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I don’t know how anyone who has a choice in the matter could choose to send their kids to an educational institution whose board of directors manifests this much contempt for scholarship. https://twitter.com/mlnow/status/1354974557254242305
Public school enthusiasts want to blame neoliberalism or big money charter schools when people don’t want to go to regular public schools, but that’s not it.
Look
at your institution. It’s not other people’s fault when families want to leave.
Look
at your institution. It’s not other people’s fault when families want to leave.
This debacle is particularly embarrassing but the same kind of anti-intellectualism and generalized friendliness to mediocrity was on display when I went to public school 25 years ago on the other coast.
My conclusion is that it comes from treating education as part of the civil service, when in fact education is a completely different thing. Running a school is not like running the DMV, for one, it has WAAYYY higher stakes.
When you’re providing a service to adults, you can afford to provide them substandard services because adults can self advocate and also they know how to plan around and accommodate the mistakes. They also are able to notice when something isn’t going right.
Not so with kids.
Not so with kids.
So at the DMV, if it’s inefficient and wastes people’s time, adults are able to (1) know ahead of time and (2) bring a book, or catch up on work or correspondence, or whatever, plan around it.
If you waste kids’ time, We never get it back. They don’t know how to accommodate.
If you waste kids’ time, We never get it back. They don’t know how to accommodate.
And of course wasting their time is one of the least bad ways that public schools fail kids, although it is probably the most pervasive. The worst way is by exposing them to violence and responding to some kids’ needs for attention by giving them a criminal record.
Besides the far far far higher stakes for failing to provide excellent service, schools are unlike the rest of the civil service in that excellent teaching is 1000 times more difficult and rare than is adequate performance at the DMV, or recorder of deeds etc.
Any adult can be trained in finite time to be able to follow the policies and procedures in the office that processes business license applications. That’s kindof the point of a bureaucracy, that the jobs are standardized and the workers interchangeable ...
I don’t think that applies to teaching. Good teachers are entertainers, psychologists AND scholars. There’s no bureaucracy for good writers, and a good teacher has to have similar qualities - drawing you in, making you care, excellent communication.
If you’re convinced that schooling can’t be effective and also can’t be part of the civil service, then why, you might ask, are we here? Why have we had this situation for 150 years?
Three things: (1) as long as we’ve had it, people have complained it’s inadequate, ....
Three things: (1) as long as we’ve had it, people have complained it’s inadequate, ....
(2) elites don’t mostly use the system anyway and (3) by far the most important, people deeply, deeply do not care about the experience of children, and the main function of school, as a practical matter for most adults, is day care ...
And our system is excellent at occupying and supervising kids while parents work (or, it was). As long as that function is filled, it can provide indifferent or abysmal education to almost all students, and it doesn’t really matter.
They system is not working (if by working you mean giving people the tools they need to make a living and be part of a democracy). Google “school to prison pipeline”.
Alternatively, if you think that the purpose of the system is to reproduce class and race divisions in our society, then the system is working quite well.
To that point, if you’re white, and your parents had white collar jobs, and you have a white collar job and you want to say “the system is working, I went to / my kids go to a great public school” then, yes, you are an example of the system working to reproduce class hierarchy.
