Once again, the fabulous Steve Olsen has encapsulated my thoughts perfectly (see his excellent post, here.)
I only have a few things to add, and then I'm putting my fight against vouchers to rest for awhile...
I have been following a post over at Coolest Family Ever, where Jesse is talking about why the pro-voucher camp (to which he belongs) may benefit by looking at why they lost. It's a thoughtful and honest post, and I have to say that I agree with his assessements.
See here: http://www.coolestfamilyever.com/2007/11/06/to-fellow-voucher-supporters/
One comment that has been with me throughout the day comes from "That One Guy" who says that "while the public education system may be broken, voting for the first shabbily-conceived solution isn’t the answer."
Several days back I had a conversation with a home school parent who was pro-voucher and pro referendum 1 because 1. he believed he would be getting some tax dollars back if it passed and 2. when i explained to him that he had to have his kids enrolled in some private school with 41 or more students in order to qualify for a voucher, he was surprised that he had been mislead. But he also said "well, its just that this bill finally gives parents a choice." He sincerely believes that public schools are not the answer for his children. He is a good friend of mine and I have always respected his choice to educate his children at home. I also believe that he sincerely feels that he has no other "choice" than to do so.
Over the next several months I am going to work very hard at understanding what this means -- to give parents a choice in how their kids are educated. To me, the choice has always existed, and I don't understand what a new law does that suddenly empowers parents to make choices for their children. I asked my friend if the voucher law somehow justified his position to educate his children at home, or if there were public school officials at his door every day with a gun to his head, forcing his kids back to school and therefore eliminating his choice. Of course he laughed out loud with me at the very picture of such a thing.
This light hearted conversation with my friend has reaffirmed my commitment to bridge the political divide that exists in our state. One blessing of the whole voucher fight was that I saw people from all walks of life and political persuasions joining together to fight the thing because they just felt it was not the right answer. Some voucher fighters believe in the free market, but believe that a free market shouldn't be subsidized with tax dollars. Other voucher fighters, like me, want to make public schools in utah the best in the nation, if not the world. And still others are the true conservatives who don't want government meddling in private enterprise (the thought of private schools having to be accountable to the government made them turn green).
As citizens of Utah and more importantly as human beings, we know that education of our children is the most important thing we can do for our country. I believe more than ever that crusaders on both sides of this debate have one common goal: to provide the best possible education for our children. I hope the voucher debate has brought us together, instead of pull us apart.
I would like to echo a comment by Rob on "Coolest Family Ever" where he says "there is too much work to do." He's absolutely right. If we want stellar education- whether it be public or private - well, then it's time to get down to business and make it happen. No more us vs. them. No more political discussion. Let's just get to work and find real answers to make our education dreams for our children come true. I am not going to give up on that.
Emily
15 comments:
we should hire MBA consultants to look at our public schools and apply private sector managment models to them
There is a mass of evidence that our primary and secondary schools are colossal failures in educating our children. I can't begin to present the evidence here, but to readers who want an overview of the scope of the US education disaster, I recommend reading "Inside American Education" by Thomas Sowell and the "Conspiracy of Ignorance" by Martin L. Gross.
To me the most shocking revelation is not that our schools are failing to educate the average student, but that the academic achievement of our best and brightest lags so far behind that of the best and brightest of other countries.
When my two sons were in elemenatry and secondary school, they would often bring home notes from school administrators and teachers. The cheery notes with happy faces couldn't hide the fact that semi-literate teachers infested the schools. I used to be appalled at the numerous grammatical errors. Often I would correct the errors in red ink and send the corrected copy back to the originator. Not surprisıngly, I never received a word of thanks or any feedback whatsoever. Then one evening at a PTA meeting, the PTA president, herself a practitioner of fractured English, told me that the faculty and administrators were "indigent" at my corrections. I told her it was the parents, not the teachers, who should be "idignant" because there were so many illiterates on the faculty. Then, I suggested that, if the PTA were doing its job, it would be insisting that illiterate teachers be removed from their positions.
The educationist establishment, in moments of candor, admits there are problems with the quality of schools. In fact, it wages a brilliant disinformation campaign, asserting that the principal problem is the lack of sufficient money to achieve excellence. Yet, when we compare results of our public schools with those of parochial schools with a lot less money, the "money" argument seems to dissolve. Comparing public and parochial schools, one might argue that the amount of money is inversely proportional to the degree of success.
Fellow citizens, I am convinced that the poor quality of our schools is primarily attributable to the overall poor quality of teachers. I believe a self-serving educationist establishment, consisting of the teachers' unions, university education departments, and school district superintendants is threatening our democracy and our prosperity by perpetuating a teacher certification system that vitually ensures academically handicapped teachers. To be certified, would-be teachers have to subject themselves to the intellectual debasment of hour after vacuous hour of education courses. Everyone with a room temparature IQ who has taken an education course knows that these courses are a sham.
