America’s public schools suck. I say this because in general, it’s true. There are exceptions, and there are people who are dedicated to changing this sorry state of affairs. I’m not going to repeat the voluminous evidence that the public schools in the USA are bad. If you want the numbers they are out there if you want some sad reading. However, I do have suggestions for fixing them.

I also realize that any fool can make suggestions so I suppose I should say something about my qualifications. I’ve taught chemistry courses at the undergraduate and graduate college level at Georgetown University in Washington, D.C. and at Jacobs University in Germany. I taught a couple of semesters of general science at the undergraduate level at the Art Institute of Washington. I’ve also been a substitute teacher in public schools and I taught a year of eighth-grade science in a large public school system a year or two ago. My first teaching experience was in the late 1970s at the University of California, Irvine, conducting recitation sections for freshman chemistry, and as a teaching assistant in the laboratories there as part of my Ph.D. training. My teaching experience has extended over decades. Most of that time I was also doing research, writing papers, keeping up with current developments in chemistry, and learning about the philosophy of science.

After one of my teaching and research jobs ended I decided I wanted to try teaching in the public schools. I figured I wouldn’t be terrible at teaching since I’d been doing it for such a long time. But I couldn’t just walk into middle school and start teaching. First I had to take classes in education at a respected university. These were classes that would have led to a Master’s degree in education if I had wanted to take enough of them to add some more letters after my name. Out of the five classes I got four A’s and one A-minus. They were good classes with a lot of information. Someone once asked me what I thought of the difference between graduate school in chemistry and law school, since I’ve been through both. My answer would also apply to the difference between chemistry graduate school and the graduate education courses I took, namely that in both education and law the basic concepts were usually easy to grasp but there were a lot of them to learn. In chemistry and physical science generally, there are fewer concepts but they are more abstract and more difficult to comprehend.

I learned a lot teaching middle school. Not so much about teaching per se, since I’d been doing that for years, but about how the public school system compares to the university. In college the students are responsible for themselves. The important qualities for a teacher in college are that the teacher knows as much as possible about the subject and can express that to the students. Most universities don’t care if the student shows up for classes as long as the student learns the material well enough to pass the tests. In public schools this is turned nearly on its head. One of the most important things in a public school is that the students show up for class. The teachers are responsible for maintaining order, and the teachers are in loco parentis, acting as parents of the children. Teachers typically have a Master’s degree in education but only a Bachelor’s degree in the subject they are responsible for teaching.

I had a great experience with many students who were excited about learning science. I met plenty of good teachers, capable, dedicated men and women who want the kids to learn. I also saw a science teacher who had a misconception about the simplest methods of scientific measurement, and a reading teacher who used poor grammar when writing on the board. All of them did, however, know how to get the kids to work in groups. Getting the kids to work in groups was also emphasized in some of the training I had to take before becoming a middle-school teacher. Working in groups, the theory goes, allows the stronger students to help the weaker students. This is important in classes of thirty to forty students, a size that was typical of required classes such as science, because in that size class it is impossible for the teacher to interact meaningfully with students on an individual level to the extent necessary to actually teach them. Never mind that having a somewhat better student teach your kid is not what most parents think they are getting for their education taxes. But as long as it doesn’t happen too often, it’s usually not a bad thing.

Except that sometimes it is a bad thing. I had students who insisted on working in a group even when I preferred to have students work on their own on certain things. By the end of the year I had a suspicion that the reason was, these eighth-grade students were not able to read very well, and working in a group allowed them to get someone else to do the reading and writing for them. They were very good at hiding their deficiency. There is no excuse for an otherwise normal student to be in eighth grade yet unable to read and write at a fourth-grade level. No excuse, except perhaps the class sizes are so large these students fall through the cracks.

Then there are those who think the only cure needed is that teacher’s tenure should be abolished for public schools. Tenure allows teachers to remain in their jobs practically regardless of what the school administrators think of them. Tenure, although maybe not ideal, is a good way to prevent bad administrators from firing perfectly good teachers for political or financial reasons. The institution of tenure was started to correct problems. Getting rid of tenure will simply re-introduce those problems: for example, the firing of good, expensive teachers to be able to hire newer, cheaper teachers, just to save money. True, it may also allow bad teachers to continue drawing salaries, but the way to stop that is to ensure teachers are good to begin with. This, of course, is already done in theory, by evaluating teachers. (I have only scratched the surface of the tenure debate here. I don’t expect to change anyone’s mind about tenure, but for an excellent examination of both sides of the debate see http://teachertenure.procon.org)

Evaluations were done in my case by someone sitting in on one of my classes periodically. I once got a comment on one of my evaluations because of a piece of obsidian I was showing the students. I was about to pass it around when I thought better of it because it had very sharp edges. The comment was not thanking me for realizing it was a bad idea to hand out a razor-sharp piece of volcanic glass to eighth-graders, but rather I was criticized for not passing it around because they thought it had no educational value otherwise. I lost a lot of respect for the evaluations after that. Some of these students would carve obscenities into their wooden desks with any sharp tool when they got a chance. There was no way I was going to give them a potentially lethal weapon. There was another evaluation I got that criticized me for allowing the students to “twirl a meter stick”. In fact I had told the students to leave the meter sticks on the desks, and later I asked the evaluator to tell me which student had been twirling one and how could I have missed seeing that. The reply was, after a lot of hemming and hawing, that the student had picked up the meter stick and turned it a bit, a few inches above the table. Not very excessive, really. The evaluation had implied I allowed the student to spin it overhead like a baton. The evaluator agreed to delete that particular accusation from my record, but kept others that were equally exaggerated and fatuous. Despite efforts to make the evaluations objective, in my experience they are often anything but.

