The New York Knicks stink. As USA Today noted on Wednesday, they’re in the midst of their seventh consecutive losing season. They’re in last place in their division, losing one out of every five games they’ve played this year, including (as this column was being written) their last six seven in a row. Attendance is down. Networks don’t want to broadcast their games. And the team hasn’t sent a player to the All-Star game since 2001.
As the old politically-incorrect joke goes, abused children are asking judges to let them live with the Knicks because “they don’t beat anybody.”
When your operation sucks this badly, what drastic action do you take to turn things around? Well, if you’re the Nevada teachers union, you’d reward the players a raise!
That’s right, the Nevada teachers union has looked at the failed public schools they control and claim that if taxpayers would just pay their union members more money, education would improve.
No, seriously. Stop laughing. They really expect you to believe that.
Of course, this notion is ridiculous. Indeed, while the Knicks are one of the worst teams in all of professional basketball, they also have the highest payroll of any team in the NBA. Clearly, just paying more money doesn’t get better results. At least not in the real world.
Nevertheless, the union is hyping a ballot initiative this year which, if it passes, would raise taxes on Nevada’s job-creating gaming industry to give pay raises to its union members. Indeed, the union’s original ballot initiative (refiled this week) specified that 80 percent of the revenue raised by the tax hike had to go to higher pay for its union members, with only 20 percent being devoted to student programs.
Parents need to wake up and realize that - contrary to the rhetoric from the union’s leaders and the sugary, touchy-feely ads they run - the union is all about the union, not the kids. Period. Indeed, a local Carson City education activist says he was once told by a union leader that when students start paying union dues, THEN the union would start worrying about the kids. Otherwise, let them eat cake! Nice, huh?
The problem with public schools in Nevada, and all across the country, is NOT the money. It’s the government monopoly. Even Assembly Education Chairperson Bonnie Parnell, a former teacher, was quoted recently admitting that “the traditional public school setting is not for all children.” And a recently released survey showed that just 11 percent of Nevada residents “said they would send their children to public school if they had the freedom to choose any available option.”
But the union, along with education bureaucrats, simply won’t allow parents to have such options, not even within the government school monopoly. Recall that only weeks ago the Nevada State Board of Education voted to ban any new charter schools in the state, despite the growing demand for such options.
Some fifty years ago, government agents stood in the doorways of American public schools and wouldn’t let certain children in. Today government bureaucrats and union bosses are standing in public school doorways and won’t let kids out. Fortunately, more and more parents finally appear to be getting tired of it. It’s time to give choice a chance.
Posted on February 7th, 2008 by Chuck Muth
Filed under: Nevada
Unfortunately, here in TX, there is a growing movement to do away with charter schools entirely … the anti-charter proponents are aided by the fact that many charter schools have evidenced poor control of their funds and the funds seem to have disappeared into thin air … many schools have close in the past two years as a result of fiscal mismanagement …
There was a news story on last night detailing just such abuses of the public trust …
While I am a believer in ‘free choice’, it’s hard to argue with that logic - why throw money down a rathole … most people here believe that even as bad as the public school system is, it has to be better than throwing away hard earned dollars …
Although supporters of school choice, including myself, worked hard for passage of the Utah voucher innetiative, it was not a true school choice program. As all such program around the USA, it was what Milton Friedman called “charity vouchers,” rather than educational voucher. While very helpful for the poor, these programs are not properly serving the needs of the “middle class.”
A true school choice program should follow the plan put forth by Milton Friedman in his 1955 article, “The Role of Government in Education,” and provide equitalbe funding for all - poor, rich and in between. As a start, I recomend the following wording:
“Educational funding is to be disbursed equitably to all children in public and non-public schools, while respecting the liberty of schools in hiring and provision of services.”
The ideal concept of unionism is good, but in real life, it is seen to be little more than a protective umbrella for the protection of itself.
it will protect always the statusquo, and will vehemntly fight any effort at self-introspection that might allow for change or improvment.
it is always selfagrandizing; it is always a cover for mediocrety or worse; and it will “die” to prevent change…… unless it is to it’s own benefit.
It will fight to the death to prevent any “outside” scrutiny, evaluation, or criticism…… it heavily discourages anything similar from inside too.
The result is a completely “inbred” system with serious “heriditary” problems that will only be corrected by a complete replacement.
