Skip to main content

Public Education: How do we stop being everybody's laboratory

I'm serious.  Let's take a look at the state of Delaware public education.

We will apparently try anything once, and having tried it, we will organize an interest group to promote it an insure it never dies.

We've had (or still have, sometimes the boundaries are fuzzy) standards, high-stakes standardized testing in many different incarnation, benchmarks built off of the standards, performance indicators built off the benchmarks, authentic assessment, smarter balanced assessment, nationally normed assessment, state-generated assessments that had neither reliability nor validity but could control your child's destiny, lead teachers, data coaches, PLCs, magnet schools, alternative schools, online programs, charter schools, independent private schools, catholic schools (though not as many as before), themed schools, alternative routes to certification, new graduation requirements, different graduation requirements, common core standards, Vision 2012, Vision 2015, No Child Left Behind, Race to the Top, character education, school choice, no snack foods in schools, schools without cafeterias, schools based on letting in only bright kids, schools based on letting in only underprivileged kids, State Superintendents, State Secretaries of Education, schools with police officers in them, schools without police officers in them. . . .

This is starting to sound like the bad clone of a Tom Gordon campaign commercial, isn't it?

And I'm sure you could add more.

Some of these programs have been imposed on us by the Feds, others we have inflicted on ourselves, and others . . . just sort of happened and nobody's taking credit/blame for them (failure is always an orphan).

Jack Markell may be uniquely qualified to become the next Secretary of Education because he comes from the only state that has literally been gullible enough to try ANYTHING and EVERYTHING in the name of public education.  If it's a fad, we've fadded.  If it's a hoax, we've been taken in.  If it produces unintended consequences, we're living with them.

And we are still, demonstrably, failing at public education in Delaware.  Not everybody, not all schools.

But we are still condemning thousands of students to a substandard education in the one state that is small enough (in terms of population) and compact enough (in terms of geography) that we ought to be able to educate every single child to his-her-its highest potential.

We used to complain about having a state that is overall smaller than many urban school districts divided into 19 different school districts.  Now we have 19 school districts and I can't count how many charter schools, and we still have some of the highest private school enrollment in the entire country.

So here's my proposition (with apologies to Jonathan Swift):  Let's declare a ten-year moratorium on large-scale innovation in our public schools, and--during that time--if a current innovation fails (like a charter school or a dance program or whatever), let's put out a standing DNR order (Do Not Resuscitate) and let what's supposed to happen to failed experiments happen.  (I'm actually calling for a little Educational Darwinism among experimental programs, aren't I?)

Then let's actually focus our resources an our attention on educating poor kids and kids with special needs for a decade, because (you know what?) middle class and upper middle class parents will find a way to get their kids educated to their specifications, especially if we make them rather than the government responsible for funding their experiments.

I will be in my bunker waiting for bombs.

Comments

pandora said…
No bomb throwing here. I 100% agree. That ungodly long list in your third paragraph has one thing, and only one thing, in common - Not one of those things listed (from standardized testing to Visions to RTTT) had anything to do with educating children.

But here's where I see the need for you to duck :)

"Then let's actually focus our resources an our attention on educating poor kids and kids with special needs for a decade, because (you know what?) middle class and upper middle class parents will find a way to get their kids educated to their specifications, especially if we make them rather than the government responsible for funding their experiments."

Don't worry, I'll have your back.
Anonymous said…
How about this - segregate the schools. Poor kids in these schools; special needs in these schools; regular suburbanites in these schools. Start out giving them equal funding. But for every C the regular school student gets their parents are taxed $100. D = $200 tax and F is $500 tax. The monies collected are then distributed evenly to the poor and special needs schools.
The Last Ephor said…
Perhaps a mixed approach is better. We can use some of the schools or even classes within schools as laboratories. Don't force a one size fits all solution on everyone all the time. Rather, set up a volunteer program for students to choose their modality and track the results.

Popular posts from this blog

A Libertarian Martin Luther King Jr. Day post

In which we travel into interesting waters . . . (for a fairly long trip, so be prepared) Dr. King's 1968 book, Where do we go from here:  chaos or community? , is profound in that it criticizes anti-poverty programs for their piecemeal approach, as John Schlosberg of the Center for a Stateless Society  [C4SS] observes: King noted that the antipoverty programs of the time “proceeded from a premise that poverty is a consequence of multiple evils,” with separate programs each dedicated to individual issues such as education and housing. Though in his view “none of these remedies in itself is unsound,” they “all have a fatal disadvantage” of being “piecemeal,” with their implementation having “fluctuated at the whims of legislative bodies” or been “entangled in bureaucratic stalling.”   The result is that “fragmentary and spasmodic reforms have failed to reach down to the profoundest needs of the poor.” Such single-issue approaches also have “another common failing — ...

More of This, Please

Or perhaps I should say, "Less of this one, please." Or how about just, "None of them. Ever again. Please....For the Love of God." Sunshine State Poll: Grayson In Trouble The latest Sunshine State/VSS poll shows controversial Democratic incumbent Alan Grayson trailing former state Senator Dan Webster by seven points, 43 percent to 36 percent. A majority of respondents -- 51 percent -- disapprove of the job that Grayson is doing. Independents have an unfavorable view of him as well, by a 36/47 margin. Grayson has ignored the conventional wisdom that a freshman should be a quiet member who carefully tends to the home fires. The latest controversy involves his " Taliban Dan " advertisement, where he explicitly compares his opponent to the Taliban, and shows a clip of Webster paraphrasing Ephesians 5:22 -- "wives, submit to your husbands." An unedited version of the clip shows that Webster was actually suggesting that husba...

A reply to Salon's R. J. Eskrow, and his 11 stupid questions about Libertarians

Posts here have been in short supply as I have been living life and trying to get a campaign off the ground. But "11 questions to see if Libertarians are hypocrites" by R. J. Eskrow, picked up at Salon , was just so freaking lame that I spent half an hour answering them. In the end (but I'll leave it to your judgment), it is not that Libertarians or Libertarian theory looks hypocritical, but that the best that can be said for Mr. Eskrow is that he doesn't have the faintest clue what he's talking about. That's ok, because even ill-informed attacks by people like this make an important point:  Libertarian ideas (as opposed to Conservative ideas, which are completely different) are making a comeback as the dynamic counterpoint to "politics as usual," and so every hack you can imagine must be dragged out to refute them. Ergo:  Mr. Eskrow's 11 questions, with answers: 1.       Are unions, political parties, elections, and ...