The Dog Eats Its Tail: Oversized Classes, Overpopulated Prisons

One in thirty one.

As a public school teacher
I am quite familiar with this figure--it's a typical teacher to student
ratio in the classroom. But now that proportion has taken on new significance:
A report released on March 2nd by the Pew Center on
the States found that one in every thirty-one adults reside in the US
corrections system--now totaling some 7.3 million people.

That means roughly one student
per classroom in America will end up in prison, on parole, or on probation.

As New School Foundation board
member Lisa Fitzhugh notes in her January 19th Seattle Times
op-ed, states like Washington even determine how many prison cells to
build based on 4th grade reading scores and graduation rates.
So rest assured, if your 9-year-old stumbles over syntax or has trouble
sounding out the word "priorities," the state has readied the necessary
cellblock accommodations. Why flush money down the sinkhole of
reading improvement teachers when there are solitary confinement cells
to be built? As the Pew study reports,

"In the past
two decades, state general fund spending on corrections increased by
more than 300 percent, outpacing other essential government services
from education, to transportation and public assistance. Only Medicaid
spending has grown faster. Today, corrections imposes a national taxpayer
burden of $68 billion a year."

In Seattle, where I teach,
our politicians have magnified this absurdity by simultaneously proposing
two pieces of public policy:

1) Mayor Greg Nickels has proposed
the construction of a new municipal jail, projected to cost taxpayers
over $200 million.

2) Seattle's School Board
voted recently to close five schools and disrupt or discontinue eight
other programs.

If you like these policies
of planning prison construction based on elementary reading levels,
and of closing schools while opening jails, you might consider a couple
of other equally rewarding ventures: smashing holes in your boat and
investing in buckets to bail out the water, or, equally clever, slashing
holes in the tires of your car and subsequently investing in tire patches.

How do we end this illogical,
anti-hope scenario and reverse increases in prison spending?

After years of deregulation
and outlandish speculation that caused an implosion of the economy,
many politicians and corporate heads are venturing out of their boardrooms
to examine the rubble at "Main Street Middle School." Realizing
something must be done, they tout their education schemes as "school
reform"--including paying teachers according to culturally biased/curriculum
narrowing tests their students take, the breaking of teachers' unions,
and the privatization of education through charter schools.

But in an era when CEOs and
bankers sabotage the economy and then get to float to the ground on
golden parachutes worth tens of millions of dollars, it's unclear
how merit pay for teachers would be structured--in this new age, would
it mean that the more students who flunk the test, the bigger bonuses
teachers get?

Given the current free market
meltdown, they can't really believe that our public schools are better
off following the laissez-faire predisposition for privatized charter
schools run by CEOs.

A genuine first step on the
path to improving education should center on what teachers, students,
and parents have known for a long time: class size matters.

Unfortunately, this common
sense approach missed Mayor Bloomberg who was quoted in the New York
Times on February 22nd giving his explanation of how to improve education:
"It's the teacher looking a child in the eye, and teachers can
look lots of children in the eye," he added. "If you have
to have smaller class size or better teachers, go with the better teachers
every time."

I'll go for option C: The
skilled teacher with the smaller class.

Tennessee's Project STAR
(Student Teacher Achievement Ratio)--the most comprehensive class size
study ever conducted--showed students who had been randomly assigned
to smaller classes of 13 to 17 students in grades K-3 outperformed their
peers in regular classes of 22 to 25 students (and in regular classes
with an educational aide). Additionally, by eighth grade, those students
who had been placed in small classes through Project STAR were still
outperforming students who had been placed in regular classes or regular-plus-aide
classes in K-3.

While proven to help, lower
class sizes are not popular with the guardians of the bottom line because
training and hiring more teachers costs money. I should admit
I am not a trained economist like the financial intellectuals who managed
asset-backed securities at AIG. However, I feel qualified to assert
that unlike the purchase of collateralized debt obligations, spending
on our children is a sound investment--morally and financially.

The American Economic Review,
one of the longest running journals in the field, recently released
a study revealing that only "A one percent increase in the high
school completion rate of all men ages 20-60 would save the United States
as much as $1.4 billion per year in reduced costs from crime incurred
by victims and society at large."

Having missed this statistic,
states across the country are reacting to the financial crisis with
school closures and teacher layoffs. While some of the largest
districts have postponed massive layoffs for now, recently the Los Angeles
Unified Schools threatened 2,300 teachers with pink slips and New York
City Schools said they could lay off 15,000. The Seattle School
District is planning to terminate or disrupt 13 schools, and Chicago
is shuttering 16 of its own. Federal stimulus dollars for education
will help ease some of the cuts, but politicians--from governors to
local school officials--have promised closures and layoffs nonetheless.

Activists in Seattle, however,
are working on an alternative lesson plan for our city that may prove
to be a model for saving schools and halting jails.

Representatives from all the
schools slated for closure and other community members have formed ESP
Vision: Educators, Students and Parents for a Better Vision of the Seattle
Schools--rallying hundreds against the school closures, teaming up
with the local NAACP to help parents file over 200 grievances with Department
of Education, and assisting parents in a formal appeals process to block
the closures. Moreover, ESP Vision has teamed up with the Initiative-100
campaign that is attempting to block the building of a new city jail
by collecting the 23,000 signatures needed to put its construction to
a vote.

Mark Twain once said, "Every
time you stop a school, you will have to build a jail. What you gain
at one end you lose at the other. It's like feeding a dog on his own
tail. It won't fatten the dog." While Twain leaves us with a
distasteful image, far more repugnant is a social order that invests
in metal bars rather than in cultivating our children's talents.