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This article appears in Aug 29 – Sep 4, 2007.
The Miseducation of America
Back to school in a land of consumerism
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Ms. Nsenga, (if i may)I read your coloumn and i agree. we spoil our children excessively and do not instill in them self love. we as parents always want to put a band aid on our kids when they cry or even sniffle and as they get older their crys change and we change the way the way we console them instead of instead of the $1.98 band-aids, it is now the $150.00 jordans and its also amazing how teens can remember when tennis shoes are due to arrive at footlocker but cant remember when we told them to take out the trash the night before trash day.
I note that you approach putting the blame where it lies: with parents. As your experience in Africa demonstrates, lack of money is not the impediment to education in this country. Nor, for that matter is it the management of the Dept. of Education, which quite frankly ought never to have been created. Indeed putting physical and practical distance between the classroom and the management of education is in all likelihood responsible to some degree for the decline in educational oucomes. There are no good ideas to be had in Washington that are better and more effective than what can be had right here at home. You find the Sec’y of Ed to be unqualified: I don’t think there is ANYONE as well qualified to determine what works at Garinger, for example, as the people IN THE BUILDING. And no one is better able to judge the outcomes that the prcincipal customer of the school system: the parents.
In a nutshell, the problems can be solved by: 1. Eliminating all Federal level involvement, 2. Tying the school funding from the public coffers to the student, thereby creating competition among schools for students, 3. Eliminating system wide (or in some cases statewide) compensation plans: make the principal responsible for recruiting the teachers he or she needs to attract the students using whatever compensation he can, so long as he doesn’t operate in the red.
In other words make control HIGHLY localized, and use the model that, in commerce, made the U.S the strongest country int he world: a competetive free market.
The only problem: the teachers’ unions won’t have it for even a moment.