How Do We Improve Public Schools? Take Away Their Funding, Terrorize Teachers, and Send Kids Somewhere Else (According to lawmakers)
By Elizabeth Walters (via Walter M. Brasch)
How can we improve public education for our children?
The answers to this question--and the perspectives on the current quality of public education in the United States--are as varied and individualized as the 55 million students who attend public school in this country. Recently, legislators in Louisiana, like their counterparts in many other states, have sought to improve their state’s educational climate. They have good reason for doing so--in its annual Kids COUNT ratings, meant to evaluate quality of life for children in each state and based on measurements that include educational indices, the Annie E. Casey Foundation consistently ranks Louisiana as 49th (thank you, Mississippi).
As a public-school teacher in Louisiana, I can think of many ways to improve public schools here, and I heard the same sentiments voiced by fellow teachers during a rally outside the Capitol in Baton Rouge as the legislation was being debated last week (April 4). It seems self-evident that one of the best ways to improve public education would be to allocate more resources for public schools--to improve technology, to expand professional-development opportunities for teachers, to buy classroom supplies, up-to-date textbooks and all the other materials that come with a good education. Perhaps one of the best ways to improve public education would be to loosen the strictures that tie student and school evaluations to test preparation and instead to allow teachers to instruct students in the sort of project-based units supported by educational research and the sort of critical-thinking skills that cannot be measured by filling in bubbles--the sort of academic freedom that is praised in charter schools but restricted in traditional public schools.
Read More...School Violence
Schools have been getting safer, even as the fear of school violence increases.
Lesson to be learned: If something is featured prominently in the media, it is a very rare event. Otherwise, it would not be news. To illustrate: if shootings were an everyday occurrence in most schools, individual shootings would never make the papers, except in the obituaries. Rare events, particularly heart-wrenching ones, are the most newsworthy.
The School of Education of the University of Virginia has an informative website on myths about schools. Some of the statistics on the site are a few years out-of-date, but the overall national statistics pretty conclusively demonstrate that school violence and crime have declined by roughly 50% in the last 20 years, in striking contrast to the hype that has pervaded the media—particularly the right-wing media.
http://youthviolence.edschool.virginia.edu
There is also a page that points out the idiocy of zero tolerance policies in the schools. The JP long ago decried the stupidity of these policies, but such Draconian measures are unfortunately all too prevalent in Mississippi schools today.
Imagine a School...
Obama & McCain on Education
Big differences in candidates' education plans
The main difference between the candidates’ plans is in pre-school support. McCain would add less than $1 billion to education. He would give principals more say over funds while redirecting spending to online schools, home schools and tuition vouchers. Obama, on the other hand, would devote most of his increased spending to preparing children for kindergarden on the premise that children who enter school 2 years behind seldom catch up.
I wish that the candidates would spend a little time discussing the content of education. I’m convinced that generations of American students have been dumbed down by a curriculum that teaches little history, literature, economics, geography, or logic, and the results have been catastrophic. If you don’t believe me, show a teenager a map of the world and ask them to locate Venice, Baghdad, New Delhi and Beijing. Ask your teenager if he or she can identify Horatio, Brutus, Marcus Aurelius and Alaric. Ask him or her one thing that the Federal Reserve does and why. Finally, ask your teenager to name one American Nobel Prize winner in literature.
More pertinently, ask your teenage to name the three branches of the federal government and briefly explain the roles of each.
None of these questions are on the level we call “rocket science.” I was taught the answers to most of the foregoing questions at Mary Lee Boyd Elementary School on Northside Drive, here in Jackson, between 1950 and 1956.
Several years ago I reviewed a book by John Taylor Gatto, The Underground History of American Education: a schoolteacher’s intimate investigation into the prison of modern schooling, that related the whole sorry story of compulsory education in America. The book is well-worth reading and pondering. Gatto regards the educational system not as a failure but as a resounding success when judged in the light of its original purpose.
No College Student Left Behind
Businessmen are experts in education. That's why they run school local boards: they know better than teachers.
Now that the Federal government has, by the way it finances education, made it more and more difficult for families of modest means to send their children to college without burdening them with mountains of debt, it proposes to dictate through high-stakes testing what college students should know when they graduate. Considering the incredible diversity in curriculums and academic programs now existing, a single high-stakes test that all students would have to pass to graduate would radically change our universities into assembly-line factories of learning, with the shots all called by the feds.
We should have expected this development sooner or later. He who pays the piper calls the tunes. Really open and free inquiry frightens businessmen and especially Republican ones. This is a perfect opportunity to bring into line one of the last bastions of free thought.