Posted on 01/23/2005 10:23:53 AM PST by furball4paws
PH - I think you are chewing on the wrong end of the Crevo problem. So I give you 20+ year old essay to back that up. 20 years later, I don't see things as better, maybe worse. It's a bad thing for Conservatives, the United States and Science in general.
Comments?
The source of all these problems?
Our Colleges of Education, aided and helped by the NEA.
Thanks for the ping. I agree with the article, and it goes a long way to explain what we see every day in the science threads. But after saying that, what's left to be said?
This fits the "progessive" agenda like a glove.
The aware, the engaged, the competent the productive, get to work and pay taxes. The goodness that they do is its own reward.
The others? They get to be supported by the nanny government because that's their right.
What's the beef?
You can't solve the Crevo problem without attacking it at its root: education. Once they've reached Freeperhood, it's too late.
Yup. They can type, but they can't think. Nor do they even know that they can't. Nor do they want to know. That's how it is.
The unions fight merit pay and impose senority because it protects their membership. So the union must be broken and schools must be forced to compete for good teachers the way industry competes for good workers.
I mentioned it above and I think it may be even a greater key to this problem - our Colleges of Education. Teacher's curricula are determined by those who fall into Mencken's addition and have no earthly idea what it actually takes to teach a kid. The union fosters and supports this. We have been had by our Colleges of Education.
Patrick, I am beginning to fear for your sanity. You have been much more depressed lately in your posts. Maybe you need a vacation. The Crevo world will not disintegrate if you take one 8-)
As to what to do? I don't know. I have to "unteach" my kids almost daily in Math and Science. I am educated enough to do it, but people are not. They trust the education system. I feel sorry for them all.
"What's the beef?"
Senor Publius I get a nagging "feeling" from this comment that you are also depressed with the state of things. I hope that's not true. Perhaps you also see no way to fight the 10 ton marshmallow.
Is giving up all there is?
My main squawk is with Math/Science since that is my area, but I am sure this problem is endemic in all areas. In fact I once took my son's English paper to school for parent/teacher conferences. I said to the teacher "This is bad English. Why didn't you correct it?". She looked at me like I had an arm growing out of my forehead.
The good thing about losing my sanity is that I'll be the last to know, if I ever know. So I'm not worried. As for my posts revealing depression ... nah. I'm resigned to the situtation, at least as it exists for the hard-core creationists. They are what they are, and they're not going to change. That's reality.
So why persist? I do it just to put the information out there. Lots of people are interested. They don't post all that much, but they're out there. I know it because they ask to join the ping list. Also, I think it's good to do what we can to keep the conservative movement from descending into the pit of the Dark Ages. It's worth the effort.
Where do you live? I ask that because we live in Indianapolis, and our kids are taught to read phonetically (except for non-phonetically spelled "sight" words), they are learning their basic math facts; and my 11 year old has been diagramming sentences for 3 years now. I think what occurs in our public schools varies dramatically from locale to locale.
The reason these colleges work and turn out teachers who get hired is that the good people who may make good teachers go elsewhere, (like the quote at the beginning of the article).
I went through teacher's classes, but after going through EE and MSEE programs. I was way overqualified to teach math and science. But I still had to start on the bottom rung of the teacher pay scale and when layoffs came, I was one of those laid off.
If teacher colleges could somehow be induced to increase the level of their requirements, it would just mean that they would fail all the teacher candidates. Hiring and firing is controlled by teacher's unions. And there is no incentive for teacher's unions to raise teacher's standards.
Great essay, it certainly illustrates the problem.
I agree with other posters who have pointed out that we need to teach children the basic skills (reading, math, scientific reasoning, and I would add writing). All other skills follow from those.
Rather than try to impose those specific goals, however, I believe what is needed is a structural change.
Parents should be able to decide where their own kids go to school. Each child should be allocated a "voucher", and that voucher could be used for ANY school. The parents should be responsible for getting their own kid to school.
If we had a truely free market in schools, it is a safe bet that we would have many more (and much smaller schools than we do today). A small group of people would be able to create a school, and if they were good teachers, would have no problem getting enough business to make a good living.
Government could help out by facilitating honest, objective testing of the students, teachers, and schools, and providing that data to the public.
Most of us are aware that state and local governments spend large amounts of money (per student). Few are aware that these large numbers are generally underreported. Government budgets have many line items, and there are large education related expenses that tend to get lumped into other (non-education) line items.
There is more than enough money already being spent, in every state in the US, to provide a quality education for every school age child (including those now going to private schools).
Private organizations and competition are the way to operate efficiently enough to do this. Anyone with a little commen sense and math skills can determine that the vast majority of education money can go to teachers' salaries. Currently a large portion goes to "overhead".
Higher salaries, less arbitrary restrictions on who can become a teacher, and freedom to teach effectively, will interest many more capable people in entering into the teaching profession.
I would expect that we whould also get a much larger variety of schools. For example, we would no doubt have some schools that would put an emphasis on music. School districts would no longer be able to blackmail parents by threatening to cut band. There would simply be one or more schools in your area that would make band a priority.
My personal favorite is "smart kid" schools. Of course, there is always a small percentage of children who are really bright, but any community of significant size should be able to support at least one school for kids with IQs of 140 and above.
"...schools must be forced to compete..."
These are rather difficult words for a conservative forum.
As far as the unions and the Colleges of Education are concerned, is this one of those "dog chasing his tail" things. How do we break the cycle?
If Colleges insisted that its teachers were superior and well trained and knew their subject matter beyond the smattering they now get, wouldn't the word get out that that College's graduates were highly desirable? Schools would then seek out those graduates and pay them commensurately. I realize that this would begin with private schools that can afford to pay appropriately, but wouldn't this eventually drive a wedge between the unions and school boards?
There's got to be an answer somewhere.
You are probably right. I live in MA, but my when my son was in school I lived in CT.
MA is worse, all they care about is tolerance education, and weaving homosexual agendas into every subject. The MCAS is the state testing. That is all they do for the entire semester, learning the questions on the test. And the scores are still down
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