Education in America
President Obama has been very open and eloquent in his criticism of the results of the public education in America. He has asked that good teachers be properly compensated and that incompetent or ineffective teachers be sacked. The people who are teaching our children are as important to the continued success of our country as the Wall Street traders, and both should be receiving roughly similar compensation. These teachers should be given the latitude and freedom they need to get adequate results, and they should be receiving the appropriate amount of societal respect and financial compensation.
Obama has indicated that he feels that significantly more Charter Schools may result in improved results. I wasn’t sure what these words meant, so I looked it up.
According to Wikipedia Charter Schools are elementary or secondary schools in the United States that receive public money but have been freed from some of the rules, regulations, and statutes that apply to other public schools in exchange for some type of accountability for producing certain results, which are set forth in each school's charter.
Accountability is as American as apple pie. But getting rid of rules and regulations has proven disastrous to the other parts of society, and has now been totally discredited. This is that same old reactionary idea of “deregulation.” The government regulations need to be improved and enforced, not abandoned.
Education needs to be funded in a manner where every school in America gets the same amount of money per student. What we have now is separate but-not-equal. Kids from poor sections of town or poor parts of the country receive a much worse education than kids who grow up in rich areas. Funding schools from local property taxes has got to cease.
Schools in America are not getting the RESULTS that the citizens want. That much is clear. The schools are not preparing the students for the real life experiences of the workplace. There needs to be a track (which most students take) which teaches the skills needed by employers. Electrical, welding, refrigeration, plumbing, medical, computer programming, accounting, etc.
It is also clear that many schools have been spending far too much effort trying to teach thousand year old right wing religions, and to prevent children from learning about birth control or sexually transmitted diseases. Many schools have taken an actively anti-science approach and have tried to teach the Christian fairy tales about Biblical creationism instead of Charles Darwin’s ideas about the scientific method and evolution. What ever happened to the ideas about separation of Church and State?
I recently heard Sandra Day O’Connor speak. One of the things she noted was that in 50% of American schools children can get a high school diploma without ever having taken a single course in civics or American history. These kids don’t know about the 3 branches of government, the importance of the separation of church and state, the history of fascism or racial discrimination, the role of the robber barons in America’s recent past, or what the concept of rule-of-law means. How can they be expected to become good citizens in a democracy without having any understanding about the past or how the political system works?
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