One Classroom, From Sea to Shining Sea

[XemaSab]

AMERICAN public education, a perennial whipping boy for both the political right and left, is once again making news in ways that show how difficult it will be to cure what ails the nation’s schools.

Only last week, President Obama declared that every high school graduate must be fully prepared for college or a job (who knew?) and called for significant changes in the No Child Left Behind law. In Kansas City, Mo., officials voted to close nearly half the public schools there to save money. And the Texas Board of Education approved a new social studies curriculum playing down the separation of church and state and even eliminating Thomas Jefferson — the author of that malignant phrase, “wall of separation” — from a list of revolutionary writers.

Each of these seemingly unrelated developments is part of a crazy quilt created by one of America’s most cherished and unexamined traditions: local and state control of public education. Schooling had been naturally decentralized in the Colonial era — with Puritan New England having a huge head start on the other colonies by the late 1600s — and, in deference to the de facto system of community control already in place, the Constitution made no mention of education. No one in either party today has the courage to say it, but what made sense for a sparsely settled continent at the dawn of the Republic is ill suited to the needs of a 21st-century nation competing in a global economy.

Our lack of a national curriculum, national teacher training standards and federal financial support to attract smart young people to the teaching profession all contribute mightily to the mediocre-to-poor performance of American students, year in and year out, on international education assessments. So does a financing system that relies heavily on local property taxes and fails to guarantee students in, say, Kansas City the same level of schooling as students in more affluent communities.

http://www.nytimes.com/2010/03/19/opinion/19jacoby.html

[SPedigrees]

1. Yes, it isn't the teachers or the students or the parents...

it's the lack of a national curriculum that has brought about the downfall of our educational system.

Back in the 1950s, when I attended grade school, students across the country in every state were taught the same fundamentals of math, the English language, American and world history etc. There is a reason why my 60+ yr old peers, from all over this country, are in general, literate and knowlegable. We all were taught the same basic subject matter.

Now that any sort of federally mandated curriculum has long ago fallen by the wayside, the result has been predictably catastrophic.

[CurtEastPoint]

2. agreed, Look at the UK and France, etc. Far ahead

of us because they have national standards.

Part 2 of this is funding. It is inherently unfair to soak property owners with the sole support of schools; rich areas = good schools. Poor ones, not so much.