Posted on 04/25/2008 6:25:35 PM PDT by OESY
...Released quietly on the Fourth of July weekend, the report concluded that the qualities of the families from which children come to school matter much more than money as predictors of schools' effectiveness. The crucial common denominator of problems of race and class- fractured families- would have to be faced.
But it wasn't. Instead, shopworn panaceas- larger teacher salaries, smaller class sizes- were pursued as colleges were reduced to offering remediation to freshmen.
In 1976, for the first time in its 119-year history, the National Education Association, the teachers union, endorsed a presidential candidate, Jimmy Carter- who repaid it by creating the Education Department, a monument to the premise that money and government programs matter most.
At the NEA's behest, the nation has expanded the number of teachers much faster than the number of students has grown. Hiring more, rather than more competent, teachers meant more dues-paying union members.
For decades, schools have been treated as laboratories for various equity experiments. Fads incubated in education schools gave us "open" classrooms, teachers as "facilitators of learning" rather than transmitters of knowledge, abandonment of a literary canon in the name of "multiculturalism," and so on, producing a majority of high school juniors who could not locate the Civil War in the proper half-century....
Moynihan was a neoconservative.... Originally, it taught domestic-policy humility. Moynihan, a social scientist, understood that social science tells us not what to do but what isn't working, which today includes No Child Left Behind. Finn thinks NCLB got things backward: "The law should have set uniform standards and measures for the nation, then freed states, districts and schools to produce those results as they think best."
Instead, it left standards up to the states, which have an incentive to dumb them down to make compliance easier....
(Excerpt) Read more at nypost.com ...
- "A Nation At Risk" (1983)
It’s been mediocre for a long time. I went to school in the 50’s and it wasn’t much more than a babysitting institution. I didn’t learn much of anything beyond basic reading and math until I went to a university. Only real decline that I see is that more students graduated from high school then. And, of course, students have no respect and no fear anymore. Hard to find teachers that will put up with that, especially in the ghetto areas, where they need it most and the students are the worst.
End tenure. Fire the incompetent. Reward the best.
Expell troublemakers. Restore order. Demand excellence.
Tell insifferable parents to sit down and shut up.
George Will is a Washington insider elitist snob trying to spin the words of Moynihan another Washington insider elitist snob. Moyihan was looking down his nose at Southerners as ignorant rednecks. Will can claim to be a conservative, but in order to claim to be a conservative columnist you need to attract conservative readership. I do not know of any conservative reader stupid enough to fall for trying to spin Moynihan's regional prejudices as anything but the liberal elitist snobbism which has been a tradition of the liberal Democrat Party and is now being reflected by Barry Obama. If you believe in channeling, Barry's bitter comments could have been channeled by Will's elitist snob hero, Dan Pat Moynihan.
Expell troublemakers. Restore order. Demand excellence.
Tell insifferable parents to sit down and shut up. “
I agree with all of that. However, none of it will help public education until unions...particularly the NEA...are disbanded and outlawed. Aside from the horrible state of parenting in the US, nothing else stands as more of an obstacle to successful education than the NEA.
i see that reform is futile... i hear it in the voices of all the teachers in my family... they know it’s futile... it’s taken some longer than others to come to this realization (i’m talking about the teachers in my family)... i homeschool because i cannot wait for the schools to reform... i get 18 years to educate my kids... that’s it... the public schools have been reforming for decades with no results...
One other thing that would almost instantly raise the average test scores in all of the border states and all metropolitan areas is to force the Illegal Aliens to pay for the extra-services that it takes to educate their third-world children, make it impossible for illegals to work in the US(workplace enforcement of SSN web-check), and remove access to state-level social services for illegals.
Immediately, the children would be withdrawn from school and many of the parents with their children in tow would wander on back across the border from whence they came.
Test scores would jump at least 10% and the deficits that border states face would be immediately gone and like Oklahoma you would have the added benefit of a lower unemployment rate.
That is exactly why I put my kids in an orthodox Catholic school. We didn’t have time to wait for the public schools to get it together. Our kids are not lab rats. At this point, it looks like they never will.
Another poster spoke of eliminating the incompetent children of the third world dregs who have filled our schools. Indeed. They should not be here and they are not entitled to a free education here. If the illegals want their children in our schools, they should be paying tuition.
Also eliminate federal, state, and county funding of the schools. Let the local school board answer to the local taxpayers for the cost of the community's schools.
The most important thing is to ban liberals from holding position's on the school board.
Look at every city in America. The schools are the worst in the world, and the boards of education are run by liberals, mostly minority liberals (blacks & hispanics) who tow the party line about more money, smaller classes, and all that dreck.
Most of the suburban schools are decidedly better and are run by mostly liberals but there is always a few conservative troublemakers like me who attend board meetings and can defend themselves when the nitwits try to discredit you by saying “you don't understand education”. They see actions, they see budgets get voted down as retribution for stupid proposals.
None of that happens in city schools. The city counsel appropriates money to the school district and the Board of Education is a mindless collection of navel gazers.
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