roachboy

personally, i think one of the main system-level problems in education is that it's way too decentralized, way too locally controlled.
there are two main reasons why:
first tying educational funding to local property taxes means that the school system is a direct mirror of the class structure of a community. people like to go on and on about meritocracy and all that, but in a system structured around replicating the class structure there is no meritocracy.
second, this kind of decentralization makes it almost impossible to steer overall system objectives in any particular way. like it or not, the primary function of education is the reproduction of the labor pool. as the parameters which shape labor change, the school system as a whole has to change. this compounds the problem noted above: the enables the reproduction of an entirely outmoded image of the labor pool----feedback loops that connect coherent information about labor markets to schools are shabby, erratic, unco-ordinated---this is not helped by the fact that american public discourse was dominated for 30 years by neoliberals who treated accuracy of image concerning both the class structure and labor markets as secondary to a feel-good ideology. so in post-reagan statistics, you get the united states as a giant lake woebegone...denial of basic social realities does not and cannot make for coherent education.

i oppose vouchers in anything like their present form simply because they're transparent as a conservative weapon aimed at destroying the teachers union; because they're mostly about legitimating christian church-basement school operations; and most importantly they don't change a thing about the dominant class-specific modes of distribution of educational opportunities--nothing about the voucher program opens up places like exeter or groton--the voucher system has no connection to this private stream of relatively high-quality education which is available in the united states only, and i mean only, to the children of the affluent.

[[edit: so i don't oppose the idea of vouchers...i would like to see less gap between public and private schools, but private in the sense noted above---opposition to this would come from people who benefit from the existing system, and this would be nothing more than a defense of class privilege...it's a weak position to argue from. what i oppose is the class stratification of educational opportunities...and if an alternative way of thinking vouchers can be used as a wedge to destroy some of all of this class-based way of doing education, i'm all for it. i just don't think it's a terribly powerful weapon.]]

i agree with sirseymour on the importance of instituting second (or third) language programs as early as possible.
the correlate of that is that english-only initiatives should be seen as paleolithic. which they are.

i also agree on the basic importance of teaching philosophy--also of teaching research strategies in conjunction with it. logical skills enable problem-solving skills; information handling and parsing are critical. at this point, student don't seem to encounter either until they hit university, which is a shame. the exception is--of course--the more elite private schools, which are often run along a logic that progressively blurs the line between high school and university courses, with junior and senior years being kinda like junior college, particularly in comparison with no-child-left-behind backwater style public schools.

o yeah---nclb should be repealed. like immediately. it has everything to do with conservative dreams of building a permanent majority by flattening kids ability to move outside the immediately given and nothing---at all---to do with teaching kids to think.

__________________
a gramophone its corrugated trumpet silver handle
spinning dog. such faithfulness it hear

it make you sick.

-kamau brathwaite