Schools Matter:
I guess I should clarify what I think has failed - these attempts are not making for better students or for better teachers, and they're not making for a better work force, and they're sure as shit not making any given community better. It is, however working beautifully when it comes to making some well-connected "entrepreneurs" quite comfortably wealthy. Don't you have to wonder why Neil Bush suddenly discovered his long-dorment passion for Student Testing and Assessment right about the same time his brother was busily sliming No Child Left Behind thru congress?
See, it kinda works like this here: When you make the endeavor about The Public Good, then you build in an incentive to do good things for The Public. When you make the endeavor about Profit, then you build in the incentive for Rentiers to take profit.
(I can't believe anybody has to say it out loud like that, but fuck me, there it is)
Anyway, schools need a lot of help in a lot of ways, but a lot of the ways we've been "helping" them is straight up shameful. Let's try something else.
hat tip = Democratic Underground
This space explores issues in public education policy, and it advocates for a commitment to and a re-examination of the democratic purposes of schools. If there is some urgency in the message, it is due to the current reform efforts that are based on a radical re-invention of education, now spearheaded by a psychometric blitzkrieg of "metastasizing testing" aimed at dismantling a public education system that took almost 200 years to build. JH August, 2005I'll tell y'all up front that I don't know how to "fix the schools". But we've been trying this melange of Charter Schools and Magnet Schools and For-Profit-Public-Private and Casino-Style-High-Stakes-Testing etc etc for something like the last 20 years or so, and I think it's time to admit that practically every attempt to shoehorn the operations of a Public School System into the Standard Business Model has failed.
I guess I should clarify what I think has failed - these attempts are not making for better students or for better teachers, and they're not making for a better work force, and they're sure as shit not making any given community better. It is, however working beautifully when it comes to making some well-connected "entrepreneurs" quite comfortably wealthy. Don't you have to wonder why Neil Bush suddenly discovered his long-dorment passion for Student Testing and Assessment right about the same time his brother was busily sliming No Child Left Behind thru congress?
See, it kinda works like this here: When you make the endeavor about The Public Good, then you build in an incentive to do good things for The Public. When you make the endeavor about Profit, then you build in the incentive for Rentiers to take profit.
(I can't believe anybody has to say it out loud like that, but fuck me, there it is)
Anyway, schools need a lot of help in a lot of ways, but a lot of the ways we've been "helping" them is straight up shameful. Let's try something else.
hat tip = Democratic Underground
No comments:
Post a Comment