Students majoring in education are the academic bottom feeders. Their average SAT score is well below that of students with other majors. They are the academic dregs. How can we expect our schools to produce academic excellence when so many of the teachers have never attained any academic distinction?
So, why does the educationist establishment insist that would-be teachers subject themselves to ed courses--a compendium of half-baked theories, psycho babble, anti-intellectualism, egalitarian mischief, mutlicutural schlock and disasterous pedagogical fads--in order to achieve certification? There are two reasons: Money and money. First, ed courses are a cash cow for the universities. Because of the lack of serious content in ed courses, university education departments can offer these sterile courses to dullards. Universities deliberately set very low standards for education majors so they can tap into this lucrative, but illicit market. That is, they extract tuition out of students who, were it not for the low standards, would be asking,"Lettuce on that burger, sir? Second, the requirement to take these junk courses deters smart individuals from becoming teachers. For academically gifted indivduals ed courses are an outrage. The insipidness of the course content and the intellectual torpor of fellow students combine to deter intellectuals from pursuing a career as a teacher. This deterrence creates an artifical teacher shortage, forcing teacher salaries up.
If you have an MA in mathematics from MIT, you can't get a job teaching high school without taking the required number of education courses. Yet, in many states, the teacher with 18 or 21 hours of "mathematics for teachers" (the appelation "for teachers" is code for "dumbed down") courses, is considered qualified.
One can be fooled by glitzy catalogs of courses offered in education departments. Look at the following three graduate courses offered at a university near my home:
Advanced Approaches to Interdisciplinary Learning
Social Policy for Families and Children
Instruction in Early Childhood and Elementary Education
If you are impressed with these pretentious titles, let us recall that many of the students who take and pass these courses are semi-literate. They are the ones who graduate and write ungrammatical, unintelligible notes to parents. The lack of substance in ed courses is the reason that dullards take refuge in this intellectual wasteland. One dirty little secret about ed courses is that graduate ed courses are no more diffucult than undergraduate ed courses. You can get an MA in education without ever having taken a single undergraduate course. All the courses are bullshit. There is no beginning and no end, no real corpus of knowledge. Try taking graduate courses in chemistry, mathematics, Latin or most other academic disciplines without having taken undergraduate courses.
Perhaps the real tragedy is that many of the would-be teachers have never experienced the sublime joy that comes from studying the great works of history, literature, economics and philosophy; have never gained an insight into the pure wonder of mathematics and science; and have never experienced the thrill of speaking in a foreign language. The very concept of academic achievement is alien to many of these would-be teachers. To them school is drudgery.
To be sure, many of the would-be teachers lack the mental acumen to enjoy inellectual pursuits, but those who do have the acumen are victimized by the requirement to take stultifying ed courses. While would-be teachers are studying such weighty topics as how to cut out paper dolls and how to arrange a bulletin board, they are unable to study the ideas of humankind's greatest thinkers.
The time has come to clean up the mess and close all education schools and departments of education. I suggest we offer amnesty to all professors of education rather than punish them. We could also offer them vocational training so they could learn some useful skill. Some of my friends have suggested reeducation camps to rehabiliate these imposters. I disagree. I think we should treat these culprits with compassion despite the horrific legacy they have bequathed us. Years ago I coined the following definition of a professor of education: "One who can take a bikini idea, and bundle it in a snowsuit so no one wants to look anymore".
Let's establish meaningful certification standards for teachers.. Elementary school teachers should be required to obtain a real liberal arts degree. Secondary school teachers should be required to have a degree with a minimum of 40 semester hours in their subject area.
To thwart the inevitable diploma mills that would proliferate, teachers should be required to take a State certfication exam to confirm their knowledge.
All newly hired teachers should be on probation for a year. Those who demonstrate pedagogcal excellence would be retained; the others should be dismissed. I estimate that given high standards, the attrition rate for newly hired teachers would exceed 50 percent.
If we don't act to energize our schools, our children are going to be flipping hamburgers, digging ditches, doing laundry, and cleaning yards for the affluent Indians, Japanese, Chinese, and Koreans, who do have schools that produce excellence.
Anon 2, you had me convinced that public school teachers are illiterate dummies until you "bequathed" us with your knowledge of "pedagogcal" excellence and "elemenatry" schools. Then I realized, you're just another gasbag looking for some of that wingnut welfare.
Anonymous #2.
I can't post pictures here... but if I could you'd see the little emoticon guy who has the big eyes and the straight face.
Are we really going to keep going and going and going on and on and on about the failure of the education system? Or are we going to work on fixing it?
Come on people, no more blame games. This is America! Let's get creative... and positive!
