Virginia history teachers should remember a line from history nowdays; "We have nothing to fear but fear itself."
The application of simple standards has sent a deep shiver through the Virginia education monopoly. The preliminary scores are dismal. Word is out in various districts -- heads will roll -- and a lot of teachers are whining because it's not their fault the kids don't come in ready to learn.
Is it asking too much to have basic standards? Hearing the anguished cries, one would think so. To my mind, the real scandal lies in the fact I've been hearing about educational reform and increased teacher pay all my adult life and that nothing has come of it. As usual, it's rhetoric versus money, and money wins.
Jay Leno routinely runs a segment called "Jay Walking" where he asks common people completely stupid simple questions; and they fail miserably. Watch it enough and you'll see a pattern to people's guesses, a pattern to their evasions, and you'll come to realize we are not only more stupid as a people, we can be confident and indignant in our ignorance.
In unvarnished terms:
- Kids don't need PhDs. They need attentive people who give a shit. They need to be taught in small schools and small settings with lots of individual attention. Looking for an answer to Columbine High? Don't package and warehouse students in a setting for 2,200 people.
- The textbook is obsolete. The printed encyclopedia is obsolete. What are needed are text books and other materials downloaded straight from the web. Kids nowdays run the risk of injury because their damn book bags are too heavy; lighten their load, and lighten the cost of instructional materials.
- Virginia's median IT wage is $20,000 higher than the median teacher salary. And people wonder why half of all teaching graduates never get into teaching?
- Corporal punishment is a good thing. My high school teachers would routinely bounce people off walls if they were acting up, and disciplinary distractions were never an issue. Apparently, only PhDs in education cannot see a correlation between eased punishments and increased disciplinary problems.
- Break the education monopoly. Let government pay a set amount per student and let private enterprise come up with more efficient ways to run schools and teach students. No more moral debacles like schools saying no to something innovative like Channel One (can't let children see TV commercials in school even though they'll see 8,000 commercials in their lifetime).
- Combine nationally broadcast classes from the best, most energetic teachers in the country with small after classes at the local level. You'd get more bang for the buck out of a hundred superstar teachers than a hundred thousand mediocre people going through the motions.
- All schools are taught year-round. Teachers can't get anything accomplished in the last couple weeks before summer vacation and they spend the first weeks of the new year catching up on what people forgot over the summer. Stop that.
- And finally, all healing begins with personal insight, and it's time for the educational monopoly to stand up and say it's failed miserably, and that the trend of things costing more and kids learning less must stop.
Standards of learning imply there are some standards to teaching, standards of administrating, standards of funding for schools. The latest furor over the Virginia SOL makes me think a lot more has failed than just students.
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G.L. Marshall is actually more hip than this rant would make him sound.
