Teachers have forgotten that they’re in the customer service business. In fact, they’ve forgotten they have customers that just happened to have outsourced their responsibility to teach their kids to others. Now, they may well be taking that responsibility back because of bad customer service.
They’ve already proven, at the union level, that they hate competition from other kinds of education models. What they are forgetting is that they don’t get to make the final choice. The Government model that they’ve been operating in for decades has insulated them from one very important factoid – in the end, they don’t have the last word. Parents do.
And yes, homeschooling has already proven that parents DO care more about their children than the teaching industry harrumphs about all the time (heard it again at this last Tuesday’s School Board meeting). And because parents DO care more, they are making sure that their kids are getting a good education and measurably better than the monopolists are churning out (again, go look around the nation and review the NEAP scores from the large urban area cities – or States, for that matter).
Anyways, the BlogQuestion came along with the following that is worthwhile to read for context (emphasis mine):
If you have school-age children, you may be wondering if they’ll ever get an education. On Tuesday the American Federation of Teachers, the second-largest education union, threatened “safety strikes” if reopening plans aren’t to its liking. Some state and local governments are insisting that public K-12 schooling this fall be conducted online three to five days a week and imposing stringent conditions on those students who actually make it to the classroom.
One of the models that our School Board elected representatives was a hybrid model in which far fewer students would ever be in a classroom, others in Remote Learning, and a continual rotating in and out of each. It wasn’t taken too well.
Yet there are three reasons to be optimistic about the future of education. First, many parents will be more prepared to home-school their kids than they were in the spring. They or their hired teachers will do a better job of educating children, in many cases, than the public schools.
The latter part will be true – Parents are invested in their kids. Directly hired teachers will be VERY cognizant of providing excellent customer service. And for the teachers out there that are already shaking their heads at the idea of being customer service representatives in addition to being educators, well, learn to code.
Second, once the pandemic ends, many parents, perhaps millions, will have a new appreciation of how mediocre a job the public schools were doing. They will continue home-schooling, switch to a private school, or push hard to end restrictions on the growth of charter schools. Third, as schools sit empty and homebound teachers draw their regular salaries for less effective work, there will be more opposition to more funding for public schools, which, in turn, will make local school boards amenable to lower-cost options such as charter schools. . . .
The idea of some enterprising and entrepreneurial teachers deciding to hang out their shingles and starting one-room or specialty schools ought to be scaring the bejesus out of other teachers. Note to same – your union won’t be able to protect you until THEY get “customer service” outlook instead of the monopolist one they now posses.
Public schools are dominant because they don’t need to compete for funds. Taxpayers are forced to finance them. If a family decides to take a child out of the local public school, thereby saving the school board the cost of educating that child, the family gets no tax break, no rebate. If a family finds a cheap private school that charges $8,000 in annual tuition, sending the child there makes economic sense only if the family values the private education by at least $8,000 more than they value the public education. That’s a high hurdle for most parents.
But with public schools’ shift to online instruction, the equation changes dramatically for two reasons. First, the public schools have done a poor job of adjusting to the new reality. Second, and possibly more important, online instruction eliminates arguably the most valuable service provided by public schools: child care. On net, therefore, the value of the online public school is much lower, especially for young children, than the value of in-person public school.
That bit of child care is very carefully swept under the nearest possible rug – by both parents and the Educational-Industrial complex. I dare say there are a LOT of schools that really are just day care centers.
Oh Wait! NYC Mayor de Blasio said that the schools won’t open due to the WuFlu – but that they could be day care centers for additional fees. Self-acknowledging, I guess.
Many will opt instead to home-school. This summer, parents have had time to plan for the fall. Many of them are forming “learning pods,” which are small groups of families getting together to hire a teacher or a tutor to teach their kids.
In the days before the German warehouse model of education was brought onto our shores, these were called “one room schoolhouses”. Just like in the “Dark Ages” of computing when “the Cloud” was called “time-sharing”. Same thing, different name.
What if, as I predict, home-schooling works, on average, better than the public schools before the pandemic? Once the pandemic ends, many parents will want to continue with home-schooling. A poll taken in May of 626 parents found 40.8% of them saying they were more likely than before the pandemic to enroll their child in “a home school, a neighborhood home-school co-op, or a virtual school” once the lockdowns ended.
There are now about 56 million children in K-12 schools. Before the pandemic, an estimated two million children were home-schooled. If even a third of the 40.8% of parents who said they might take it up followed through, the number of home-schooled children would almost quadruple.
Small sample size but even here in NH, the Dept of Education is indicating a rise in those filing intents to homeschool. We have a “homeschooling cooperative” nearby – I may drop in to see how it is working out. And here is the crux of the “Edu-monopolists don’t even wish to look at:
Even many who don’t home-school will push for an expansion of charter schools, which tend to be responsive to parents and can more easily fire poor teachers.
Customer service is Queen (given that most educators are female) in almost all other areas of our lives. Often, the product or service is just “extra” – those companies that put customer service above all else are generally those doing well above average.
It’s a mind set that teacher unions find both absolutely foreign and abhorrent at the same time, so it seem.
(H/T: Instapundit)
