SCHOOL REFORM-A FAILING GRADE

This link is  a review of two different books , one by a teacher from inner city New York and the other from a Wall Street tycoon who poses as an educator..

It's no secret that our students are in trouble , not from lack of ability, but from a system that has been led astray by over educated smart asses who think that privatization  of everything is the way to go, that unions are bad and are the reason for bad teachers existence..  Any teacher and a lot of parents will tell you bad teachers could be flushed out if administrators had any balls , which most do not.. Politics filters down to this level especially to school boards and district level educators..

This madness of test, test , test dissolves to teaching to the test.. A system that does not teach to to face the everyday world much less your working world.  Thinking is verboten.

Add to the testing craze , the bullshit of NO TOLERANCE, none thinking actions that punish the good with the bad, stripping lockers out of schools and replacing them with 100 pound backpacks (does provide training for military ground pounders) but sure as hell doesn't teach trust and if they think that cuts down on the bad things they were trying to check they had better think again. Drug dogs, cops on the grounds, arresting of 6 year old by cops, strip searches , what in the hell are we doing..

A comparison of the philosophy of education in these two books should light a fire under you if you are a parent to fight the nonsense changes we are running our schools by... The fact that Obama buys into this crap and proved it by hiring Duncan as his Secretary of Education dismays me greatly.. Having read Duncan's theories put into practice in Chicago gave me ulcers from the git go..Anybody who has ever been responsible for training people knows that his theory is bullshit..

Back in my good ole nuclear sub days, we lived in fear of the nuclear hatchet squads who would show up to test our skills with oral and operational testing I was sad to see that the testing in now by written exam which of course they were caught cheating on..

Back to the good ole days I would go.. The teacher is the Captain of their classroom they will write the tests as they did in my day. Not a standard for sure but it gives the teacher and the kids a better feel of whether they are cutting it or not..  Throw out the Billions of dollar testing dollars of testing cost, buy paint and toilet paper, and hell maybe even a few new books or computer software that isn't 20 years old...