We hear again and again that the public district school system is broken and not fit for purpose. Some of these criticisms are justified and supported by evidence, some are valid but hard to pinpoint and thus hard to evidence, and some are just wrong. Inevitably the result is almost entirely political. Instead of fixing what is broken, the solution is to create something new. This is not even treating the symptom and ignoring the disease. This is cutting off an arm beause of a broken finger.
I am constantly amazed and distressed at people's ability to ignore the past and its lessons which to me is one of the two "American diseases" although I suspect it also exists elsewhere and is more a feature of politics and worldview rather than geography. We have a public education because of the experience of not having one. When education is restricted to the wealthy and/or religious, society suffers. Every single communiy that has advanced or wants to advance has seen public education as key, and the more effective, the greater the advances.
Not here. We see good public education as a reward for the better off and so fund schools unequally. District x can never get an override or a bond, and a 4% increase on a low base generates little even if it is paid Meanwhile, District y has every override known to man, bonds are oversubscribed and even a modest tax increase on a high base generates zillions.
Efforts to raise minimum standards like Common Core are fought and blocked, teachers are so demonised that recruitment is in reverse, salaries are kept too low to recruit and retain, and academic levels of trainees are around those of gardening programs portraying it as not for the best and the brightest.
One high-profile effort was the Bush push to replace education with testing, aka No Child Left Behind which laregley applied only to public district schools. From memory, every educator from practitioner to researcher to policy-maker warned of what was to come. When the inevitable did indeed come to pass, schools and teachers were blamed for the failure of the edict.
Another major effort to do something was to establish charter schools, not as laboratories for learning as so many wanted but as a conscious attack on district schools. This has had a significant effect on district school enrolment, particularly as charters have taken so many of the more motivated, more able and more supported students in district schools thus further justfying the brickbats.
Next was tax credits to attend non-public schools, coincidentally mostly religious and mostly to the right politically. Predictably, most of the funds went to those who were already paying for such schools but again, many district students were enticed and not so many charter.
The latest is in the form of vouchers, effectively paying students to attend non-public schools and early research from Arizona suggests this has led to a growth in the extent of ... religious, politically to the right provision.
Left-behind district students are increasingly those with special needs, with behavioural problems and with little in the way of supportive parenting. Costs per student exceed funding and will only continue to increase, thus supporting ineffectiveness and inefficiency arguments.
Instead of consciously destroying public district education, we should be fixing it. We know what works, and what does not such as one-size-fits-all, but first we need to pay attention to that broken finger. Brachial amputation is not a solution.
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