We lived in Colorado from April of 2006 to March of 2007. During that time I enrolled my children at a charter school in Fort Collins; Ridgeview Classical Schools. It is widely known in that area that for some four years now, Ridgeview has been ranked as THE top high school in the state of Colorado (I’m not sure how they measure this . . . by ACT results perhaps?). I can tell you that my children were receiving an oustanding education by mostly outstanding teachers, many of whom did not have their bachelor’s degree in “education.” We have since had to relocate to rural Nebraska, where my sophomore son has not had ONE single challenging day of school since our arrival. I will be enrolling him very soon in some online university courses in an attempt to help him stay competitive for college entry. There are many good-hearted people in the public schools; unfortunately that is not enough to educate our children.
We will never see the kind of education that we had as few as fifty years ago. Before any change can be made, a complete change is needed in our beauty contest career form of government everything will keep right on deteriorating. The handlers package the contestants, we know not who they are until they are firmly in office. One of the Marxist candidates for change claims that; we need to infuse $18,000,000 more in our failed, mortally flawed govt/union schools.
My suggestion for your ballot initiative would be to focus on tuition tax credits and make them tradeable like carbon credits. That way a family could market their tuition tax credits to someone rich person who needs the credits. The rich person (or company) would get the tax break (at market rates) and the student would get an education.
I helped with California’s Prop 38. We only attracted about 37% of the vote and our vouchers where half of what the public schools were getting to “educate” a kid.
Don’t let them make the argument that you are taking money from the public schools and you will win. If you market this as a tax cut for families and make the “evil” rich pay for it, they can’t make this argument.
Take a page out of William Wilberforce’s playbook. He tried to eliminate slavery in the English Empire for years and was stopped each and every time by the economic forces that stood to gain by it. When he focused on an alternative way that effectively did the same thing (protection from pirates only for non-slave ships), it was then he prevailed (with a few tickets to the circus for his opponents).
The teachers union has succeeded in making vouchers a dirty word to voters. Don’t have them. Get the families the money they need another way. Once the market is competing with the education monopoly, enrollments will decline, education funding will decline and union dues will decline. With that decline will go the opposition to market based education.
[…] I wrote a column which will appear in the Nevada Appeal tomorrow titled “The New York Knicks of Education.” You can read it HERE right now, however, on my Muth’s Truths blog. […]
Here’s a link to some of the arguements against school vouchers… and some rebuttals. http://pajamasmedia.com/2007/11/are_school_voucher_programs_a.php
I’m so far unable to find a reference to a specific speech that Al Shanker made where he uttered the following quote: “I will begin to care about the quality of children’s education in this country when they start paying union dues.” I had found it before on the web, and I am very suspicious that the educrats have destroyed references to it.
Albert Shanker (September 14, 1928 - February 22, 1997) was President of the United Federation of Teachers from 1964 to 1984 as well as President of the American Federation of Teachers from 1974 to 1997.
As president of the American Federation of Teachers, Albert Shanker became known as a strong and courageous advocate for labor - as well as an “iconoclastic thinker,” “champion of children,” and “educational statesman.” For twenty-seven years Shanker’s “Where We Stand” column in the New York Times offered an 800-word dose of straightforward common sense, reaching an audience far beyond the educational establishment. The column stands as a wonderful archive of Shanker’s far-ranging intellect, keen analytical abilities and no-nonsense ideas about how to improve schools. The complete collection offers an assortment of education and labor topics, and also spans important events and issues of the time, predicting what impact they have for us today.
Here’s a link to an AFL/CIO pub referencing that quote .. . or close to it.
http://www.unionfacts.com/unions/unionProfile.cfm?id=12
and another
http://www.thechief-leader.com/news/2007/0921/news/004.html
Israel;
Nevada is number one inthe country for equitable distribution of funding across all school districts in the state. Number one. Many of our schools are still failing. Equity funding is a big deal, less so since the US Supreme Court got involved, but ultimately, this is not the issue.
If we paid the teachers $5.40 an hour, our school systems would be failing. This, too, is not the issue.
Ray, education in the 40s, 50, 60s and even into the 70s was functional and delivered in a, compared to today’s high volume media delivery system, bland manner. Yet, moist of us graduated high school able to read, write and make change, and our standard of living is higher than our parents.
WHY do only eleven percent of Nevadans want their kids to be in a public school? I didn’t see an answer in the survey results. We all know the answers, as do the bureaucrats, its clearly identifiable in the data: Only no one can say the reason without being labled ‘racist’. But we do know that concerned, and involved parents like A. Reneer above, do make a difference. Can you imagine being a teacher trying to motivate the unmotivateable?! I don’t agree that our kids are failing because of the teacher: It starts with the parents, er, well one parent in the home does have a demonstrable negative affect on a child’s success in school.
