by Bruno Behrend
Yet another piece describing the woefully inadequate class of teachers produced by the iron triangle of Teacher's Unions, "Education" Schools, and the absurd regulatory structure of "Public Education."
Most of the article highlights the utter vacuity of the "education curriculum." However, the real problem lies with editorial's inability to get out of the current corrupt and unproductive paradigm.
See the excerpt and comment below.
"Yet there's one idea that seems more important and urgent than the others. That is the recommendation that all states begin collecting information about how much their schoolchildren have learned from kindergarten through high school so it can be correlated with information about how their teachers were trained. Until this fundamental question is explored and answered--what kind of training produces teachers who get the best results from their children--we'll be holding classes in the dark."
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We don't need any such "data collection" to solve the "education problem." Rather we need to get away from the irrational concern with teachers in any way.
In a rational world, we would fund children directly and let the family choose the best way to educate their kids. We need to stop focusing on the intentional misdirection of "studies" on teacher pay, teacher training, computers, school construction and other such detritus.
We've been doing that for decades, spending obscene amounts of money, and getting flat or declining results. Empower parents to decide on how they want their child educated by giving them a fully funded scholarship, and the best education solution(s) will beat a path to their door.
District School Board charades, referendum battles, construction bonds, and the web of corruption that has metastized in the education industry will become a thing of the past. It is time to think about the children and the taxpayers, and forget about the teachers and adminsitrators. They've had their ride on the gravy train.
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The vast majority of the nation's teachers attend colleges that have low admission standards, low graduation requirements, confusing curricula and faculty disconnected from the realities of teaching in today's schools, according to a first-of-its-kind study released Monday.
Those problems, along with lax regulation, have resulted in graduates who are ill-prepared to work in classrooms concludes the four-year study by the former president of Teachers College at Columbia University in New York.
In the last 20 years, we've jacked up pay, payroll, perks, and pensions, all so that we could "lure" the "most qualified" people. It's a joke, but it isn't very funny. Billions spent to lure older teachers into retirement, so that a cadre of medicrities can get pay boosts by getting "Masters" degrees in indoctrination and political correctness.
The system is beyond reform. Toss it in the junk heap.
Fund Children, not bureaucracies. If you can't support that, the very least you can do is support scrapping "certification" and hiring all comers from all fields. They couldn't do any worse than the Bozo's we've been graduating for the last 20 odd years.