01-02-2017, 12:16 PM
(01-01-2017, 10:02 AM)Odin Wrote: The problem with performance-based evaluation is that a lot of things that go into kids' academic performance is completely outside of teacher's control. It's not the teachers' fault for a student having a poor home life or for a student having parents who are dullards or anti-intellectual. Performance-based evaluation leads to teachers trying to avoid teaching in low-income, underprivileged communities.
You need to quit believing all the right-wing propaganda about teachers' unions, Warren. It makes you look pathetic.
That's right. Teachers don't teach in a vacuum. Watch Season Four of the brilliant (and prescient) David Simon's The Wire if you want a searing glimpse into the life of a teacher battling society's ills while trying to teach tough inner city kids. Simply giving parents vouchers to attend schools of their choice--if they can even gain admittance to the best private or parochial schools in the first place--doesn't begin to address the grim lives of underprivileged kids outside the four walls of a classroom.
Vouchers are not the "silver bullet" that most conservatives tout. Look up the dismal results of the Milwaukee school voucher program. Charter schools, to mention another example of "school choice," have no better record as a whole than public schools, according to recent studies. Some are indeed much worse.
After years of studying our misguided efforts at school reform (and author Diane Ravitch is a credible critic) I am now convinced that such efforts have been more motivated by ideology than by a genuine desire to improve public education. It is no coincidence that the conservative push for school choice in state legislatures has been accompanied by a frontal assault on teacher unions--and pensions--by radicals such as Gov. Scott Walker of Wisconsin. Destroy teacher unions, and you cut out the legs of financial support for progressive politicians committed to public education.
And quite frankly, it's really about money, not improving the lot of kids who live in impoverished communities. The ownership class--educational "entrepreneurs"--see the treasury that funds public education as just another "honey pot" to raid in their pursuit of profit, in the case of for-profit charter school chains. In Phoenix, one charter school failed mid-year, leaving its poor students scrambling to find another school to attend. When have you ever heard of a public school going bankrupt? It doesn't happen for obvious reasons.
It's a matter of priority, too. Over half of our federal discretionary budget goes to defense spending. Obama--and Trump--have both proposed updating our nuclear arsenal at an estimated cost of one trillion dollars over the next ten years. Meanwhile, we still have dilapidated school buildings, many without well-credentialed teachers and not enough textbooks or computers. On the eve of the Iraq War, I made a comparison for my students: the cost of a new state-of-the-art high school in a Dallas suburb (exurb, actually) to the hideously expensive--and malfunctioning--V-22 Osprey helicopter. I showed them pictures of some bombed-out looking high schools in the Dallas inner city in dire need of repair, if not outright replacement. (Some of the "poor little rich kids" that I taught in an affluent Dallas suburb got the point, I hope.)
Today, I could make a similar comparison, this time comparing the whopping cost ($148 million) of a single Air Force F-35A to that of a brand new school in a Canadian province with all the trimmings ($52.5 million).
"New state-of-the-art high school officially opens" https://news.gov.bc.ca/releases/2015EDUC0066-001664
In essence, three state-of-the art high schools could be built for the cost of one US fighter plane, a weapons program plagued by huge cost overruns. So when "budget hawks" tell us that the money is not there--in the next four years--to adequately fund public education, or to provide a decent social safety net to our citizens on a par with other developed nations, I call bullshit. The money's there alright, hiding in plain sight, in all the places that our corporate state favors. It's simply a matter of priorities, or more cynically whose "ox gets gored."
We would do well to look at the salutary experience of a country like Iceland, which has achieved dramatic improvement in academic achievement without resorting to the "short cuts" that we have tried to no avail in America.