Another bad way to evaluate teachers is by how well the kids do on tests. At first one would think this must be an excellent way to do evaluations, by seeing how well the kids do. Unfortunately, this would provide an incentive for teachers to look the other way when students cheat on tests. There have even been cases where teachers have cheated for the kids by changing the test answers the kids gave, after the tests were turned in. Evaluating by student tests also would mean the teachers do better if they get better students, and could lead to cases where a worse teacher might get a better evaluation simply because he got a better class of pupils.

So how do I propose to evaluate teachers? Unfortunately, I don’t know of any better ways than those already being used, problematic as they are. My suggestions are, instead, to focus on starting with a better class of teachers. Here is my first proposal: require teachers to have a Master’s degree in their subject, rather than a Master’s in education, for teaching any class above, say, fourth or fifth grade. Maybe require a Master’s in education also, but to my mind requiring an undergraduate minor in education would be fine. Perhaps thirty hours of education classes with half of them in practicum, as student teachers. Teaching is a skill developed by doing, not by reading. The point is to ensure that the teachers actually know about the subjects they teach. This is especially important for any science class.

All too often I have heard that someone has gone into teaching “because it’s an easy way to get a degree,” education being “much easier than a real subject”. I don’t want to say that an education degree is easy to get and that the people who go into teaching do it because they couldn’t handle anything else. However, that’s the prevalent attitude in our culture. “If you can’t do, teach” the saying goes. This saying is about as wrongheaded as it can be. Teaching well is an extraordinarily difficult thing to do. It requires both extensive knowledge and a strong ability to express the same idea in several different ways. Both of these are not as common in our schools as they should be. Part of the problem is that maintaining discipline in schools today is just as difficult as teaching well, and even more important because of large class sizes. Discipline problems arise partly because public schools now have the reputation of being useless for learning. Unfortunately, this reputation is grounded in the reality of many teachers not really knowing enough about their subject much of the time. Requiring teachers to have advanced degrees in the subjects they teach, rather than just in education, would go a long way toward fixing that.

One hundred years ago, a Bachelor’s degree in physics, chemistry, or biology would have been enough to get a good grounding in the subject. The problem is, since then the sciences have grown exponentially each decade in knowledge and information. Even with a Doctorate and years of teaching college classes, there are vast amounts of chemistry that one simply doesn’t have time to learn. The same is true of physics and biology, and perhaps many other disciplines, but certainly that’s the situation in the sciences. Unfortunately the secondary school curriculum hasn’t changed in about one hundred years, so there is very little time to teach science in secondary school compared with the increased amount of knowledge available. I doubt that this situation will change, but at least we should require the teachers to have some advanced knowledge in their subjects so they know what the curriculum isn’t covering, and so they can slip some good information into the classes they teach. This might require changes in laws and would take time to have any effect but it’s a start.

My second proposal is to ensure that classes are no larger then twenty students. There would be exceptions, of course, like P.E., band, orchestra, and maybe some labs and other such classes, but twenty students is more than enough for most. Ten would be even better but I’m not that divorced from reality yet. This of course might mean more school rooms, perhaps more school buildings, and probably more teachers. It’s not an easy short-term goal and not cheap. But I had experience in rooms with thirty-five and forty kids and it’s a full-time job just to maintain order in some of them, much less teach. Individual instruction is almost impossible in those conditions, and individual instruction is sometimes the only way to reach students. Smaller class size would not only mean better teaching but fewer behavior problems.

I’m going to slip this idea in here as an afterthought, but in a way it’s central to everything: There is currently too much emphasis on the teacher being responsible for the student’s learning. Learning is the students responsibility, once the teacher adequately presents the material. One can argue about what “adequately” means, and the teacher must be able to present the material in a “suitable” way, but after that, learning is work that the students must do. It shouldn’t be the teacher’s responsibility to make the work “fun” and then blame the teacher if the student fails to learn because it wasn’t “fun” enough. Having said that, I also know that teaching and learning can be fun, although not for everybody and not all the time. Science classes in particular can be fun if there are enough resources in the school to provide interesting demonstrations. But back to the main point: if teachers are better educated perhaps it will be more clear that the students bear the main responsibility for their own education.

Better education for teachers and smaller class size: these are long-term infrastructure fixes for the educational system that would take time, money, and probably legislation to implement. They would yield results years down the road instead of in an election cycle. I am convinced that they are the best way to start, perhaps the only way to make real progress. Usually I’m optimistic, but I estimate the probability of it ever happening here as approximately the same as that of the long-term existence of a loosely-packed bolus of ice crystals in Hell.