***HOS Note- Always interesting to keep in tune with the pulse of our community related to educational matters.***
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Opinion »Letters to the Editor » Education status quo offers wrong goals
Article Last Updated: Wednesday, March 16, 2011 8:24pm
It is my hope that 9-R teachers, students and parents will wake up and respond to the curtain that is descending on public education.
Devotees of the much publicized “Waiting for Superman” movie thought it was a vehicle for emphasizing the beauty of charter schools, but researching the people and money behind the film exposes a corporate manifesto looking to sap the power of public employee unions, especially the teachers’ union, because public education is the single biggest expenditure for every state.
Winners always protect the status quo because that status quo created the rules that made them the winners. The forces driving education reform in the U.S. today are all speaking from the winners’ circle. Winners always believe the rules of the game are fair and that they deserve to be winners.
The true status quo of public education is that it struggles under the crushing weight of poverty, not the burden of “bad” teachers or the press of bloated unions.
There are things that education cannot do. In particular, the notion that putting more kids through college can revive the middle-class society we used to have is wishful thinking. It’s no longer true that having a college degree guarantees that you’ll get a good job, and it’s becoming less true with each passing decade. Student loans now have passed credit cards among the largest sources of private debt. We can’t get to where we need to go just by awarding workers college degrees, which may be no more than tickets to jobs that don’t exist or don’t pay middle-class wages.
Calls for accountability always come from those standing outside accountability themselves. Yes, it is an obvious good to have better-educated students to compete with other economies. However, it’s complete nonsense to insist that low public school test scores hobble our economy when it was the highest-achieving graduates of our elite colleges who designed and sold the financial gimmicks that preceded our current financial predicament.
The “winners” may be winning, but that doesn’t mean they’re right.
Bill Bowlby, Durango
