School daze

A recent audit of the Public School System by the J. Scott Magliari & Company auditing firm shows some very interesting results. Not the results we have been seeing in the newspapers and via other media sources about a “cash-strapped” system, nearly broke and struggling along on pennies per student. Not the kind of numbers that support the “oh-my-gosh, we-have-termites-and-can’t-afford-a can-of-Raid” pleas for financial assistance we see on an almost daily basis. Not the kind of numbers that justify a level of educational quality that one expects to find in sub-Saharan Africa or in a jungle on the back side of the Peruvian Andes.

No, what the audit shows is a spending level that should see our local students as paragons of scholastic achievement, if in fact, spending can be related to academic excellence. The surprising truth is that the CNMI spends $5,756 per child and that PSS is further subsidized to the tune of U.S. federal spending amounting to another $8,807 per student. For a WHOPPING total $14,563 per student per year. Holy Moly do you realize what that means? It means that our elementary, junior, and senior high school students could all be attending some of the finest universities in the United States and abroad for the same amount of tuition that we spend to get them to the point where “we hope to improve their reading skills to where 50 percent of them read at grade level”. (If that goal of educational excellence doesn’t scare the hell out of you, it should).

A check of college and university tuition levels indicates that the $14,500+ we are spending could send every one of our students to all but the 35 most expensive universities in the nation. No we couldn’t send them off to Princeton, Harvard, or Yale, but we wouldn’t miss it by much. Our students could actually could be going to nearly any fully accredited university in the U.S. except the most expensive Ivy League schools and the super pricey private research institutions like MIT.

Please note that these audited spending numbers do not even include the bond debt forced on all of us taxpayers that paid for new school construction and other massive expenditures. The real amounts spent are staggering when compared with what we get for our money.

The point is why on earth are our results so dismal when our spending is through the roof! Either the money isn’t getting to the system through laundering/squandering or outright theft; or it is getting there but being spent in such an unproductive, ineffective manner that it should be a source of national shame. I tend to believe the latter. I don’t think anyone is stealing it…I just don’t think they know how to spend it productively. A quick look at these islands’ private schools shows quality education being delivered at a fraction of the cost spent to subsidize our “public” (read government) schools.

I have a theory. I call it the Theory of Educational Relativity (apologies to Mr. Einstein not really needed since he’s dead). Simply stated is says that a government school turns out students that are relatively worse off per dollar invested and man hour spent; than their private school counterparts. This is the result of horrendous inefficiency, not terrible funding woes, as we are lead to believe by the excuse-oriented upper echelon at PSS. Bloated employee rolls where only a fraction of the workers actually teach the students create much of the shortfall, and waste much of the money.

Only part of the problem (yep, it’s a problem not a “challenge”) can be traced to substandard classrooms and termite-infested reference books. Truth is, it should not matter whether the students sit under the shade of a flame tree or whether they sit in a windowless, hyper-expensive classroom breathing aircon. A quality education comes from the teachers. It does not come from the superintendent of schools, or the school board, or the third janitorial assistant to the librarian’s sister. The special assistant to the file cabinet clerk’s helper cannot make much of a difference (except that he eats up $50,000 per year of our funds). If it can be said that good teachers equals good results, then what must we say about the causes of bad results? Well, we could say that even good teachers may not be able to overcome a bad organization.

I don’t think our problem is one of too little money. I think it is problem of too little talent, too little leadership, too little results-oriented organizational direction, and too little effective training of the trainers.

The solution? Privatize the school system…to heck with CUC…privatize the most important thing we can think of…the betterment of the minds of our youth. Let’s put the communicating power of a Jerry Tan or the organizational skills of a David Sablan or a Tony Pelligrino or the pure drive to succeed of an unknown Joe Blow on a mission to improve the minds of our youth by paying attention to the bottom line. Results, not whimpers of “we need more cash” is what we need, and we need it soon.

Now that I have aggravated about a third the islands’ population, I will stand back, shut up and hopefully listen to the ensuing discourse that MAY lead us out of the quagmire and into the light of focused intelligence. We have the talent, and a lot of is pent up inside this dinosaur of a school system. There are lots of good people currently employed by PSS that if unleashed could turn this national shame into national pride. Let’s try to break the chains of incompetence that bind our government schools. We spend a lot and we get very little. There is a cure.

* * *

Bruce A. Bateman writes Sour Grapes when the moon is full and the mood strikes. Stay tuned for each exciting episode of Sour Grapes. Yes, he is opinionated.