Lastly, schools and unions function to support (protect) the least common denominator and rarely get around to letting the best and brightest pull forward. Organizational Theory 715.
There are at least two major problems with school voucher problems.
Number one, it does not get at the heart of the matter. By sending money to the government monopoly and then letting them dole it back out, you are still legitimizing government controlled schools. That is, you are agreeing that it is the state’s right to take your money in the first place for a government monopoly and then return it to the people on their terms.
Number two, when private institutions accept government money they become subject to government regulation. This potentially makes the education system worse, not better. Instead of having truly independent and private school options, you would have nothing more than public schools and public schools lite.
There is a better alternative to vouchers which solves both of these problems - tax rebates. With a tax rebate issued to people who spend private money on a child’s education, people would have many more options for education with less government control. These rebates could be used for private schools, homeschools, or private tutoring - without government regulations attached to the money. This would also be an admission that the money really belongs to the people in the first place, not the government.
The only potential drawback that I see to the rebate vs the voucher method concerns those who don’t have the upfront money. However, this could possibly be solved in a variety of ways. First, private schools would probably be willing to offer deferred payments or “scholarships” to those who expect a rebate. Also, provisions could be put in place to ensure any parent is eligible for a rebate. After all, even those who pay rent bare their share of the property tax burden through their rent payment.
Overall I feel the rebate method has greater benefits in the way of more choices and less government control. Vouchers, on the other hand, have the potential to do as much harm as good.
The major objections I’ve seen to school choice and vouchers - from thinking people, not frothing, vestigial Marxists - are that
a.) they serve to further cement government involvement with American education, as Kim outlined above;
b.) they’re merely disguises for egalitarian welfare-redistribution programs, as indicated by Israel, above;
and
c.) though they’re important as interim steps to reclaim our schools from government, they distract from and steal the stage from pushing our ultimate - and largely unarticulated - goal: the complete Separation of Education and State, as indicated by…me.
I admit an ignorance of the deeper complexities of the ties between gov’t and schools, but I believe we should be using America’s dismal academic scores as a king-sized club to leverage - nay, *demand* - a Separation of Education and State, a.k.a. a planned phase-out of government schools in favor of total privatization, competition and complete freedom of choice.
Pie-in-the-sky, yes, but we need to look at the playbook of the Leftists: They, unlike the…non-Leftists, understand the importance of setting radical goals and sticking to them unless physically pried away. It’s a tug of war or war of attrition, and we’re getting pummeled because we’re the only side that does not set radical goals and the only side that compromises.
It’s *our kids* we’re talking about here. The degree to which Americans acquiesce and “play nice guy” rather than wage scorched-Earth war on those bureacratic child-molesters is both inexplicable and shameful.
The problem with initiatives and referenda is that the unions and opposition can and will completely outspend the proponents. The AFL-CIO has a, what, $15 BILLion annual budget?
The better approach it through the legislature, but it’s often a decades’ long fight. If the issue is so popular, then you need to leverage public opinion to remove those politicians who stand in the way.
That said, in my personal view, Friedman notwithstanding I am skeptical of any type of government funding of education for the simple fact that it invites its meddling, as well. (That is to say, the better approach would be schools provided for-profit or charity – but try selling *that* to anyone to the left of John McCain.)
At least you may be able to raise some money off of it, though.
Damnit, I left out a preposition.
We homeschool and purchase a curriculum from a private organization. It does burn me that I have to pay twice to school my child but if that is what it takes … In first grade we enrolled in Bill Bennett’s K12 charter school and our tax dollars went to K12. I would be happy with a rebate/reimbursement equal to the cost of my curriculum. I’m not sure offhand what I pay in school taxes. The argument that you are taking money from the public school isn’t totally true because my child isn’t there. Our school district is NOT home schooler friendly. (I hear it’s not very good either.)
I wonder how bad Mr. Muth’s education was? Taking cheap shots at teacher’s really annoys me. Mr. Muth compares Nevada’s teachers to the New York Nicks, the highest paid NBA team with the worst winning record. Mr. Muth, average starting pay in the NBA is about $8.5 million, the starting pay for a teacher in our area is $30,000. Nevada’s teacher’s aren’t the highest paid teacher’s in the country nor are they losers.
