American High Schools

When you talk about "American High Schools," you've got to generalize. A city like New York has more high schools than many countries, and some are among the finest high schools you'll find anywhere. Regrettably, these schools don't define our high school system as a whole.

So what's wrong with our average high school. They don't teach much math (based on test scores) and they suffer from high drop out rates. Should you have the opportunity to make an unannounced visit, you'll often find the classroom environment non conducive to learning.

There's really not much to chuckle about other than the irony of NYC having a mayor who made improving the educational levels in the city as one of his prime objectives. This was to be the jewel in the crown of the legacy he had hoped to establish. Oh, well . . . . . . . .

It was a worthy goal. However, I suspect he came to office not really knowing all that much about education. Business was his background. And, there, no one can question his expertise. But the business paradigm doesn't quite work in education. And, perhaps the main reason for this is one that escaped the good mayor; namely, there's no way to quality control the kids coming into the school.

If you make a toaster (something GE knows something about), you give your sheet metal supplier the specs you expect him to meet on the stuff he ships to your factory. If the chromed metal comes in off spec you reject it. You can't do that with kids. Some minds work faster than others. Some minds have been preconditioned for learning, whereas others have been woefully deprived of positive conditioning. If the mayor understood this, he has given no indication of it to his subjects.

His first target seemed to be the UFT. And, there is indeed logic to that. It's the membership of the UFT that we find on the front lines. It's the teachers who work with the kids in the classroom. Few appreciate exactly how demanding a teacher's work can be; or, how rewarding. The question, of course, is how responsive the UFT is to the needs of its own members. (If this question shocks you, think: teamsters, or dock workers.) True, the UFT did raise teachers from what now, as we look back, appears to have been a condition of servitude. But, that's far behind us.

And, while pay and and retirement benefits now seem ample, working conditions are often arguably worse. Benefits too have declined. New hires, for example, get less in their retirement than the old timers.

But, it's not the economic benefits of teaching that I want to focus on, but rather on what they face in the class room. They generally have 30 students in a class and they're expected to teach five classes a day. That's 150 students they've got to work with. One hundred and fifty names they'd better get to know within perhaps five days. You need stamina and good kidneys.

People who aren't teachers don't generally realize that stuffing information into the heads of their pupils, also known as "transferring content," is just one thing the teacher is expected to be good at. There is also the very important ability to achieve good "classroom management," which can also be described as keeping order among the inmates. It's a bit like being in the circus and putting the tigers through their paces. That last simile might seem a bit over the top, but keep in mind that the students are studying the teacher for any possible weakness or shortcoming to be exploited on a suitable occasion.

A new teacher doesn't enter his or her classroom on their first day with a full command of all the skills needed to do a good job. The same could be said of a soldier not yet tested by battle, or a salesman on his first day in the field. (There used to be something called "student teaching," but that seems to have been chucked a long time ago.) And, yet, that's what schools expect of their "green" teachers; namely, skills that often take more than a year to really learn well.

Now, if you have any sort of understanding of what's called for in a teacher, you can begin to understand how much more is needed in a principal. And, yet, under the guidance of our mayor, people are made principals who haven't taught a day in their life. They tend to be young people who have gone through his Leadership Academy. With what they've picked up there, they are now put in a position of overseeing teachers doing difficult things that they themselves have never experienced. One can only pity the teachers working under such inexperienced managers.

Teachers colleges aren't much help either. The get grants for innovating "new techniques," such as heterogeneous grouping. (That may no longer be a new technique. But whether new, or slightly used, it's still nonsense.) In the first grade, putting slow students with fast learners will create no great problems. But try teaching algebra to 30 students, where 10 are over-achievers and 20 really don't want to be in school. Here you can only pity the poor teacher.

