American Educational Disease: Its Cure through Voucher Schools

By L SwilleycloseAuthor: L Swilley Name: L Swilley
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Our public school systems suffer mortally from:

1. Ignorant school boards infested with individuals who are too often  without any practical knowledge of educational realities and more  often motivated not by sound educational ideas but by political and  God-bothering agendas.

2. State educational agencies that give little evidence of any concern  beyond assuring the continuation and perpetuity of their own ill- conceived powers; entrenched bureaucrats, evidently without any real  knowledge of the classroom, but addressing our real educational  problems there with yearly prescribed and revised “innovative”  programs that suspiciously appear designed to disguise problems rather  than deal directly with them; head-in-the-sand paper-shufflers who,  without looking about the world to see what might be working well  elsewhere, perennially reinvent the wheel, ignore traditional and  proven methods of instruction, delivering their often-incomprehensible  mandates in such a mumbo-jumbo of jargon that many, with frightening  justification, suspect them to be mad-eyed lunatics in a tower sending  out messages by bats.

3. University education departments, “training” our teachers with  courses (for example, at the respected (?) University of Massachusetts- Amherst) like “Oppression & Education,” “Sexism,” “Jewish  Oppression,” “Lesbian/Gay/Bisexual Oppression,” “Social Diversity in  Education” (four different courses!), and (!!)”Erroneous Beliefs” -  but ignoring the alarming fact that recently 59 percent of prospective  teachers in Massachusetts failed a basic literacy test: education  departments where, it is estimated, the apparent credo is “Anything  but Knowledge.”

4. School superintendents – grossly overpaid while their teachers wait  in vain for a living wage and just benefits – with their own fearful,  crowd-quietening, byzantine agendas, and with a veritable army of  underlings, “implementers” and “facilitators” and supervisors of  supervisors, whose concept of leading is limited to their endless  proliferation of forms to be filled by clerk-teachers whom they do not  trust beyond the evidence of the teachers’ assurance in writing that  they have religiously followed the mindless, daily, follow-the-numbers  lesson plans.

5. School principals – too many apotheosized from coaching roles and  sadly, almost universally without a real appreciation for academic  aims (as are too many principals, with or without such coaching  background) – too many weary time-servers, who see their  principalships as their terminal positions in the system; and,  accordingly, do little or nothing that might “make a wave” with  parents or invite the unwanted scrutiny of superintendents, abondoning  their teachers especially when support of discipline in the classroom  is so desperately needed.

6. Teachers, too many of whom, as college students, drifted into  Education courses because they were too lazy or mentally ill-equipped  to do the work in more demanding academic programs; then meandered  into the teaching “profession” as a path of least resistance rather  than a course of greatest advantage, eternally seeking a  teaching “method” that will disguise their ignorance of the subjects  they presume to teach; many swept up in the current fad of concern for  student “self-esteem” at the expense of student work and scholarly  accomplishment; the depressingly too few competent and inspiring  teachers, ham-strung by politico-administrators, by over-indulgent  parents, by their officially-mandated lack of authority to discipline  unruly students, and by an ever-growing mountain of administration- generated paperwork.

7. Teachers’ unions, nowhere with any serious profession-improving  agenda that might enhance teacher quality by demanding teacher  excellence beyond meaningless state certification; everywhere, in the  name of solidarity, indiscriminately and criminally protective of  competent and incompetent teachers alike; in the many states where  strikes (the only weapon there is to force decent salaries and  benefits and conditions) are illegal, pitiful voices crying in the  wilderness against inequities they have no real power to correct.

8. Parents: where active, too often demanding for their spoiled  children privileges and concessions that undermine the authority of  the school; where inactive, hopelessly detached, or indifferent to the  school’s pleas for their cooperation in disciplining their children.