I attended public school in New York, and based on that experience I would say Utah hasn't got a chance of having the best public schools in the nation. The competition for first place is tougher than you think. OTOH, I'm sure Utah schools are very far from the worst based on various comparative studies.
If it weren't for all the teachers who are so committed to their communities that they resist the temptation to go elsewhere for more money, Utah's schools wouldn't be as good as they are.
I'm glad the UEA won this round against the right-wing ideologues. They ought to go on a counterattack with some new public school initiatives, the public support is mustered already.
Forget the UEA!
Although I'm glad that vouchers lost I think the UEA is as much a part of the problem as anything else.
Let's find some great candidates, both republican and democrat and throw the rest of the bums out!
Anonymous 2:
I find it interesting that while you insult an entire profession, you do not disclose what your profession is, or where you obtained your degree(s) (or if you even did obtain any). There is a spectrum of intelligence and talent in any given profession. Degrees in "Family and Consumer Science" and "Communications" are even easier to come by. Many professions do not even require basic college degrees. At least the educational (educationist is not a word) establishment has standards. Furthermore, colleges are ranked; if you did not go to a top-ranked university, sir, your degree isn't worth the paper it's printed on. I did graduate from a top-ten university and I am a teacher, and proud of my colleagues and profession. There is no mass of evidence (two books does not a triangulation of data make) and you are out of line. Probably out of work, too, judging from the time you took to post this. I've found that those who hate teachers and schools are society's biggest losers - they have no real education (I'll bet money you didn't get into a top university - you're not intelligent enough), no valid career, and no meaningful contributions to society. Keep blaming others for your and your kids' failures; we don't care!
I can understand houw people can have problems with public schools. I certainly didn't want my children going to the same kind of schools that I went to, ones that indoctrinated them into being an unthinking worker bee or good little nationalists . . .
But I did feel that if I didn't want my child in a traditional school environment -- that was my problem to solve. I had no right to take away the option of public school for everyone else because of my issues (which is the ultimate, long-range goal of the pro-voucher folks).
I found an optional program in the SLC district which was a better fit with my values. The catch was parent involvement. Between my daughter's dad and myself, we had to put in 3 hours a week in the classroom plus committee work -- that's how the progam has been run for the past 30 years.
I was a single working mom when my daughter started out, but I made it work. I'd take either 1/2 day vacation every other week or find some way to make up the time at work. It has been hard at times, but the results are well worth it.
If I had the money, I'd consider home schooling and private school options, but the truth is there are options within the free public system if you take the time and energy to look for them -- and those options may mean that you'll have to put in a little more effort than their traditional school counterparts.
To Rob Miller and the Utah Democratic Party. You ran a fine campaign touching on all the right buttons to get this legislation killed, congratulations....
Now where do we go from here?
I would hope with your success you will now not sit on your behinds and just celebrate your victory, but would actually look at the problems and try to find some answers.
If only the Teachers Union and the Utah Democratic Party could have put as much energy in getting the Apple initiative passed to provide the longterm funding of public education here in Utah and get our PPE somewhere in the middle nationally, and open enrollment for all schools, across district boundaries, and support for merit pay for Teachers, you could go along way to solve the problems of Utah's public education system.
But if you just sit back and do nothing, and expect some kind of windfall or concessions from the Utah Legislature you will find nothing but coal in your stockings.
Emily,
I share a lot of the same sentiments as you [except for the way I voted on Referendum 1 ;-) ].
Even though I was on the losing end of the vote yesterday, I don't feel as down as I thought I would. Your article here cheers me up even more. Because when it comes right down to it, we DO need to bridge that divide and realize that we're just all a big group of people who want what's best for our kids.
Spyglass (Mark) -
Why so gloomy? I think I said that we need to work together and celebrate our common goals ... and ok, we beat vouchers... let's find real solutions and move upward. No more blame game, no more politicizing education -- its time for that good old fashioned Utah hands on approach to getting thigns done. That's what I love about our state and that's why I am not giving up.
"its time for that good old fashioned Utah hands on approach to getting thigns done"
Um..no, I don't think so, it's Utah thinking that caused all these problems in the first place..lets look at a state were schools work
"I'm tired of Utah's schools being compared to East Coast schools"
Utahans could learned a few things from public schools in NY, CT & NJ
The reason why the public school system is failing? Because Republicans are controlling it.
Anon #2:
Say what?
Teachers are at the bottom of SAT scores when they enter college? Did you get spanked on the rear from a teacher when you were young? And now you hate all teachers?
Or are you just trying to piss off everyone on this blog?
Most teachers go beyond studying the subjects they teach. Most often, they research and live the subjects. And yet, we pay them a salary slightly above a non-skilled service worker.
Hopefully Anon #2 is in the minority.
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