who listed an address in his district
is caught. The people who answered the door when Lozano visited told him she
didn't live there.
Two days later, I talked with the grandmother who tried
to get her grandson into the Fremont
schools.
"I was actually crying. I was crying in front of
this 14-year-old. Why can't they just let parents to get in the school of their
choice?" she asked.
Why can't she make a choice? It's sad that school
officials force her to go to the black market to get her grandson a better
education. After we started calling the school, the school did decide to let
him stay in the district.
School-Choice
Proponents Meet Resistance
When the Sanford family
moved from Charleston to Columbia, S.C.,
the family had a big concern: Where would the kids go to school? In most
places, you must attend the public school in the zone where you live, but the
middle school near the Sanford's
new home was rated below average.
It turned out, however, that this didn't pose a problem
for this family, because the reason the Sanfords
moved to Columbia
was that Mark Sanford had been elected governor. He and his wife were invited
to send their kids to schools in better districts.
Sanford realized how
unfair the system was. "If you can buy a $250,000 or $300,000 house,
you're gonna get some great public education,"
Gov. Sanford said. Or if you have political connections.
The Sanfords decided it was unfair to
take advantage of their position as "first family" and ended up
sending their kids to private school. "It's too important to me to
sacrifice their education. I get one shot at it. If I don't pay very close
attention to how my boys get educated then I've lost an opportunity to make
them the best they can be in this world," Jenny Sanford said.
The governor then proposed giving every parent in South Carolina that kind
of choice, regardless of where they lived or whether they made a lot of money.
He said state tax credits should help parents pay for private schools. Then
they would have a choice.
"The public has to know that there's an alternative
there. It's just like, do you get a Sprint phone or an AT&T phone," Chavous said.
He's right. When monopolies rule, there is little choice,
and little gets done. In America
the phone company was once a government-supported monopoly. All the phones were
black, and all the calls expensive. With competition, things have changed — for
the better. We pay less for phone calls. If we're unhappy with our phone
service, we switch companies.
Why can't kids benefit
from similar competition in education?
"People expect and demand choice in every other area
of their life," Sanford
said.
The governor announced his plan last year and many
parents cheered the idea, but school boards, teachers unions and politicians
objected. PTAs even sent kids home with a letter saying, "Contact your
legislator. How can we spend state money on something that hasn't been
proven?"
A lot of people say education tax credits and vouchers
are a terrible idea, that they'll drain money from public schools and give it
to private ones.
Last week's Florida
court ruling against vouchers came after teacher Ruth Holmes Cameron and
advocacy groups brought a suit to block the program.
"To say that competition is going to improve
education? It's just not gonna work.
You know competition is not for children. It's not for
human beings. It's not for public education. It never has been, it never will
be," Holmes said.
Why not? Would you keep going back to a restaurant that
served you a bad meal? Or a barber that gave you a bad haircut? What if the
government assigned you to "your" grocery store.
The store wouldn't have to compete for your business, and it would soon sell
spoiled milk or stock only high profit items. Real estate agencies would sell
houses advertising "neighborhood with a good grocery store." That's
insane, and yet that's what America
does with public schools.
Chavous, who has worked to get more school choice
in Washington, D.C., said, "Choice to me is the only way. I believe that
we can force the system from an external vantage point to change itself. It
will never change itself from within. …
Unless there is some competition infused in the equation,
unless that occurs, then they know they have a captive monopoly that they can
continue to dominate."
Competition inspires people to do what we didn't think we
could do. If people got to choose their kids' school, education options would
be endless. There could soon be technology schools, science schools, virtual
schools where you learn at home on your computer, sports schools, music
schools, schools that go all year, schools with uniforms, schools that open
early and keep kids later, and, who knows what else. If there were competition,
all kinds of new ideas would bloom.