There are clearly identified problems with our secondary schools.
1. Inferior texts
2. Inappropriate teaching methods
3. Dumbing-down curriculum
4. Passing kids through
And we know why these problems exist.
Public schools are not required to answer to parents.
Instead, educators are forced to comply with the demands
of politicians and school boards with political agendas.
These agendas are weakening our schools. Schools and teachers are
forced to use supposedly brilliant education plans thought up by state
judiciaries, legislatures,
and bureaucracies. And taxpayers are expected to pay the bill.
A separation of school and state may be beneficial. By shutting
out the interfering politicians and giving the power to the parents
and teachers, schools can become accountable.
We need to put parents and teachers back in charge.
Punishing teachers because of the actions of school boards and
politicians is ridiculous and does not address the problem or the
solution. Trained teaching professionals can get the job done.
We need for school boards, administrators, and politicians to get out of the
way and let educators do their jobs.
"The demonizing of teachers is another public relations feint, a way for corporations to deflect attention from the theft of some $17 billion in wages, savings and earnings among American workers and a landscape where one in six workers is without employment. The speculators on Wall Street looted the U.S. Treasury. They stymied any kind of regulation. They have avoided criminal charges. They are stripping basic social services. And now they are demanding to run our schools and universities...
“Not only have the reformers removed poverty as a factor, they’ve removed students’ aptitude and motivation as factors,” said this teacher, who is in a teachers union. “They seem to believe that students are something like plants where you just add water and place them in the sun of your teaching and everything blooms. This is a fantasy that insults both student and teacher. The reformers have come up with a variety of insidious schemes pushed as steps to professionalize the profession of teaching. As they are all businessmen who know nothing of the field, it goes without saying that you do not do this by giving teachers autonomy and respect. They use merit pay in which teachers whose students do well on bubble tests will receive more money and teachers whose students do not do so well on bubble tests will receive less money. Of course, the only way this could conceivably be fair is to have an identical group of students in each class—an impossibility. The real purposes of merit pay are to divide teachers against themselves as they scramble for the brighter and more motivated students and to further institutionalize the idiot notion of standardized tests. There is a certain diabolical intelligence at work in both of these.”
http://www.schoolsmatter.info/2011/04/hedges-on-why-u-s-is-destroying-its.html
