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This sounds to me like a fundamentalist (I'm confident that Rick is not a fundamentalist) trivialization of the purpose of public education. In the first place, the historical purposes and justifications were different in different states. I'll focus on the states that came out of the Northwest Ordinance of 1787. These states, as I recall, had extraordinarily high literace rates and a society that was particularly appreciative of the need for public education to prepare students to take their places in a participatory Republican form of government. That is one reason why teachers in many, if not all, states are required to pass an exam on both federal and state constitutions.cut
I grew up in a more populist state where teachers were of the opinion that the rights of initiative, recall, and referendum were the basic rights of every citizen.
The notion that public education is justified for employment reasons is, to my understanding, particularly European.
Regards,
Jack
On Thu, 20 Sep 2007, Rick Tarara wrote:
Public education is just that PUBLIC. That is, it is ultimately controlled
by the citizenry through their elected officials--whether that be federal,
state, or local. While the states do and should promote free exchange of
ideas at the upper education level (although we've seen abuses of that)
through a tenure system and application of the principle of Academic
Freedom, it is less clear that such should be the case through the lower
(and required) levels of education. For the umpteenth time, the only reason
for tax-payer supported education is to produce productive members of the
society. Depending on the needs of that society (or at least the needs as
the majority see them), such education might be narrow and quite regimented.
The society might also opt for a broad and open curriculum--but ultimately
will still want to see that graduates of the program can read and write and
maybe even do a little arithmetic. In this system, the personal, religious,
and political views of individual teachers and/or individual administrators
(who BTW are ALSO public employees) are not relevant. Teach the approved
curriculum. Don't like it--lobby to change it or go teach in a private
school that allows your point of view.
As for being abused by the bean-counters, ultimately those are your
neighbors who are either willing to pay higher taxes (often property taxes)
to support education or they are not. MONEY controls all. Now does anyone
have any power without a union, without bargaining agreements? Some--but
you have to be prepared to exercise it. If 10,000 state teachers outright
quit at the same time, that would not violate any laws but would certainly
cause some minor problems within an unresponsive state system! But to do
that one must have some courage of conviction, have at least a couple months
of money saved up (and most don't), or be willing to take some jobs away
from the Mexicans for a couple months. Few are ready or willing to go that
far.
Now of course to 'test' as JC wants, you have to have a set of national
tests to replace the state tests so as to judge the effectiveness of
teaching in each state--and those 'ain't going to be the FCI! ;-) With all
the wailing and gnashing of teeth over state NCLB testing, what response
would a national test produce??
----- Original Message -----
From: "Rauber, Joel" <Joel.Rauber@SDSTATE.EDU>
To: "Forum for Physics Educators" <phys-l@carnot.physics.buffalo.edu>
Sent: Thursday, September 20, 2007 9:31 AM
Subject: Re: [Phys-l] Kozol fasts to protest NCLB - defense of unions
John C. wrote: