Is it the teacher's unions? The auto unions certainly seem like dead weight for the Big 3 in Detroit, so I don't have much problem viewing the teacher's unions in the same light. It's not really clear to me how the teacher's union benefits from the schools doing well, or gets punished for them doing bad. That's a recipe for mediocrity, and the best teacher's I've had always came from the real world, and taught in spite of the usual route to becoming a teacher. So I can definitely see a union stranglehold being a large factor, but I'm not sure it's the whole enchilada.
Are teacher's salaries not high enough? According to the union itself, I wouldn't think so. Where else does a person get that kinda schedule and security for that kinda dough?
Are the classrooms too crowded? If that's the case, wouldn't you be able to easily test it by doing an experiment where class sizes are under whatever the magic number is? Seems like that'd be easy as hell to prove, and then we'd build a boatload of schools to hit that ratio, and our streets would be paved with gold in no time. If anything, I see schools shutting down and consolidating into big SuperWalMart editions.
I think the reason we're stuck is because we don't know what a quality education is. Like an army of capable soldiers with a dolt for a commander, this is a top-down problem, where having the wrong top contaminates everything below it. In this case, the top would be a guiding and uniform idea of what the ideal education is. The Greeks knew it, the Romans knew it, revolutionary America knew it, but we don't have a clue. I dare say that the countries that are whipping us now, like India, know it too. I'll bet they know just what a good education consists of, what it's good for, and don't fret over hurt feelings in pursuit of it.
3 Comments
http://www.city-journal.org/html/8_2_a1.html
It's like how they say kids don't know how to type because of txts and IM. Nobody thought to teach 4th graders typing, but all this technology came along that necessitated them to type and type quickly, so they fostered their own typing styles, and lolz and beh0ldz, they can't type worth shit.
I like the Anything But Knowledge phrase they throw around in that article. That sums it up nicely.
i think you'd like this blog alot:
http://d-edreckoning.blogspot.com/
there's a bunch of education blogs out there, but this guy doesn't seem tied to any foundation or part of the conversation. he just seems to think that, unless you can show some data as to why you're saying something, you're probably just full of crap.