You will never understand bureaucracies until you understand that for bureaucrats procedure is everything and outcomes are nothing. If you have been living in a world where outcomes are everything, you may have a very hard time understanding bureaucratic thinking or practices.
How anyone can argue in favor of being non-judgmental is beyond me. To say that being non-judgmental is better than being judgmental is itself a judgment, and therefore a violation of the principle.
Following the lead of the highly organized public education bureaucrats, black leaders have spoken out against efforts to institute school choice programs that would allow parents to decide how at least part of the public funds available for education would be spent. Using vouchers or some other form of direct support, parents could authorize public expenditures up to a given limit, at whatever school they decide best serves the educational needs of their children. For poor blacks in particular, these programs could offer a path to greater influence over unresponsive public school systems, or a way to finance alternatives when they are dissatisfied with the public schools' performance. Such alternatives are only available today to people with substantial incomes, or to others willing to make inordinate sacrifices. In addition, teachers and others with innovative ideas for reaching hard-to-teach children in poor urban areas could set up alternative schools, knowing that even in those poor areas parents attracted by their promise or success could command a chunk of the resources now under the exclusive control of the public education bureaucrats.
If the goal of educational reform is to make schools effective and to get more children into those schools, the first step of meaningful reform is to recognize that saving our children is not the same as saving the public school system. That means changing our definition of "public" education, by seeing it as a committment to provide all children with a quality education rather than as the perpetuation of a specific system of funding and bureaucratic organization.
In Arizona, state school superintendent Lisa Graham Keegan says she employs 165 workers, 45% of her staff, to manage federal programs that make up 6% of her budget.
When Johnny and Jane can't read, their parents aren't interested in platitudes about public education. They are smart enough to notice that the union leaders and politicians aren't sending their children to the same schools. These parents want to be able to send their children to good schools too.
The debate should not be about whether schools are public or private, religious or secular. The bottom line is if students are learning or if they're not learning.
Title I, the federal government's largest education grant program, provides $7.4 billion each year ($118 billion over the last three decades) in an effort to narrow the achievement gap between rich and poor students. (The Los Angeles Times, January 17, 1999)
The program (Title I) has been a failure up to now. The real losers in this are not just the taxpayers but the kids. We haven't been able to deliver.
It (Title I) is a waste. It accomplishes nothing other than the expenditure of money. The fiercest fights in Congress are not over whether it accomplishes anything but over the distribution formula for the money.
If we are going to raise the bar we must take the necessary steps to help students reach it.
It was a very long day, and a very valuable lesson for me about the disconnection between reality and academia.
Many talented teachers get pushed away from the field by a set of bad experiences. Good teachers can be unmade.
For the life of me, I do not see how one can think about nothing. An unfurnished mind is not a thinking mind. I am only proposing that, in the absence of content - of admirable, worthy or noble content - there is no "way of thinking" to be taught.
Never underestimate an educrat when his interests are threatened.
Let us remember that public schools exist not for their superintendents, principals, teachers, and staff, but for students and student learning.
The [Georgia education review] commission should talk more about improving education and less about education reform. Reforms are for bad guys. Those of us who choose careers in education are good guys.
My wife is a school teacher. My mother was a school teacher. I believe in public schools. But I also believe that huge monopolies require competition to shake them loose. Poor people really need some power against the public education system.
When a white person kills a black person, we all go out in the street and protest. But our children are being educationally killed every day in public schools and nobody says a thing.
It's [vouchers] about giving poor people choices, the choices that people with money can make very day. Bill Clinton can decide to send Chelsea to private school because he has the money. And then he says to poor parents in Washington - who are stuck with the same schools he wouldn't send his daughter to - that they have no way out.
What I am proposing today is a fresh start for the federal role in education. A pact of principle. Freedom in exchange for achievement. Latitude in return for results. Local control with a national goal: excellence for every child.
Without testing, reform is a journey without a compass. Without testing, teachers and administrators cannot adjust their methods to meet high goals...Without testing, parents are left in the dark.
I was attracted to private vouchers for all the obvious reasons: I wanted to rescue kids from lousy schools and wanted to offer parents of limited means the freedom to choose the best education for their children.
Why did I offer my scholarships? I believe "public education" means tax dollars should be spent to make sure that citizens are educated. This should not mean that parents (unless they have money) should have to send their children to government owned and operated schools determined by where they live. Parents should have the freedom in a democracy to decide what is best for their children. Schools should have the freedom to decide how best to educate. I would like to see an open education system that allows many kinds of schools and school choice. Philanthropists can help to point the way.
