Recently, someone tweeted to me, “I have lots of faith in teachers to implement learning properly. I have less faith in schools and admins to set the proper goals and resource appropriately.”
We are in an era of decreasing trust of teachers and schools. Of course, we are in an era of increasing distrust of all institutions, so this shouldn’t be so shocking. And while trust in teachers remains quite high, is has declined a little bit in recent years. Teachers now trail only nurses and medical doctors, but they used to rank higher. (They are still far ahead of police officers, judges and bankers. Local office holders and members of congress are net a little and very much distrusted, respectively.)
Nonetheless, it is quite striking that someone would distrust schools and administrators to “set the proper goals and resource appropriately.” These simply are not the jobs of teachers or school administrators.
Educational goals are laid out in state learning standards. These state standards are developed by educational professionals, researchers and policy-makers, and then customized for various states. Finally, these customized standards are ratified and endorsed by state legislatures. For example, Florida customized the Common Core State standards and the Next Generation Science Standards and calls them standards The Sunshine State Standards.
Educational goals are not set by individual teachers, individual schools, districts or their administrators. Educational goals are set by state legislators.
Educational resources are similarly out of the hands of schools and educational administrators. States are the primary determiner of educational resources — again, through acts of state legislatures. Local municipalities also contribute to educational resources through local government budgets. Again, it is local elected officials who make these decisions. In some areas, the school district has the authority to levy taxes, instead of the general local government. But this is done through elected school boards. In none of these cases are schools or administrators responsible for these decisions. In all of these cases, it is elected officials.
Of course, the federal government contributes ~10% of school resources,. Here, it is Congress that decides. Again, elected officials.
To be fair to all of those legislative bodies, their acts usually have to be signed by an executive. Thus, it is not the legislatures alone who do set standards or set resource levels. But they are all elected officials.
Now, where I live, we actually vote on he town budget every year. My local town government does not have the power to set budgets. Rather, it’s elected officials puts together a budget for the citizens of the town to vote on. Occasionally, a town budget somewhere does not pass, and the town government must put forth a new proposal for citizens to vote on. This American Life recently did a piece on a a contentious effort of citizens to radically alter a school budget. But no where in any of this do schools or school administrators sets budgets.
It is incredible that people distrust teachers and administrators to do things that they’ve not be responsible for in generations.