Speech House Education Committee

Speech To House Education Committee

By Alex Saitta

February 12, 2019

Listening To The Wrong People:

My name is Alex Saitta and I served on the Pickens County School Board from 2004 to 2016.

In our state, we have long relied on education leaders to come up with new initiatives to solve the problem of poor academic performance. Despite a million new initiatives and spending billions more, there has been little improvement.

I think it is clear by now, we are asking the wrong people for solutions. Education leaders are academics and see the world through an academic prism. They see academic problems and provide academic solutions. Unfortunately, the problems we face in our schools are not academic in nature.

You ask a surgeon what to do, 9 of 10 times he’ll say operate. If you ask a district office administrator, he’ll give you an academic remedy like another reading program, new assessments, additional teacher training or a technology upgrade.

Add in the group think that prevails in the system, the way the chain of command is rigidly enforced, and 5-year plans that rival the old Soviet Union, few leaders see beyond what they know or are comfortable with

Real Problems:

Instead of talking to those at the top, I would pick a 100 teachers randomly. They will tell you what the problems are:

First problem is, teachers become teachers because they want to go into a classroom and freely teach children as they see fit. Unfortunately, that freedom is being grinned out of the classroom by top-down bureaucrats who haven’t taught in a decade or two. They tell teachers what to teach, when to teach it, how to teach it and how long to teach it. And teachers are observed, evaluated and have to report on it every inch along the way to make sure they are doing it all to the letter.

It is not surprising new teachers are not hanging in, and old teachers are jumping for early retirement.

This is not an academic problem, but a management problem.

You can pay teachers more money to tolerate all this or you could fix that problem.

Two, a lack of discipline — too many students do not follow instruction, are disregarding the rules, disrespecting teachers and bullying other students.

Students need structure, boundaries and consequences.

Teachers and administrators are now afraid to discipline students because they fear ending up on the 6 o’clock news.

This too is not an academic problem. It is a psychological problem — the students’ sense of right, wrong and what is appropriate is faulty.

It is also a social problem -- mainly how students behave amongst themselves and how they treat school staff.

Three, more students are now struggling with social, psychological and emotional issues.

If a second grader is not reading at grade level, it is not because we need another new reading initiative. Likely, the parent doesn’t read at home with the child. That is a social problem or a problem with the relationship between the child and the parent.

If Janie is coming in everyday crying her eyes out because mommy is on meth, daddy is MIA and she is being bumped from DDS to Grandma’s to Aunt Louise’s, installing new Pro-Boards isn’t going to help. It is not an academic problem either, but an emotional one.

My children go to public schools and they say 40% of the kids don’t try. They simply don’t value getting an education. The problem is in their thinking or values. That is a psychological problem. Not an academic problem, which education leaders simply do not see or fully understand.

It is like Mr. Jones has been schooled-in, trained-in, and has held a hammer in his hand for 25 years. Guess what? Everything Mr. Jones sees looks like a nail to him.

Accountability:

Fourth, restoring integrity to the system and accountability also needs to be a focus.

On the SC Ready only 42% of students in the state read at grade level. In math only 45% are at grade level. Yet more than 80% walk across the stage at graduation. So according to their own figures, a ton of students are just being pushed through the system.

You also saw that with Read to Succeed, the program that was going to leave-back all third graders not reading at grade level. In South Carolina, 45% of the 3^rd graders read at grade level. They left back about 2% this past year. This is another management problem, not an academic one.

Financial Problem:

Five, a lack of educational focus is another major problem. Only a little more than 50 cents of every dollar spent makes it to the classroom.

I have been in meetings were the administration argued just as hard for an 18^th activity bus as it did for hiring another teacher.

Failing to set and enforce spending priorities is a financial management problem, not an academic problem.

Incentive/ Tax Credits:

Instead of creating more rules to get the system to do this or that, find ways to inject incentives that will bring about the results you want.

For example, I would expand the tax credit school choice program from special ed to any student who tests on SC Ready more than one grade level behind in reading or math. This will result in two things. One, private schools that focus on teaching reading and math will start to crop up.

Two, this will incentivize the entire traditional public school system to focus on basic reading and math. From the principal all the way down to the custodian who knows he might lose his a job if the school loses some students.

Our system suffers from decades of mission creep. This will narrow the focus.

You would not have to legislate anything more than that to get that result. The system will self-mobilize itself to take care of the rest for you.