Are you familiar with what goes on in a classroom today? Teacher’s don’t just teach. The plethora of societal, physical, discipline and learning problems found in a classroom is stunning, it doesn’t say much for society as a whole. Kids enter the “Education System” so parents can go to work or so teachers can raise the children for the people who shouldn’t be parents and don’t have a clue how to be one, some actually come prepared to learn, many come needing to be educated about how to learn and interact with other human beings before they can be taught; teacher’s handle this plus they have to try and educate parents who don’t understand their role as a parent and they diagnose the other problems that need to addressed by an array of social and physical specialists. Teacher’s could have stunning success if they were allowed to pick their students and expel disruptive students.
Teacher’s are the glue that holds the “Education System” and our society together, teacher’s aren’t a problem, the system is. The system starts with the impossible mandate of trying to educate all students regardless of the baggage they bring. But let’s not dote on the problems with the environment of learning, student problems, parental short comings and a catch all I’ll call learning impairments, let’s just focus on the pay. A teacher starting their career in our area starts at $30,000 a year with benefits, which when compared to police and fire employees in the PEER’s system is way out of whack. Let’s just focus on the base pay. A teacher can have 25 students in a class and a 186 day contract, or $7.14 per student per day, or, if teacher’s only worked 8 hour days, the one’s I know work more like 12 and up, that’s a whopping 89 cents per hour per student. Where the hell does the difference between the $5,000 per student the state pays, $125,000 per 25 student classroom, and the $30,000 the teacher makes, where does the other $95,000 go? If you have ever paid someone to “baby sit” a child how much did you pay them $5 or $10/hr? Lets use the $5/hr rate; if a teacher got $5/hr per child to actually “teach” not just baby sit the child they would be making $1,000 a day for 186 days but since people like Mr. Muth hammer teacher’s rather than society or the “education system,” $186,000 a year seems like an outrageous wage to pay a teacher, unless they are college professors, deans or chancellors. So let me ask Mr. Muth, would you entrust your children to the care of a “babysitter,” not a teacher, just a babysitter, who charges 89 cents an hour? Maybe you would, I wouldn’t.
It’s not the teacher’s that are the problem or cause of Mr. Muth’s overpaid losing team analogy, it’s society, the system, the unions, the beau racy, the unrealistic goals and objectives and under powered policies and procedures placed on what is referred to as the “education system” that results in unobtained goals and objectives; it’s not the teachers. A “system” is the sum of it’s parts, teacher’s are parts, not the system. Mr. Muth, even the highest paid, most winning teams in the NBA couldn’t win games with flat basketballs. Mr. Muth, do some research into the classroom environment that teacher’s work in before you decide they are overpaid or the problem with the system.
FYI, a police or fighter can retire at age 50 with 20 years of service, and any age with 30 years of service; a teacher can’t retire until they are age 60 or have 30 years of service. If you want the highest quality educators possible, let them retire at age 50 with 20 years of service or any age with 30 years of service; that way, we could allow teacher’s to retire and rehire at a decent wage and we’d get people with 20 years of experience back in the classroom and we could purge the system of the teacher’s who are burned out and just hanging on until they reach 60 years of age. Notice the term “burn out” is used in relation to people who work in high stress environments. The SYSTEM is broken, not the teachers!
If vouchers were allowed, for half the costs of a child’s education then if half the students left the classroom would be smaller and the amount per student in the class room would be increased.
30 students at $5,000 per student. $150,000 per classroom.
Vouchers for $2500. Every student that leaves the school still gets $2500/ Sp 15 students leave. The classroom is 15 students with $5000/student and $2500 for each student not there.
The problem is that those that oppose vouchers say that private schools would pick and choose. But so what. If the kids that weren’t interested were left in the public school, they would still have been in the public school, but now there would be less students and they might get more attention. So the negative to stop, should really be a positive to have vouchers.
David (and others); “Friedman notwithstanding I am skeptical of any type of government funding of education for the simple fact that it invites its meddling, as well. ” YOU would not be a founding father with that belief system! For our founders a public education system was the bedrock of our Republic!
Mike, I was agreeing with you until you stated that you should be paid the same as firefighters and cops. Well, how come you aren’t? Maybe because your job description say nothing about ‘use of lethal force’, ‘arrest and apprehend’, ‘enter buringing buildings and other hazardous atmospheres’, “climb to the roof of the Monte Carlo weraing 5o pounds of equipment and put out a buring building 400 feet up”. Unlike cops and firemen, you can teach into your 90’s! Cops and firefighters have short careers because the people in the community don’t want to rely on a 60 year old fireman to drag them out of a burning building, nor do they believe that a 60 year old cop is strong enough to ward off a bunch of gang bangers that might be shooting up the Strip.
