Leonard Pitts gets something right:
Americans seem to be rallying around a demand for education reform. Apparently, we’ve had enough of students failing schools and schools failing students. We know our kids are capable of better — and that in a competitive, hyper-connected world where China is rising and India aspiring, not delivering better is no longer an option.
Unfortunately, whenever anyone seeks to require better, they seem to find themselves at odds with the last people you’d expect: teachers. Or, more accurately, teachers unions.
No, I don’t hate teachers. I’ve been one myself. Moreover, I know that whatever I’ve achieved in life is due in large part to what I learned from Mr. Jacobs, Ms. Sobo, Mrs. Harrison, Sr. Tapanez and many others.
No, I don’t hate unions. I support the right of workers to organize and bargain collectively if they choose.
And no, I don’t think teachers bear sole responsibility for the failure of our kids to excel. You also have to blame those parents who are uninvolved or who live under the misapprehension that their little darlings can do no wrong, even when said darlings are swinging from the light fixtures in class or running an extortion ring behind the gym.
All that said, it is troubling to see teachers unions reflexively reject anything that smacks of accountability.
Rhee offered a significant raise and big bonuses for effective teachers in exchange for weakening tenure protections. She had to fight the union.
The White House put up $4 billion in grant money to spur innovation in schools. It had to fight the unions.
Those Rhode Island officials fired (and later re-hired) faculty at a school where one child in two doesn’t graduate and only 7 percent of 11th graders are proficient in math. It had to fight the unions.
Enough. It is time teachers embraced accountability. Time parents, students and government did, too.
Because ultimately, what is at stake here is not grades, not jobs and not blame. No, this is an argument about the future — and whether this country will have one. The fact is, it cannot in a world where information is currency and American kids are broke.
[…] There is a groundswell building here. Lead, follow, or get out of the way.
Well, you may have mentioned, Mr Pitts, that your beloved post-racial President pissed all over parents — many of them black — when he did away with future vouchers in DC as part of his cozy relationship with the teacher’s union — but that’s probably asking a bit much.
Baby steps.
:headdesk:
“The last people they’d expect?”
People must be too busy staring at their own rectal polyps.
Pitts is still wrong. Rhees may be fighting unions, but the White House isn’t:
Even when Pitts is partly right, he’s almost always more wrong.
Baby steps toward the
rightcorrect question.The clock does jump into the act to be sure, since their baby steps appear to be engaged in a race against their own ruin: will ruin arrive at the finish line first? Stay tuned.
My cow-orkers in public education really don’t like it when I bring up the graph showing per-pupil spending and pupil achievement over the past twenty years.
So once they figure out the how, will that newfound understanding enable them to find the what?
You wanna fix the screwels? Start charging the chil’ens tuition.
Questions:
1. Just how tough is it to render the basics of a solid primary education sans the overlay of secprogg PC bullshit?
2. With that in mind, of corporate America, which marks have the best physical urban and suburban penetration as it concerns proximity, economies of scale, competence, market acceptance, organizational prowess and so forth?
3. Why aren’t they, probably under a partner brand, in primary education in these markets? Setting aside the govt’s aegis, that is.
My daughter’s city elementary school was operated to some degree by a private corporation so how much of this is already going on I don’t know. But any major American corporation with the incentive could adopt and deploy a K-6, -8, or -12 program in 12 months within existing infrastructure and do a vastly better job for less than the establishment.
First step: get rid of the department of education.
JHo – my daughter’s preschool is private, is for profit, and delivers an excellent education. Government really gets in the way once they hit kindergarten, which will be a year to review what she learned some time before.
When I was a kid, they had three different reading groups, so the better readers weren’t held back. Now, I’m sure that would be improper because it makes some of the children feel bad. So, they just slow everyone down to match the pace of the slowest.
Leonard Pitts is a whiny dillweed. And obtuse. He’s only now figuring out what so many normal Americans have known for generations.
“Baby steps.”
Nah, he’ll just use this to point out how “moderate” he is… he will still insist that any changes include lots of Nanny State control and buckets of taxpayer cash.
Meanwhile, in Massachusetts, the Boston Globe reports:
Concern over students switching schools
Turnover linked to lower scores
As state education officials push school districts to overhaul the lowest-achieving schools, they are focusing on a long-overlooked issue they say could be a key in raising performance — the frequency that students switch schools.
New statewide data appear to show a strong correlation between schools with weak academic performance and those with large influxes and exoduses of students.
