Nearly every day I hear a new story from the g-phrase about her kids at school. It’s a rare occasion that the story has a happy ending. I hear about the kids, the families, the school administration, the constant testing, and the hazards of being a public, elementary school teacher.

After a few years of watching this from the sidelines, my view on schools has changed drastically.

I’m of the opinion that most of America’s schools (at least in places like the Denver-metro area) are fine. They are decently funded, staffed with people who care about kids and teaching, and filled with kids who are, well, kids. They do well some days and poorly others. Learning may not always be a passion, but it’s an accepted duty. Most of the kids will grow up to be decent people. I’m honestly not worried about most of the schools and most of the kids.

But the failing schools can’t be fixed and I’m not entirely sure that issuing vouchers (which I still, cautiously, support) will help solve the problem. The problems could be fixed if people would stop focusing on all the bits that surround the core of the difficulties, but, instead, liberals and conservatives have chosen to dance around the real issues.

Conservatives focus on standards, testing, and fixing responsibility on failing schools and teachers. The liberals focus on pay, funding for special programs, and the re-shaping of teaching theories that make up a sort of self-help business porn for educators. All these things matter, but they represent neither the largest challenge nor the best fix.

Educators are an insular, defensive lot. They don’t like criticism from the outside, they don’t like suggested solutions that don’t come from one of their own, they follow teaching trends the way some CEOs follow management trends, and they, as a group, oppose anything that challenges their liberal orthodoxy. They aren’t the problem, either; I would say that most of the teachers that I have met have been intelligent, good people who do their jobs at least competently.

Teacher unions are worse. Under the cover of fighting for the good of the children, they often seem to fight against changes that might actually benefit the kids. See, the unions don’t exist to help kids; they exist to help teachers. They make it hard to get rid of the bad teachers, they make it harder to implement performance-based pay scales (which, incidentally, only helps the marginal and bad educators and punishes the best teachers), and won’t stand for anything that might take funding away from the public schools even if that money then flows to better performing private schools in the form of vouchers. In that sense, they are much like the auto unions who oppose closing any manufacturing plants even when a company no longer needs the manufacturing capacity; the union protects jobs at the expense of the company which, ultimately, results in even more lost jobs when the company stumbles.

But, no, they aren’t the problem, either. Part of a problem that keeps schools from performing as well as they should, without a doubt, but not the basic problem that, unless it is successfully addressed, will keep failing schools from ever being meaningfully reformed.

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