More on Education

In response to Temper and Self-Confidence by Riverwind513:

Responding to some of the comments on this discussion:

Teaching and educating is hands-on by definition. Being "far removed" is not an admirable quality here. Indeed, by centralizing education at the federal level, we only remove parents and the community one step further from control of their schools. How does requiring parents to petition Washington to make improvements the school board is no longer empowered to pursue helping anyone?

Also, do we really need more comparisons of schools to figure out which ones are underperforming? Seriously? If we already know rich neighborhoods have better education than poor neighborhoods (as a rule of thumb), why then put further burden on all schools to compete for the "whose worst" ranking, just to get assistance?

This overhead only hurts performance. Already teachers, who would much rather be teaching, spend more of their time doing paperwork, reporting to bureaucrats at all levels of government, and preparing their students for standardized tests.

Notice I don't say "teaching to the test": indoctrinating students on how to meet some ominous anonymous testing board's expectations hardly meets the standard of education most teachers set for themselves when they started on their careers.

Today's standardized tests are not teaching tools, they are tools for sorting wheat from chaff, sociological threshers, first used on a mass scale by the U.S. Army to determine who would be a specialist and who would be cannon fodder. There was never any assumption that those who did poorly on standardized tests would do better for having taken them.

The first standardized test (setting aside ancient testing practices dating to the Han dynasty), Binet's IQ test, was designed to determine future educational intervention, not past educational performance. Which is admittedly useful, but only if we don't take away teachers ability to intervene for the benefit of students they can see are struggling without some test to confirm it for them.

Students that aren't learning to their best potential are recognizable without taking away valuable teaching time and educational flexibility to engage in further comparison ranking.

Calling for uniform education standards misses one very important fact: students aren't uniform. Learning is not mass produced like widgets, and educational strategies are not interchangeable like machine parts. Legislators in state and/or the federal capitol can't procure good test scores by submitting a purchase order for so many points of performance.

Teachers know this. When teachers are given the freedom to teach, to learn with their students, to engage a child's unique non-uniform motivations and leverage a pupil's individual multiple intelligences, they can work wonders.

Education is hands-on.

Funding is important. In economically disadvantaged neighborhoods without the property tax base to compete on a dollar per student basis with wealthier neighbors, funding is essential.

Funding is essential, if only to deal with all of the foundational needs from the lower rungs of Maslow's pyramid, needs that must be addressed in order to even begin to teach: Children who don't feel safe in their own homes and aren't getting basic nutrition aren't going to learn. We don't need a uniform education standard to figure this out.

The problem is confusing a standardized unit of measurement, the dollars tallied by accountants and partitioned by policy makers, with the students who sit in the class room. Students are not standardized. Children are not uniform. Classrooms are not homogenized. You can't milk performance out of a school by proclaiming requirements from afar.

Like filling the milk pail, education is hands-on. Being far removed from the problem is being far removed from a solution.