“Education is no longer a business to benefit the children. That ship sailed about the time the unions discovered the school house.”
True, but it’s not just the unions. The colleges of education in our university system share in the problem.
State and Federal legislatures often turn to these ‘experts’
when they want to reform the system.
Then there are the State and Federal legislatures themselves. The ability to raise revenue and appropriate it
in the name of “educating children” has turned our public school system into quite a money making adventure for those
who are able to lobby the right congressmen.
As to your recommendations...they seem like another beauracracy that will require evaluators, managers, supervisors etc. In essence more of the same that we already have.
What’s the solution? It’s the compulsory education laws
that give the states the power to run public education. By
compelling children to be in school, the state also takes the ‘responsibilty’ to create the system. It then allows them to tax the public at large, even people who don’t have
children in the system, to finance the enterprise.
To me this whole scheme sounds a lot like Obamacare!!!
Eliminate or scale back the compulsory education laws, and make individual parents responsible for defining the education their own children receive.
The counter argument will be that there are some parents that don’t care for their own children, are too poor, are too ignorant....or whatever.
Again this is the same argument behind Obamacare!!!
Unfortunately, the left is once again ahead of us on this one. They have realized that you cannot force a child to learn and that the equal opportunity to an education doesn’t always lead to an equal outcome, that White students continue to out perform minority students on tests.
So, rather than return to the old tracking system, where students choose their own path to a diploma, college preparatory, business, tech, or general, the left has decided to simply give out a diploma to kids at 15 or 16 and put them directly into a union apprenticeship or training program, preferably an SEIU training program, whether the kids can read, write and do math or not. They don’t even have to pass a GED test and probably couldn’t.
In other words, the left has changed the goal of education from an equal opportunity to an equal outcome. Next time you hear the left talk about outcome based education, you’ll know what they mean.
I don’t disagree with you, to be honest. My family homeschools - we have taken both control and responsibility for our kids’ education.
I was just ranting off the top of my head about how I would fix some of the issues. I can admit (easily) that I sometimes miss the larger points. Thank you for sharing your viewpoint.