Education reform’s central myths
The education debate rests on two faulty premises: that public schools are failures, and choice is the solution
http://www.salon.com/2012/08/01/school_choice_vs_reality/
My complaints about our education system pull from my background. Maybe our education system isn’t really bad, when compared with other nation’s systems, but that is damning with faint praise because my education pretty much sucked. I learned _in spite of_ my education, not because of and while I (like I imagine all other humans) harbor thoughts deep in my psych about being special and all that crap, I know I am pretty much an ordinary person. Thus, I can’t help but remain convinced that our education system was operating far, far away from its potential when I was an inmate some 40 years ago. I have little reason to think that there has been any improvement in our system in the intervening decades (rather the opposite based on my, admittedly informal, research), so in my book our system is still a sucky one capable of dramatic improvement.
Now, I firmly agree that one should have some sort of experimental evidence that an approach has been successful before one commits the word’s largest economy on a path and it seems to me that there is little evidence that vouchers do a damn thing to make inner city ghetto schools one tiny bit better. If, as I suspect is quite true, it is these same inner city ghetto schools that are ‘dragging down’ our cumulative scores, then ‘success’ in improving our system should focus on dealing directly with those schools and ignoring the ones that already produce students in the top percentile in the world. And there is evidence that it is quite trivial to have success with the under performing students and schools. Of course, that isn’t about transferring middle class tax payments into the hands of the oligarchy, so it ain’t gunna happen!
It isn’t per capita expenditure. D.C. has one of the highest and is one of the poorest school systems. What is required are:
1. Good (and knowledgable) teachers.
2. Insistence upon discipline.
3. Insistence (by parents) that their children go to school and do the work.
No amount of quotas, affirmative action, grants, cultural balance, or anything similar, will get the job done.
I believe I was one of the last cohort of students that had to worry about ‘capital’ punishment. It didn’t happen very often, but the fact that it did, I feel, kept a bit of a lid on excesses.
Another travesty: teachers can’t get rid of problematic students. In my opinion one major reason why private schools do so well on average is that they can get rid of trouble makers. Public schools can’t do that and I am quite sure that would be a huge drag on any efforts to educate students.