Posted on 03/02/2010 1:52:10 PM PST by BruceDeitrickPrice
One of the most striking things about education is that everyone has a theory.
A lot of these ideas are extreme. Some are what I call swaggering defeatism (everything is fixed, game over, no use fighting). At the other end are blue-sky utopians (we have to level the schools and start over a different way). Truthfully, a lot of this is not very helpful. Smaller, immediate goals are usually going to produce more progress.
But here’s what is most profoundly troubling to me about all these ideas. They give cover to the people who are the real problem, namely, our Education Establishment.
These guys always want to blame somebody else. First, they say it’s the kids’ fault because they don't try. Then it’s the parents’ fault because they don’t care. Then it’s society’s fault because we don’t spend enough money, etc.
Our top educators are in perpetual CYA mode. The last thing they want is that anybody actually look in their direction. Can you imagine HOW GRATEFUL THEY ARE that most of the people in this country use up their reformist energies discussing split infinitives, planning new kinds of schools on the moon, or just giving up?
In every industry, and every kind of human activity, when you have a bad year, the first reaction is to fire the coach, get a new CEO or whatever. But we never do that in education. We let the same people (quacks and hacks, I’m afraid) mess up year after year; and when we identify a problem, we let these people replace the old stupid idea with a brand-new stupid idea.
I’d suggest we need new people, and a new class of ideas. To get there we have to stay focused on the real culprits.
(The thinking above led to the YouTube video. Only 3 minutes. Makes the same points in a light-hearted way. Please use whichever one you think might help.)
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=PN-dY1HBqsQ
Just read NEA material...nuff said.
“Why Don’t Public Schools Do A Better Job?
They don’t care.”
They don’t care because parents don’t care. For parents the schools are free baby sittting and that’s what they care about.
“Oh, and don’t take any of this personally, I don’t.”
I don’t- I couldn’t do this for a living if I did...
Something else occurred to me as a problem that needs addressing- special education laws and regulations. I have colleagues who come in way early and leave way late- just because they have all this extraordinarily useless documentation, in order to satisfy the law. This sort of thing wastes time and helps no students. The law for a lot of this is IDEA- a federal law that guarantees that special ed students get an education. Not a bad idea, in a way, but its execution is lamentable and has a lot of pernicious side effects. For example, it has a clause of “least restricted environment.” This means that a lot of students get “mainstreamed” into regular ed classes where they have little or no business. A lot of malcontents often pose as people who have problems- and cause discipline problems which are not handled the same way as it would be, if a regular student committed an infraction. Something really needs doing in this area. Individual schools need more leeway in deciding this matters- and most certainly special ed students should be held to the same standards of behavior as others. And, if they somehow can’t be, then they shouldn’t be in a regular classroom.
All well and good, but this comes back to my one point, which is that our Education Establishment is anti-intellectual and malevolent. They permit and ABET all the bad tendencies you speak of, so that education will proceed slowly. And all will be made into C-students... You say also there’s no head. Is that possible? At the top, at the very top, don’t we have to assume a small group who actually decide policy? My working assumption is that if we could fire the top 100 people and get some real intellectuals and Gilbert Highet types, we could change this country overnight. Our Education Establishment loves leveling and hates knowledge, that’s the curse we’re working with.
I think the problem is widespread and thin, and not centrally directed. (Although I’ve seen some things that indicate some would like it to be centrally directed). For example, the Federal Department of Ed is not empowered to direct local schools to do much of anything- unless they take Fed money, and then all the strings attached apply. At the state level, policy is not always made by a single entity- here in NC we have a state Superintendent of Schools, a state board of education (those are elected) and then the Dept of Public Instruction (unelected educrats, but they have to bow to the wishes of the General Assembly if it chooses to stick its nose in. (The Governor is not a supreme executive here.)
If it were a matter of 100 people, that would be easy. But not every state has a single person in charge of it. That’s why I think it would be a matter of several generations before we removed some of the problems that exist in education now- we didn’t get here overnight, and it would take about as long to undo what has been done as it did to do it in the first place.
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