Re: [Phys-l] How Much Value is Added at Elite Institutions-Response to Haim #2

[Hugh Haskell <haskellh@verizon.net>]

At 19:18 -0700 01/29/2011, William Robertson wrote:
> Let me throw a grenade and then get out of the way. How about we get 
> the government out of the education business? They don't have a great 
> track record in much else that they do. And if you say that private 
> education organizations would just abandon the inner city, then you 
> have to explain how other businesses survive in the inner city, but 
> private schools wouldn't.
What makes you think "little government" has done any better? The 
problem, ISTM, is that both the feds, the states, and the local 
districts have all been trying to manage the details over each 
others' heads. For every crazy action of the Feds (NCLB, for 
example), there are equal insanities at the state (e.g., Texas text 
book management), and the local districts (e.g, see Wake County, NC's 
recent willy-nilly dismantlement of a school assignment plan that has 
been held up as a national example of how to insure that poor 
children have the same opportunities as the wealthier kids, driving 
out the well-respected superintendent of schools and replacing him 
with a retired army brigadier).

Everyone is concerned only with standardized test scores, and no one 
seems to give a damn about educating the children in their charge. So 
Congress passes stupid laws mandating stupid tests, DOE dutifully 
makes up error-riddled tests that actually test nothing, the states 
and local districts dutifully administer them, firing, or trying to 
fire those teachers who kids can't get good scores on worthless 
tests, which encourages the teachers to cheat just to save their own 
skins, while the children are the victims at every level.

Who do I blame? The schools of education, who somehow got the idea 
that teachers don't have to know squat about the subjects they 
teach--they only need to know how to "teach"--and then they taught a 
generation of administrators the same thing, and the administrators 
have told their government officials the same thing, and the 
government officials, who listen to the "experts" then enact policies 
to implement these dumb ideas and we are now on the "race to the 
bottom" but everyone is standing on their head, so they think that 
the direction they are going is up.

So let's not just blame the Feds, there is plenty to go around, not 
even excluding parents who have also bought the BS about standardized 
tests, and actually think that those test results tell us something 
about how good any given teacher is.

Gang, the inmates have taken over the asylum. And it's making us all crazy.

Hugh
--

Hugh Haskell
mailto:hugh@ieer.org
mailto:haskellh@verizon.net

It isn't easy being green.

		--Kermit Lagrenouille