“Does anybody here know how to play this game?”
The late Casey Stengel, venerable manager of the New York Yankees in the 1950s and early 60’s, is alleged to have fired this famous query at his reserve players seated in the dugout during a rout by an opposing team.
Casey’s frustration with having talented ballplayers not playing up to professional expectations is mirrored in the recent trends in public education.
“Does anybody here know how to play this game?” is the battle cry of elite Department of Education bureaucrats who apparently are becoming increasingly frustrated by classroom teachers’ lack of performance?
What is more, the sensational revelations of recent years about public education almost obscure a larger point: the bloated bureaucratic government agency is just no good at what it’s supposed to be doing.
In other words, government officials have about as much chance of revamping the public school system as the Justice Department has of reinventing useless and redundant legal procedures and streamlining the deteriorating court system.
Reforms in the educational system, according to some critics, are impossible—largely because of the innate bureaucratic bloat that exists at all levels. As a result, young teachers are resigning in droves across the country. The rate of attrition apparently is sufficient to cause a teacher shortage in many states already.
At the same time, public school administrators try, though often in futility, to assuage the invisible DOE “experts” by contriving evidence that all children are progressing at the same rate toward an academic goal—which, in the eyes of many classroom teachers, is one of educational mediocrity.
But senior administrators know the truth.
Discretely asking why so many good young teachers are leaving the classroom would appear to be out of the question. After all, that would be tantamount to committing professional suicide.
Better to keep a poker face if you are an administrator eager for a promotion to an executive job in a county or state board of education office—a place where you likely will never have to deal with children again, ever.
Anyone who sees the public education system as a charade—perpetuated by a cast of professionally undistinguished if not dysfunctional players, those hiding in air-cooled offices far away from students and classrooms—would best serve their position by helping to peel away the layers of the state department’s elite management mystique.
One thing is bound to surface: the visible discrepancy between the educational bureaucrats’ academic reputations and their talents.
Sterling exceptions aside, the average senior department head at the state level rose to his office through the hierarchy without ever learning much about the profession in which he serves.
Therefore, current educational reform needs to start at the top—not at the bottom, where teachers are trying to do the best job possible with what they must work with.
Many retiring teachers are not replaced. Other teachers are rift by a system of bean counters whose main objective is simply to cut costs.
As a result, classroom numbers continue to grow. The student to teacher ratio now is more like 30 to 1, instead of the often publicized 15 to 1 that includes administrators, counselors, athletic directors, librarians, and board of education personnel.
The public school system, meanwhile, is a sick institution that likely will continue to flounder in a quagmire of confusion and disorientation until high-salaried executives are cut from the public payrolls.
The school system is not going to get well overnight, especially with the measures regularly offered up by a bureaucracy desperate to save itself at all costs.
About the only real triumph of current educational reforms is the acceleration of declining standards for students and teachers, causing a corrosive atmosphere of learning.
Ironically, public education has now sunk to its lowest ebb—a bureaucratic “liars paradise,” where aggressive self-promoting administrators, coordinators and supervisors strive to get to the next level of their profession—away from students and out of the classroom.
And because a multitude of teachers already have given up on reform, the resounding academic question from state department heads, as they witness their integrity and competency gradually being eroded by reality, is the old Casey Stengel feeler in the dugout: “Does anybody here know how to play this game?”
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Top o’ the morning!