Susan Jacoby: One Classroom, From Sea to Shining Sea

[tonysam]

Pie-in-the-sky by-and-by stuff and written by a non-educator who really doesn't have a clue about the realities of teaching, but interesting. The conclusion:

First, even though a national curriculum cannot be imposed, serious public intellectuals of varying political views need to step up and develop voluntary guides, in every academic subject, for use by educators who do not disdain expert opinion. The historians Diane Ravitch and Arthur Schlesinger Jr., who disagreed politically on many issues, advocated for just such a set of national history standards in the late 1990s. These guidelines met with approval from just about everyone but the extreme fringes of the left and right.

Second, the federal government must invest more in training and identifying excellent teaching candidates. France, faced with a teacher shortage in the early 1990s, revamped its training system so that aspiring teachers would receive a partial salary in the last year of their studies. Prestigious institutes for teacher training were also set up to replace less rigorous programs, with admission based on competitive national examinations. Which makes more sense — investing resources upfront in attracting the brightest young people to teaching, or penalizing teachers who fail further down the road, as No Child Left Behind attempts to do?

Finally, the idea that educational innovation is best encouraged by promoting competition between schools and pouring public money into quasi-private charter schools should be re-examined by both the left and the right. One of the worst provisions in the Obama administration’s $4.3 billion “Race to the Top” program strongly encourages states to remove restrictions on the number of privately managed charter schools. Here again, we have the worst of both worlds: a federal carrot that can lead only to a further balkanizing of a public education system already hampered by a legacy of extreme decentralization.

Daniel Webster, eulogizing Thomas Jefferson and John Adams, who both died on July 4, 1826, spoke of “an unconquerable spirit of free inquiry ... and a diffusion of knowledge throughout the community” as two of the fundamental requirements of American democracy. He predicted, “If they fall, we fall with them; if they stand, it will be because we have upholden them.” These great principles cannot be upheld if the quality of our public schooling continues to depend more on where a student lives than on a national commitment to excellence.

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Getting rid of local control of schools will NEVER happen; voters want accountability from their local districts. And as long as taxpayers are not willing to pay higher taxes for higher teachers' salaries, you are not going to get the so-called "best" and "excellent" into this field by throwing more money to recruit them to work for peanuts and have to put up with all kinds of workplace abuse from principals, abuse that is a completely different animal from the private sector. Besides, it takes YEARS of experience to be "excellent" in the job of teaching. Finally, the reality of public (and private and charter) schools is that it really isn't about educating kids. It should be, but it isn't.