Education Epiphany...

...meditations of "No Child's Behind Left" (pun intended).

As a former high school physics teacher, you feel you're on a treadmill and you're told these test scores are very, VERY important. And naturally, as a point of pride in your work, you want your kids to do WELL on any exam, standardized or otherwise. It could mean the difference in school ranking, district funding and if failure is repeated: job loss and school closure.

I'd seen it happen with a friend that was brought in to be a principal of a failing school. He wasn't able to turn it around in three years, so he lost his job, they fired the staff, closed, reopened and renamed the school.

It did not change the demographics my friend had to deal with - 80% where English was not spoken fluently in the home, so the same demographics won't change for the new staff/principal. It is essentially planned obsolescence of a most cynical type.

I am hardly the xenophobic type, but those are my observations. I have to agree with the author of the article below: it's not the teachers, the kids or the teacher's unions. We're too enamored with privatization to the point of Mammon worship, and the free market as if Thomas Friedman's neoliberalism saved Chile (although, it did give a blueprint to Pinochet).

A controversial statement:

Standardized tests allow education to compete with...itself, rather than prepare a future workforce for labor. Which, I guess doesn't matter since we've allowed our elected officials in both major parties to outsource jobs for the middle class overseas, decreasing the standard of living in the US.

On web sites like GreatSchools.org, you can see how your school stacks up, or the potential school you may plan to enroll your child in if you're moving to a particular area. Funds are allocated based upon the performance on said standardized tests: the better you perform --> the more money the district gets --> the more likely families will move to your district --> thus property values increase (more money for same district). Reverse the formula for districts with unique family structure and/or cultural challenges.

It is a system of privatization that no other country has an example of (that I'm aware of), whose only mission is (seemingly) to completely shut down public schools and teacher's unions.

This has a LOT to do with science and how/IF new discoveries are going to come from US shores.

Read on, pilgrim...