And, why would the system ‘rehire’ a burned out ‘retired’ teacher? Suggestion, apply for a job as a cop or firefighter and when you get hired quit your teaching job. Then you can deal with all those assholes, not in a classroom, but 10 years later, when at 2:00 AM they are committing crimes or strung out on drugs.
Well no, I would not be a Founding Father for the simple fact that I was born too late. But still, if I had been at the Convention, having the benefit of what we see in 2000-era America, I would have argued against government education because it leads to too much mischief. Government agents teach children all the benefits of government. Kind of like how NPR — government provided news — always slants to the Big Government solution.
Jefferson would probably be for farm subsidies, at least extrapolating from some of his quotes, but we know though the science of economics that they are inefficient.
“farm subsidies” are indeed inefficient and yet 1/3 of all income received by farmers is from government subsidies. $20,000,000,000 a year! and 1/3 of it for corn. All that excess corn has to go somewhere, so we plow down grass and plant more corn; we feed it to cows who used to digest grass for a living and who aren’t made to process corn. And corn is in everything! we eat….everything. Now it is in our gas tanks. Corn.
I was a firefighter, and every situation faced by police and fire are faced in the classroom by a teacher, does Columbine ring a bell, or Virginia Tech, kids with guns, drugs, social problems, discipline problems, natural disaster, fire, and contagious disease and every kind of problem you can think of and teacher’s have to be “first responders” to, just like police and firefighters on the scene of an emergency that involves lives and property of adults. Schools are little city’s where kids lean to be adults and they are exposed to every hazard the adults are and in their little city the teacher is the first line of defense and the “teacher” of the population; they are responsible for their class and it’s safety and well being, they protect and serve the students.
I’m not saying hire burn outs, I’m saying hire the one’s whit 20 years of experience who are 40 years old and aren’t burnt out and let the burn outs get out of the system before they are 60. Teacher’s are selfless and have one of the hardest jobs on the planet. The teacher’s aren’t the problem!
My experience with Nevada Public schools has been good and I would continue to send my kids to this same school if vouchers were available. That said, I believe vouchers would be great competition to make bad schools good, good schools better and who knows what could happen to the better schools.
1. I would not support a program that is not available to every family regardless of income. My understanding of most school voucher programs is they are sold as, and are geared toward helping the “poor, inner city kids” or “special needs” kids. Making vouchers available to every family would give greater public support (financial and moral) to an initiative because middle and upper wage earners place more value on education than do the poor. The higher income people who enjoy paying taxes to help only the poor are the ones who would never support privatizing the school system anyway.
2. The simpler the better. The money needs to come from the funds currently paid to the school system. Any program that is based on a complex funding scheme would be too confusing and suspicious and lose support of many of the electorate. Nobody wants to create another complex government department or program.
3. The value of the voucher needs to be on par with the amount of money paid to fund each public school kid. This amount would give incentive to companies to begin opening private schools in Nevada. While this would not save money initially, it would initiate competition so future increases in spending would be reduced.
4. No voucher user can be at a disadvantage from other users. The schools participating in the program need to accept the voucher as full payment. No more or less money can be spent for the barrio student than the upper class student. Privately funded schools can still charge as much as people will pay. (Donations for non academic purposes could be allowed)
5. Home schoolers should also be included -with oversight. Nevada has good support for homeschools. Home school markets would give additional support, and the thought of more parents spending time raising and educating their own children is appealing. Oversight for this program would be required in order to prevent parents from using this as a stay at home welfare system where no education is being carried out.
6. Vouchers should be allowed at colleges and universities for those under 18. This gives families something to dream of when considering the initiative and it also gives the truly gifted kids access to Nevada’s best and brightest.
Campaign points;
1. Every child/family will qualify.
2. Soccer moms can be paid to stay home or reduce their hours at work to homeshool and raise their own kids
3. Lobby teachers to show they can open a school in their home, have a class size of 7-10 students, and make more money than they do now. They would answer only to the parents they choose and they can accept only the students they want. The unions won’t support it but the support of the teachers might be enough to undermine the union.