The failure of teaching colleges is a subject unto itself. Let's return to the main problem facing many high schools; namely, the student, or, more precisely, our attitude toward the student population. If we were to put our students into various categories and attempt to put them in schools where the curriculum and the teaching staff focused on the need of that category, we'd be doing more for the students than seems to be possible under our current system. But we can't do that. It's not possible. It's called "tracking" and it's politically incorrect.

Thank goodness that, in medicine, antibiotics haven't been declared politically incorrect. Were that to happen, we'd be back to bleeding patients.

Healtcare in America

Chuckle, because that's all you can really do when you listen to talking heads or politicians explain how the government will finally fix healthcare in America. Chuckle as you begin to see that they haven't got a clue.

When you express your doubts, they come back with something as inane as "do you want to give up your social security? Huh, do you?" Or, "do you want to do without your Medicare? Huh, do you?" Such is the level of discourse amoung our politicians and their flackes.

Anyone with a high school education can figure out that social security, medicare, and some kind of proposed healthcare system, all have one thing in common: they're forms of insurance. But, they are very, very different kinds of insurance with very different insurance problems.

Social security is the easiest kind of insurance. It's an annuity. You pay in so much until you reach a set age. Then you get an annuity. That's it. So why, if it's so simple, isn't it handled by private companies? Good question, but one with an equally simple answer. Early in their lives most people don't see the need to put away for their golden years. Then when they hit those golden years, they suddenly discover they have nothing to live on.

The government decided to do something about that. They decided to do what no private insurer could do. They decided to reach into our pockets and extract the premiums needed to pay for our future annuity. Paternalism? Sure. But, most of us now agree that it was a good thing.

Medicare, and healthcare insurance in general, is a far more complicated matter. Social security is essentially based on actuarial information as to when we are going to die. When it was first set up, most people died at 65. If you died before that, you got nothing. What you had paid into social security went to the annuities of those who outlived you.

With medical insurance, things are a lot more complicated. First, costs vary all over the lot. And, those costs can come at any time, although most do hit people in their last years. Cost control? Forget about it. It's a good idea, but Congress doesn't have the vaguest idea as to how to achieve it.

One fascinating point: Healthcare in some places in our 50 states is 50% less expensive than in other places. (You can check this fact in studies done by the Dartmouth School of Medicine.) But, what's really amazing is that the outcomes in the less expensive locations are not only equal to the more expensive places; they're generally better. One more thing to consider: the suckers in low-cost places like Rochester, MN, and Salt Lake City, UT are actually subsidizing Medicare for New Yorkers. But they don't mind. They get better care.

There is something else; namely, how we live does factor into our health costs. Eat too much, drink too much, smoke a pack a day, and develop a taste for recreational drugs and the care you will come to require will skyrocket. I hate to sound like an ogre, but why should I pay for the diabetes treatment of people addicted to cheeseburgers, or people who loose their livers to liquor, or who develop goodness knows how many illnesses from smoking? Is Congress giving any thought as to how to protect my standard of living from these idiots? I doubt it.

All insurance businesses can run into rough patches. The problem Congress faced with social security was that people were living longer. That cost the government's insurance business big time. But the solution wasn't that hard to find. Make people work beyond age 65, give them a small annuity, or make them pay a higher premium. In the end, they decided to make them work a bit longer. Congress, being Congress, diddled about this a long time before they came to the obvious conclusion. But Congress can afford to diddle. If the problem gets serious, they can simply print more money. Let's see a private insurer do that.

Healthcare is different. Here costs are entirely out of control. Private insurers are against the wall. You can try to squeeze the pharmaceutical companies, but there's only so much that can be squeezed. Put in a federal insurer and the private insurers will be out of business. Congress claims they don't want to do that. They want competition. Really? For a vibrant economy, economists claim the best thing is free trade. But with health insurance, the companies can't even cross state lines. (Is there some kind of special Mann Act for health care insurers?)

You don't need a crystal ball to see how this will end, if a federal health plan is instituted. And, it won't be government's insurance business that will fail. They have a time-tested safety device. It's called the printing press.