From today's Miami Herald:
Ten years ago Florida enacted the most sweeping school reform measures taken to date by any state. In essence, it rewards schools whose achievement test scores are excelling and punishes schools whose scores are poor and/or not improving. For those who believe government schooling can be reformed, it has been hailed as a huge success. One of the best features is that it has narrowed the achievement gap between minority and majority students. And a signifcant number of really bad schools have been closed down. But not everyone is happy. One complaint is that graduation rates have not improved (maybe that's because you have KNOW SOMETHING in order to graduate now). But a more thoughtful complaint is that teaching to the tests tends to produce a very sterile, unimaginative curriculum which does not engage and stimulate students who easily grasp the basics.
From today's Baltimore Sun:
In the late 1980's and early 90's, one of the panaceas advanced by the reform movement was involving teenagers in community service as a means of getting them outside the sterile walls of the classroom to gain a vision of life beyond their mandatory thirteen years of incarceration in public schools. I'ts not a bad idea, and many good schools in many states have adopted some form of this concept. A few years back, Maryland became the first state to make community service credits mandatory for high school graduation. Now it has come under fire because, in an effort to help students complete the requirement and graduate on time, many schools are creating activities during the school day that fulfill the community service requirement. But complaining parents feel that this takes away academic learning time, and that all community service should be done after regular school hours.
Both of these stories illustrate the foolishness of one-size-fits-all government-controlled school policies. It's like going to a restaurant and being told the legislature is voting on what you will eat for dinner, and as soon as the poll is finished you will be served what they have chosen for you. One can envision a massive complaint department would have to be installed at such an establishment. But complaints are what the public schools have done the best job of generating.
What's wrong with back-to-basics schools that teach to the tests, alongside enrichment schools that teach that which is aesthetically and intellectually stimulating? What's wrong with schools with a high component of built-in community service, alongside schools where all the time is spent on academic learning (and perhaps meet for fewer hours per day)? Or all of those choices, in various combinations, within the same school?
Mandated schooling and legislated curricula have made parents into chronic whiners instead of thoughtful educational consumers. Where are the menus?
1 comment:
Your analogy of the state legislature mandating the menu of our meals is apt. For the few who actually CARE what is being served up to feed our children's minds, this is a great concern. Besides the fact that the state has arrogated to itself the power to make us pay for educational programs whether we like them or not (or use them or not) there is the obvious problem that the slop they've been dishing up has been neither wholesome or nutritious. Few realize that the state norms for educational competency have been steadily and incrementally lowered, lowered, and lowered. If the average American knew that the education their children now receive in government high schools is less than equivalent to what they received in JUNIOR high school 50 years ago, perhaps we'd have some outage and change. But, alas, the same dimwits they graduate from these institutions go on to fill positions of power and influence in the media and so the story is never told. The dirty little secret that the NEA (National Education Association, the national teachers union which is the most powerful union in the nation) doesn't want us to know is that we would have gone completely down the tubes by now if the home school movement and private Christian schools hadn't continued to establish a baseline of true educational performance. Few people know that these two groups, working sacrificially without government funding, and spending a fraction of what government schools waste per student, regularly produce students whose scores on standard national achievement tests soar far above national averages. If anyone doesn't believe it, all they need do is look at whose winning all of the academic contests such as the Scripts National Spelling Bee which is always dominated by home and privately educated students. The message should be clear: Competition works! Educational reform will come ONLY when we end the NEA's death grip hold on it's educational funding monopoly and return true educational CHOICE to parents. Vouchers and/or simply dis-establishing the government education monolith is the only way we'll see true educational excellence return to our land.
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