1. They are pretty much owned by the NEA, the largest union in the United States. As a union, they pretty much want complete control over all aspects of whatever the business is they are a part of. Because of this, trying to get any sort of reform is a non-starter because they will claim that it isn't the schools' fault that kids aren't doing well because if it was the schools' fault then the blame would land right on their doorstep. Unions want all the benefits they can get but want to shoulder none of the blame. They are always blaming something else:Because of these three things, those controlling the public schools are riding a gravy train:•We don't have enough money for our schools.Also because of this, there is no room for innovation or competition. If a public school or even a teacher within a public school is allowed to experiment to see what really does or does not work in either a very low level criterion of, say, getting the kids to be enthusiastic readers or a very high level criterion of being able to analyze an argument, even one from the teacher, point out the bullsh_t, and then eviscerate the opponent by use of a deadly application of logic and sarcasm, then it will be evident that, by comparison, everything else that is controlled by the union from textbook writing, textbook purchases, classroom size, curriculum development, curriculum implementation, curriculum specialists, etc., is pretty much bullshit and their sinecure will be at an end.
•We don't get paid enough to attract the best and brightest (considering what teachers have to put up with in dealing with the deadwood of administrators, there is no amount of money large enough to convince the best and brightest to put up with that kind of crap unless they are, at heart, masochists-- you know, those who can, do; those who can't, teach; those who can't teach, administrate or become guidance counselors).
•We don't have a large enough portion of the day to counteract all the negative influences the children experience at home or on the streets.
•The parents are not doing what they are supposed to do to prepare children for school.
•Kids don't get enough sleep.
•Kids speak a different language at home.
•Kids can't learn effectively because of racism.
•Kids can't learn effectively because of sexism.
•Kids can't learn effectively because of homophobia.
•Kids come to school hungry and cannot concentrate and benefit from our curriculum.
•Kids are hyperactive or attention deficit disordered (usually means that the tedium and bullsh_t of the class is just too much for some kids who then find other ways to amuse themselves).
•Kids have so many electronic playthings at home that they cannot concentrate on traditional learning methods (meaning, "Hey, let's buy billions of dollars of electronic equipment for the class and hire veritable sh_tloads of specialists to figure out how to use them, dream up innovative new software to use on them, teach the teachers to use them, teach the kids how to listen to the teachers telling them how to use them, repair them, figure out ways to make firewalls the kids can't hack to escape from the tedium and bullsh_t of the class now being administered to them via an electronic IV", etc).
•Kids can't learn effectively because of demands for teacher accountability.
2. The teachers, though often well-intentioned, are generally from the very bottom of the barrel of college graduates in terms of grades, ability, and proficiency in almost anything (see how education majors compare to engineering majors in the GRE test given for those going on to graduate school. Look at the absurd product of candidates for either a masters or doctorate in education. Their theses are rarely more than Mickey Mouse feces). Because of this, expecting any sort of major innovation from a group constitutively unable to rise above mediocrity, overly desirous not to rock the boat, and, from an early age, overly eager to please those in authority over them, is a ridiculously false hope.
3. Public schools claim that their objective is to educate students. In reality, their aim is to indoctrinate students and the philosophical core for that indoctrination is a leftist, materialist, collectivist point of view. It has been that way since the second decade of the 20th century when the Gang of Thirteen overturned the recommendations of the Eliot Committee for the standards for secondary education and put into place what has afflicted public education ever since: producing worthy citizens (as defined by the people in charge of producing the curriculum--certainly not EVER by the parents) rather than producing educated people.
•They command ever larger amounts of money and control.The education landscape of the past 100 years or so is littered with the corpses of such schemes that served their purposes to distract the public's attention while the educational beast lumbered forward gobbling everything in its path.
•They inculcate their sociological and political ideas to their hearts content to produce kids chattering their ideas on the environment (environmentalism), industrialization (business is bad, produces pollution, and oppresses people), money (capitalism is bad and makes people selfish and not want to share), government (Democrats are FOR people, Republicans are for BUSINESS, which is evil and greed and oppresses the people, government should provide for everyone's needs), religion (it's divisive and keeps people from coming together in a loving and sharing community provided by the government that should eliminate all the divisive elements of religion so we can all get along).
•They can point to their failures and claim that it's only because they haven't been given enough money, power, and control over those pesky objects of their education to be able to do the job right and then ask for more.
•They occasionally dream up some scheme to produce an educational red herring to throw people off the scent of their incompetence and call it "basic minimum standards" or "basic minimum competency" or "common core."
“The most erroneous assumption is to the effect that the aim of public education is to fill the young of the species with knowledge and awaken their intelligence, and so make them fit to discharge the duties of citizenship in an enlightened and independent manner. Nothing could be further from the truth. The aim of public education is not to spread enlightenment at all; it is simply to reduce as many individuals as possible to the same safe level, to breed and train a standardized citizenry, to put down dissent and originality. That is its aim in the United States, whatever the pretensions of politicians, pedagogues and other such mountebanks, and that is its aim everywhere else.”
Just switch out the words, “Teacher” and school”, and insert the name of **any** socialist-entitlement program, and all of what you have written will apply to that program.
Fundamentally, government schooling is a socialist-entitlement. That is the problem. It must be abolished.
It's an amazing story, how the U.S. ever adopted the centralized, essentially Prussian model of education, outlined well by John Taylor Gatto in "The Underground History of American Education."
Gatto covers some great historic ground, and in an entertaining way, but doesn't delve into Philosophies of Education, an area American Conservatives of the early 21st century would immediately recognize. Few these days seem to realize that no one can receive a teaching license, so to speak, without passing muster with rules put in place by the teaching colleges. A prospective teacher must adopt one, and only one, flavor of one, and only one, Philosophy of Education, i.e., "Experimentalism."
That single flavor of Experimentalism is, of course, John Dewey's Progressive Education.
The heart of a monster ostensibly built to create workers to serve the machines of both government and business in a fascist vision of the future from 100 years ago. That heart is based on an overall philosophy of being that was, and remains, alien to American language and thought, where the individual exists only as "a foci of relationships," with no more identity that that of a wave in an ocean.
Even teachers don't know the requirements which are presented to them in our teaching colleges as simply "education."
It really is monstrous, with a track record and legacy everyone can see, and really can't avoid, that is almost never traced back to its sources. And, yes, it's all of a whole with Progressiveism. Dewey and Woodrow Wilson were thick as fleas.
I appreciated Gatto's citation of test scores before, during and immediately following World War II, the results of precisely the same skill tests given to new recruits of similar age groups entering military service during World War II and just 10 years later going into the Korean conflict.
Something happened on the homefront while most Americans were busy fighting the Axis and then adopting to the world that emerged afterward.
Test scores plummeted, dramatically.
Yes, indeed. The Dumbing Down process is not just a result of lazy, incompetent teachers. It is deliberate.
And yet one of my in-laws, an elementary teacher, was so impressed with her brilliance that she tried to run everything and dictate to everyone in her husband's family -- her parents-in-law, the elder siblings-in-law, aunts-, uncles-, cousins-in-law and their families -- even the caterers of her in-law's 50th wedding anniversary party, causing major strife and estrangement. If your point of view differed from hers in any way, you were not only wrong, you were immoral!
And to think she married someone who was a Republican going into the marriage.
“see how education majors compare to engineering majors in the GRE”
Do you know where those figures can be found?