CURMUDGUCATION: Rewarding Failing Schools

CURMUDGUCATION: Rewarding Failing Schools

Rewarding Failing Schools

One of the problems with the business oriented view of education reveals itself in the use of the word "reward."

As long as the debate has raged, we can find commentators, thinky tanks, and policy makers arguing that giving more resources to struggling schools is "rewarding" them for failure. (Here's an example, and here's another.) For many folks, this seems simple and straightforward, but it's really not.

Imagine two small children. Pat is growing up in a poor home and not receiving the kind of food necessary to thrive. Chris is growing up in a wealthy home and gets all the food and nutrition necessary to do well. Chris is big and strong, well at the top of the charts for growth. Pat is thin and emaciated, near the bottom of the chart for growth.

Let's imagine a government program for distributing food to families of young children. Who would like to argue that Pat should not get any of this food because it would just be rewarding Pat for failing to grow big and strong?

For some folks, it seems impossible to view money as anything other than revenue. In business, money is your reward for doing a good job. That's the whole point.

But (at the risk of repeating myself) public schools are not businesses. They do not generate revenue. They do not produce a profit. And money is not a reward; it's a resource.

This idea hurts some people's heads. Health care and public education have always treated money mainly as a resource, something you spend in order to take care of people. Yes, there have been plenty of money-related arguments in public education, but they are virtually all (including teacher CONTINUE READING: CURMUDGUCATION: Rewarding Failing Schools