Why Public Schools Don't Change

Michael Maloney

As behaviorists, it is interesting to map out the contingencies that operate currently in the public education arena and to then determine how these contingencies maintain the status quo. It is equally interesting to see what changes would be necessary to promote observable behavioral changes in public schools.

Historically, and especially in this century, public schools have received broad financial support from their communities, from state and provincial governments and even from the Feds, whose role in education has always been something of a default position. That support increasingly has allowed public school teachers and administrators better salaries, more benefits, larger pensions and other perks, irrespective of their performance. Teachers dismissed for lack of performance are rarer than woolly mammoths. Successful teachers, who add significant skills to the repetoires of their students, are not given any additional reward for having done so. Few merit systems exist and many that do are fatally flawed. In some cases, merit systems operate at a school or district level. Performance bonuses are equally distributed between effective and noneffective teachers and support staff of a better performing school, rewarding competence and incompetence indiscriminately.

Unlike some endeavors, professional sales or small service companies for example, teaching has no necessary correlation between performance and reward. Unlike salesmen, teachers don't 'eat what they kill,' they just show up when the dinner bell rings.

The system's failure to differentiate high performance teachers from those waiting for a pension is partially due to the flawed data sources which pass as measurement in public education. Unit tests, exams, and standardized tests consistently fail to determine with any exactitude, in any reasonable period of time, when any particular student behavior changed from non-functional to functional or fluent levels of performance. This consistent and continual blurring of the easily measured differences in specific learning by individual students allows the entire profession to escape accountability for teaching. It provides and promotes a set of elastic standards.

But changes are in the wind. Discontent roams the land. Other options to public education systems, where funds are not tied to the district but to each student, are gradually evolving and expanding. Choice is becoming a factor. An increasing number of parents are foresaking public education altogether and teaching their children at home. Charter schools, which have clearer performance targets written into their charters to ensure more direct accountability, are springing up like mushrooms. Vouchers to support individual students are available in some states and may soon become more widely available as politicians respond to parent pressure for more influence over their schools. Religious and private schools are chock-full, further draining students from public schools and further reducing the funds that these schools have traditionally been awarded as part of their body count. The contingencies are changing.

Public schools now face the challenge of parents who can vote with their feet in such sufficient numbers that they can impact the school's budget and threaten staff tenure. Fewer students mean fewer staff and/or larger classes.

Sadly, the changes occurring as a result of reduced finances, due to fewer students, are not implemented on the basis of merit but rather on the basis of longevity. Unions see to it that old, useless teachers stay while new, energetic, and perhaps even effectively trained rookies are sacrificed. This culling is one of the few bottom-up phenomena of current public education. There are proportionally fewer directors and superintendents who get caught in the cutbacks than teachers and aides. Management sees to that. As a result, more dissatisfaction is created at the school level when parents see the effects of the most recent rounds of cuts.

Public education is under threat. The threat is real. It will only be resolved when public educators:

• replace teacher attendance with teacher performance,
• replace 'evaluation' with measurement,
• replace promotion based on seniority with promotion based on repeated measures of student success,
• replace job security based on longevity with job security based on student learning.

It all starts with measuring observable behaviors of administrators, teachers, and students on a daily or more frequent basis to determine which educators are effectively delivering skills to students. Maybe we, as behaviorists, could be of some help to devise and implement observable metrics. Ogden Lindsley, his students and colleagues, have certainly provided us the tools to begin measuring such performances specifically, accurately, quickly and as frequently as needed. The empirically proven tools have existed for decades but remain largely unused. Maybe someone will ask us to help. But then, if we analyze past behavior of public schools as an indicator, probably they won't. They are not yet finished arranging the deck chairs.

Perhaps we will have more success shaping the behaviors of their evolutionary replacements.

Michael Maloney is a teacher, principal, best selling author, and award winning software producer. In the last 25 years, he has created behaviorally-based private schools and learning centres. He was recently awarded the 2001 Canada Post National Literacy Award (Educator). Teach Your Children Well Inc.,

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