Public Education

We have looked at the ‘glory Paraducers’, those at the top of the food chain. But there are Paraducers all down the line. Most of these Paraducers are so interwoven with Producers and Consumers that it is difficult to separate them without tweezers. Take public education for example.

Some of the most inspiring Producers I have met have been teachers, mainly in college, but some in public school. These people produced in me a desire for learning and knowledge and achievement that has served me well to this day.

Now these teachers work within a larger system that enrolls the students, builds the classrooms, pays the bills, and cleans the toilets. This system is the school administration, from the principal up to the superintendent and school board.

Of all the teachers I have spoken with about school administration, I have rarely heard a positive word. This is unfortunate. My negative impression of public education comes partly from my 12 years in the system, but the rest comes from the comments of many teachers I have known. Their descriptions of administrators convey that those in charge are out of touch with the needs of teachers and students. They are lax regarding discipline, insensitive to the material needs of the classroom, and they place too many time demands on teachers.

Our public education system is flagging, with students doing worse than their parents did in the same grade. My evaluation of the current average high school student is: Pathetic. The leftward slide of the bell curve that we discussed previously is very pronounced in our students. There has to be some Paraducerism at work here, and we find it in school administration.

Work. That’s what it takes to be a Producer. Depending on what you are producing, it takes years of hard work. If you are educating a child, it takes about a dozen years to prepare that person for a job as a convenience store clerk. All the while, society and even parents are working against the Producer-teacher, making the job even more difficult.

My belief is that among the administrators in public schooling we have a large proportion of Paraducers, people who are not terribly interested in results (as a Producer would be), people who are not interested in doing the work required to deliver excellent education. They dump that responsibility on the teachers, along with the requirement for results and excellence, and they get the credit when teachers manage to deliver.

Teachers alone cannot do the whole job. They need a support system that shares the highest values of education and performance. They need leaders who lead not only the teachers, but the students, in deed and in spirit. This is not happening.

The Paraducer administrators are interested in the appearance of success, not real success. For example, take the grade inflation.

The college grading scale has a maximum grade point average of 4.0. Not 4.1, or 4.2, or 4.00001, but 4.0. Do you know that it is possible for a high school student to earn a grade point average higher than 4.0? When students I know tell me that they have an average greater than 4.0, I just roll my eyes!

That’s the same as me handing you a dollar and saying that it’s really worth $1.50. But when you go to spend it in the real world, you find that it’s only worth a dollar after all. It’s a cheat.

A 4.1 grade point average is good, I suppose, but how good? What’s the reference?

The key is that the Paraducers consciously or subconsciously despise references or standards of performance, because they despise being evaluated. Producers perform. Paraducers mediate and shuffle paper and spreadsheets between parties, especially in education. The indeterminate grading scale makes Paraducers feel good about themselves.

I have a friend who taught for many years at a public college. Over the years, the quality of incoming students declined, as emitted by the public school system. One class he taught was populated by students who were not interested and would not learn the material, so a large number of them ended the course with a failing grade.

One student complained to the administrators, and the professor was called on the carpet. He was told that these students could not have all failed. The professor’s defense was ignored and he was ordered to ‘reevaluate’ the grades. So he did that, increasing some grades by a letter in the least pitiful cases.

The administrator was not satisfied. Calling out the professor once again, he said that such a failing proportion of students was unacceptable, the implication being that failing students do not enroll for the next semester.

My professor friend arbitrarily assigned A’s and B’s to each student, and the Paraducer administrator was appeased. He was then enabled to shuffle some paper to higher level administrative Paraducers that enrollment rates for next semester would be improving.

Grade inflation has been reported on by the US Department of Education ^[21]. They found that grades vary wildly between schools, with schools attended by poorer students receiving higher grades. The 1994 report also disclosed the fact that a C is not the middle of the bell curve any more. The preponderance of grades are B’s. What better way to make a happy parent than sending home a rack of B’s on each report card? Perhaps we can realize Garrison Keillor’s vision of Lake Wobegone after all, where each child is above average.

As another example of educational Paraducerism, let’s look at the Ritalin quandary.

When administrators receive complaints from teachers about problem students, often a parent-teacher conference is called and the parent is gently guided toward a chemical solution. Drugging a child to reduce outbursts and bad behavior is an easy fix. Working with the child and parent to determine the root of the problem is a difficult road, and one no Paraducer will choose.

I’m not interested in over-diagnosis of ADHD, or overuse of Ritalin. The point here is that Paraducers will take the easiest path toward a problem solution that relieves the symptoms, while leaving the base problem intact and active. If aspirin would shut these kids up, they would be handing out aspirin, regardless the diagnosis.

And when the parents are also societal Paraducers, the ‘solution’ proposed by the educational Paraducers makes perfect sense to them. The result is that we have an entire generation of chemical dependent children being told they are A students when real life would give them a D, whose parents are incapable of solving a difficult problem, and who have few Producer models for their future careers. This breeds more Consumers and Paraducers.