You hit the nail on the head! But, I fear for the total demise of the public school system. With vouchers allowing money to move to private (in my area - Christian schools) and the rise of homeschooling, there’s not going to be much of a public school system left.
Would diversifying be such a bad thing? I mean, some bad could come with it, nothing is all up side. But on average, if we had ten thousand school systems instead of one, isn't it possible we'd get healthier and more educated students as a population? It's hard to do kuch worse than our current situation of adult illiteracy at 20% and innumeracy over 50%.
The problem is very simple, accountability has to encompass consequences. A return to local control is great, but that's not what we got. Parents and communities don't actually have power over hiring, firing, classroom ratios, admin to staff ratios, curricula, discipline policies. They don't control the money. And school boards continue to be populated by Realtors making speeches to boost their imagined chances at becoming governor. We replaced imperfect local control with local control overseen by (sometimes segregationist) states, then with federal control, and now we tacitly return the responsibility for accountability to the locality while keeping control of the system remote.
It's like blaming Walmart customers for a corporate decision to not stock enough baby formula. If Walmart is not set up to fire the guy making that decision when the customers complain, they soon learn to not spend their energy complaining. They either find formula elsewhere or, if they have no ability to do that, they conform when Walmart tells them to feed their infants punch and, powerless to do anything else, agree with Walmart that sugar water has always been better than formula for babies.
a timely written eduwonk 'Call to Arms'....I agree...but as you correctly pointed out - with no real call for education reform at the federal or state level it's going to take a significant philanthropic effort like the 'ed reform' push from 2005-2015 to create the political environment needed for America to ramp up vs. China, Korea, Malaysia, etc...
You hit the nail on the head! But, I fear for the total demise of the public school system. With vouchers allowing money to move to private (in my area - Christian schools) and the rise of homeschooling, there’s not going to be much of a public school system left.
Perhaps. How would we know if it’s effective?
Would diversifying be such a bad thing? I mean, some bad could come with it, nothing is all up side. But on average, if we had ten thousand school systems instead of one, isn't it possible we'd get healthier and more educated students as a population? It's hard to do kuch worse than our current situation of adult illiteracy at 20% and innumeracy over 50%.
The problem is very simple, accountability has to encompass consequences. A return to local control is great, but that's not what we got. Parents and communities don't actually have power over hiring, firing, classroom ratios, admin to staff ratios, curricula, discipline policies. They don't control the money. And school boards continue to be populated by Realtors making speeches to boost their imagined chances at becoming governor. We replaced imperfect local control with local control overseen by (sometimes segregationist) states, then with federal control, and now we tacitly return the responsibility for accountability to the locality while keeping control of the system remote.
It's like blaming Walmart customers for a corporate decision to not stock enough baby formula. If Walmart is not set up to fire the guy making that decision when the customers complain, they soon learn to not spend their energy complaining. They either find formula elsewhere or, if they have no ability to do that, they conform when Walmart tells them to feed their infants punch and, powerless to do anything else, agree with Walmart that sugar water has always been better than formula for babies.
a timely written eduwonk 'Call to Arms'....I agree...but as you correctly pointed out - with no real call for education reform at the federal or state level it's going to take a significant philanthropic effort like the 'ed reform' push from 2005-2015 to create the political environment needed for America to ramp up vs. China, Korea, Malaysia, etc...