I find it incongruous that the very same wealthy liberals who will get up in court for the ACLU and argue against voucher programs for the poor are using their own money to put their kids in quality private schools.
A curriculum on paper is no good unless it is implemented properly in the classroom and a supervisory system is in place to monitor its results.
Take it from me a former high school teacher - discipline, not unsupervised spending, is what is needed in America's public schools.
Principals must back the teachers up and remove disruptive students from the classroom.
Politicians who are against vouchers for the poor so they can have educational options for their kids are oppressing those people not helping them.
When I came to the department and I looked at the Schools of Excellence program, we found some real anomalies in there and found that the criteria had been set so that you didn't really have to be showing student achievement to be a School of Excellence.
The standards that govern American schools are too low, and too vague. And so the first job of reform is the establishment of detailed, rigorous standards in all subjects, and at all grades.
For many policy experts, the persistent shortage of women at the highest levels of a field otherwise dominated by women - as teachers, principals, and central-office administrators - is one of the most troubling leadership issues in public education.
I want people to be able to get what they need to live: enough food, a place to live, and an education for their children. Government does not provide these as well as private charities and businesses.
We all declare for liberty, but in using the same word we do not all mean the same thing. With some the word liberty may mean for each man to do as he pleases with himself, and the product of his labor; while with others the same word may mean for some men to do as they please with other men, and the product of other men's labor. Here are two not only different, but incompatible things, called by the same thing....
Do high-stakes tests breed cheating? That's the question that is being put forth in newspapers nationwide because of recent, growing evidence of school officials and teachers helping children cheat to get better grades. Cheating represents a character flaw, and is no more a symptom of high-stakes tests than cheating on your wife is a symptom of marriage!
"Error is information only if it is correctable - otherwise it becomes the information."
- - John Chattin-McNichols - -
Free markets provide better services at a lower cost than government provision of the services.
I have yet to see any data suggesting that decontextualised critical thinking skills can be taught. There is no doubt that these skills will flourish when children have enough knowledge to make informed judgments and when teachers have enough genuine interest in their subjects to inspire that same enthusiasm for enquiry in their pupils.Core Knowledge can only supply the curriculum. It's up to teachers to provide the rest. I think the great virtue of Core Knowledge is that it attracts teachers who love their subjects and believe that an ounce of fascination and knowledge is worth a pound of 'critical thinking skills'. The phenomenal success of Core Knowledge is largely due to the fact that they treat teachers with respect and do not try to programme everything they do.
Management is a pathetic substitute for leadership.
You never know how much you really believe anything until its truth or falsehood becomes a matter of life and death for you.
The claim is often made that the SAT is "culturally biased." But life itself is culturally biased. If you can't handle math and the English language, you are in big trouble.The tests are not unfair. Life is unfair. If you are serious about wanting minority students to have a better chance in life, then you need to start years before they take the SAT. And you need to stop deceiving them and the American people.
Without families there is precious little that can be done to enrich a youngster's life and raise his potential for future success. Consider the question: What are some simple threshold basics necessary for a youngster to get a good education? Someone must make sure homework is done. Someone must ensure that the youngster goes to bed early enough to get a good night's rest. Someone must make him obey the schoolteacher. It is not likely that any of these threshold requirements can be accomplished by a politician, social worker, teacher, or consultant. If they are not met, the quantity of public expenditures on education is immaterial; education will not occur.
For years I've said that if the Ku Klux Klan wanted to sabotage black academic excellence, they couldn't find a tool more effective than the public school system in most major cities.
White liberals, black and white politicians, and civil rights organizations have done far greater harm to black academic excellence than yesterday's racists could have ever done. They have given unquestioned support to an educational establishment whose actions have condemned large numbers of black youngsters to lives of educational mediocrity, while simultaneously bleeding taxpayers to death.
But black parents cannot be held blameless. Out of a misguided sense of loyalty, they have allowed the education establishment to lead them down one blind alley after another.
Take Washington, D.C. If a Klansman was mayor, superintendent of schools, and the majority of school principals and teachers were Klansmaen, it is hard for me to imagine education being any worse than it is now with a black mayor, a black as school superintendent, and blacks as principals and teachers. The only difference would be that black parents would be up in arms about the education rot.
When time after time a problem cannot be resolved, it is reasonable to suspect that it may be unresolvable, at least in the manner in which it is conceived.