Some 400 schools across Massachusetts — most of them in poor areas and considered underachieving — have high turnover rates, with at least 20 percent of their student populations registering or departing during the school year, according to data collected by the state Department of Elementary and Secondary Education using a new student tracking system.
To which I add:
And the education establishment sees in this mobility, this ability to exercise school choice, self-inflicted harm by the mobile student population – not harm inflicted by the establishment, which again and again proves itself incapable of providing the basic education services required – rather than coming to grips with the critical message the students and their parents are delivering to the failing schools they leave behind.
Is that Alice over there, just down from the Real World?
Bush was wrong and now Obama is wrong in attempting national control/encouragment in regards to education. Cranky was right up there at #8.
It really doesn’t help, though, that teachers matriculate through the prog-infused ed schools. John Dewey and every other prog educational theorist since then. Garbage.
You people want to abolish the NEA – who are probably to ed(octrination) what JournoList were to the fourth estate I mean journalisms. I see how you are. You want nothing safe.
– This week the local Reader featured an article talking about the plight of recent grads to find employment. Aside from the obvious condition of the economy, a common theme expressed by a group of last years graduating class is summed up by one fellow who said: “In going around to various job fairs and doing a large number of personal interviews, what I’m finding is that my schooling provided me with a wealth of information and almost zero practical working skills that would let me put that information to some salable use. My only hope seems to be in finding an unpaid internship where I can learn how to do something.”
– And so the degree factories labor on.
New statewide data appear to show a strong correlation between schools with weak academic performance and those with large influxes and exoduses of students.
Parents don’t choose to leave their kids in bad schools? Perish the thought!
as long as everykid gets a trophy what’s the problem?
trophies are shinyand look good on mantles and are excellent doorstops
RE #16: You know who is guaranteed a job on graduation? Service academy grads and ROTC scholarship/contract students. Just sayin’.
I think everyone should learn a trade if they can. I’m not interested in making it a requirement, but it just makes sense to do so. The educated (and the over-educated like me) need to know the value of work. Plus, it gives you something to fall back in if your education turns out to not be as helpful as you would like.
Not on purpose, I’m guessing.
once u learn a trade u can’t unlearn it
“In going around to various job fairs and doing a large number of personal interviews, what I’m finding is that my schooling provided me with a wealth of information and almost zero practical working skills that would let me put that information to some salable use.
You mean, a degree in French Feminism or Gender studies doesn’t translate into a marketable skill?
I’m shocked. I am.
I do not think it is worth not destroying the entire thing and starting from scratch. Oh, and sowing the ground with salt inbetween.
I got nothing but time wasted from schools and teachers, and I owe it to my “absentee working parents” that I have any education at all, because they gave a damn because I was their flesh and blood and not some random stranger or just someone less important than their union.
Political power protects thievery, child abuse, and graft, and that sums up the “educational” system. I don’t CARE if 1% or 5% or 10% of the teachers are brilliant and dedicated and want to help people despite the system, it’s not enough. Everywhere I’ve been the vast majority are dunderheads or ideologues or just union functionaries.
But in the end, until the unions’ power is broken, or their patrons (the Dems) sufficiently driven out of power (in the bureaucracy as well as the Congress and State Houses), NOTHING is going to happen except for fake-ass reforms as distractions, more featherbedding and further abuse of American children and taxpayers by this damned mess.
And this is me being restrained.
The NEA and the DoE are one and the same.
The United States spends more on teaching kids than any other country on public education, yet is mediocre (at best) on performance. Yet parochial schools often deliver a better education for half the price.
While I support workers collectively organizing, yeah I blame teachers unions. Just like I blame the UAW for killing the U.S. automotive industry.
It is also parents. Kids whose parents send them to a private or parchoial school have parents who care and (usually) have the additional funds to send them or pushed them into a scholarship program.
But the solution is simple. Competition. Give every parent a voucher that has to be used at an accreditted school. Let schools compete for students. If public schools had to compete for students, they would get better. The teachers union would find itself the equivalent of the UAW.
“Unfortunately, whenever anyone seeks to require better, they seem to find themselves at odds with the last people you’d expect: teachers. Or, more accurately, teachers unions.”
Business As Usual does not like people reforming things. So simple even a columnist should be able to understand.
Thursday morning links…
You can get almost anything at Costco Hard Drinkers, Meet Soft Science Lessons from Ma Bell Michelle: Mad Maxine’s minority fat-cat bankers Insty: Is higher ed a waste of money? Driscoll: Paranoia, Short-Term Thinking, and the Ongoing Media Deat…