[…] I recently wrote a column pointing out the absurdity of the teacher union’s position that simply paying teachers more money would make them do a better job. That elicited, not unexpectedly, howls of protest from the usual crowd of public school apologists, well-represented by this grammatically-challenged diatribe emailed to me by “mike hayes” (if that’s his real name): […]
Mr. Hayes, call me nitpicky, but since we’re talking about teachers and education here, a friendly tip:
Your message would be orders of magnitude more pursuasive if you demonstrated a basic proficiency at punctuation - the proper use of the apostrophe, specifically.
As an anecdotal aside, I have a relative who entered her freshman year of college last fall, and she’s having trouble because she was never taught multiplication tables. (!) How do you even *function* in life without that? But she can cite chapter-and-verse dogma on that hoary, faith-based concept called “global warming.” She had that down by something like age 8, I think…
Her parents bear some of the blame for not correcting that deficiency, certainly, but what the *hell* are teachers doing indoctrinating kids with political propaganda instead of teaching them the nuts and bolts of cognitive thinking?
Let me reiterate: The only - read: exclusive - solution to America’s education problem is A COMPLETE SEPARATION OF EDUCATION AND GOVERNMENT. Anything less is only valid as an interim move. We need to keep that separation as an explicitly-stated goal, stick with it and hammer away at it relentlessly. No, it likely won’t happen in our lifetimes, but this is, as I’ve said, a tug of war with opponents who do not compromise. So why should we?
Within the last month, I challenged a teacher friend of mine by suggesting school vouchers for children. He argued giving vouchers would take needed money away from the most needy childen, forcing them to attend the worst schools. I, of course disagreed, calling his point of view BS. It ended the discussion.
Although Chuck is comparing the teachers to the Knicks, I don’t think he is calling them bad teachers. The basketball team is full of talented players, but they need better coaching and management. The same can be said of the public school system.
The public school system limits what the teachers can teach. It prevents them from pushing children in their education because some students may not “get it” and would need to be held back. Damn the education, we wouldn’t want to make any kids feel bad now, would we?
The public school system and the teachers union rely on government handouts to survive. If students fail standardized tests, they school system gets penalized by having their handout reduced. In order to keep the cash flowing in, the teacher’s union and school board give passing grades to stundents who do not deserve them. The student keeps getting passed along in this manner, just a pawn in the union game to get money.
Teachers are important, and the great majority of them do truly care about the education of our children. The beaurocracy above them, however, prevents them from doing their best. You can argue about poor payscale, but how much more could the teachers get paid if they didn’t have to send dues to the unions? In my opinion, most unions exist solely for the benefit of the union, and the teachers union is no different. The union cares nothing about the education of the students, only about making sure the teachers pay their dues.
I graduated from the public school system in 1989, and I could see the problems with the system back then. Many students in my high school could only read or write at a third or fourth grade level. How can that be allowed to happen?
Ken is right; Mike is wrong.
I compared the public school system to the Knicks, not teachers. I never said or even implied that the teachers were losers. And I referred to the UNION’S absurd notion that simply paying the players/teachers more money would improve the system.
This is about the system and the union, both of whom continue to victimize truly talented and competent teachers as well as the students they teach. The problem isn’t the teacher in most cases, it’s the union. Especially when the union defends incompetent teachers and fights to pay every teacher the same amount of money regardless of merit or ability.
It’s the union. It’s the union. It’s the union.
While I have mixed thoughts on some of the comments, I have found that the union and the teachers have lost their truest desire. To teach our children. I have raised 4 children, of which I have a daughter in High School. We have been asked by the powers to stay involved in our childrens education as parents. I can tell you that no amount of money will cure the problem we have in our schools. Teachers that have strong tenure are not giving any attention to the less abilty students. They use the “A” students to show that there is good education and the drop out rate is unreal and a failing rate to match.
Last year at McQueen High School in Reno, the number of Freshmen students that did not make credit or grade was so high that the school had a special meeting with over 100 freshman, in short telling them that they would not blame any one for their failure but would fix it. When parents went to the school board on different levels the reaction was not to believe. One of higher board members told the parent that McQueen had a waiting list for students.
If the system wants to begin on education reform we must break up the clicks of teaching, move them around so the finer teachers from higher, better schools can spread out their expertise in schools that need the better teaching skills. Therefore allowing the less experienced teacher to work with and get better skills.
If you want to understand this great problem, use the movie, Pump Up The Volume. While not exact it will give people and understanding of why we are failing as state wide education.
Teachers do not care about any students that are not natural “A” students.