It is election day today, and I've never felt less like voting. The election in my district is mainly about public schools. The public schools are more broken than I had realized and none of the choices offered to me seem likely to help.
Two of the ballot issues are financial questions. The worst: Shall the school district issue bonds to pay for deferred maintenance? No! They should not commit future taxes to pay for interest on costs which should never have been deferred! But what are the current alternatives? Defeat the referendum and let the buildings decay further? Or support the bonding and encourage inexcusable fiscal management?
Some of the seats on the school board are also being filled. Shall I vote for the incumbents, who got us into this mess? Or shall I vote for the one newcomer whose generalities are perfectly fine but who, in particular, supports experimenting with gender discrimination in the classroom? (On her website, she also supports the referenda and explains away the past mismanagment.)
On Monday afternoons, I volunteer with homework help for elementary and middle school students. Recently, I've been asked to help mostly with mathematics homework. (This is nice, because I like math and like to explain how it works.) The homework assignments consist almost universally of worksheets published by the textbook publisher. The worksheets are reasonable in content and acceptable in format -- I mean that they don't detract greatly from learning mathematics and in many cases support learning the basic concepts. But there is no creativity on the part of the teachers in handing out the publisher's worksheets.
Recently I read an article in Science magazine reporting a study of the effects of involving high school science teachers in science research. The conclusion, as I interpret it, is that participation of motivated teachers in a program of professional support translates (through a mechanism not yet elucidated) into a small but statistically significant improvement in the standardized test scores of students whose parents are more likely than average to expect college attendance. Establishing that such a relationship is real, and not either imaginary or an artifact of the process, is an essential step in developing a science of education. That we are still at such an elementary stage is disheartening.
Perhaps this experience is an opportunity for me to empathize with those (self-defined) "conservatives" who have felt alienated from public education for several generations. I doubt, however, that feeling empathy for other disaffected individuals does any more to improve the schools than will voting for fiscal mismanagement.