Lets face it, the education system represented in my state (the wonderful land of potatoes, Idaho!) is beyond inferior to the rest of the country. There are many reasons for this, and none of it (at least in the grand scheme of things) is due to the actual educators. It has more to do with the administration and the local populous prefering their interstates repaved twice a year to a quality classroom.
Any decent educator can tell you that a small class size will produce better educated children, simply due to the fact you can get to know your students better, and spend more time assisting them individually instead of the old college stand-by of cram and spam (30+students/classroom+teacher/prof who just lectures w/o any real emphasis or feeling or personality...). Current classroom policies being discussed right now ask that classroom cap sizes (which are generally 10 less of what the actual average class size is) be increased to 28-30 students/class. That is rediculous, considering what teaching already infers with students. With that proposal, they also suggest that every secondary student be given a laptop to keep. Sure, tech junkies will be impressed, but really, a cheap laptop handed out en masse is only a concoction for trouble. If you were ever a teenager, and given something technologically fancy that could be accessed during class, you were never really doing classwork. You were probably texting, listening to music, checkin social websites, or looking at porn. Lets get serious, who the hell thinks laptops are a good solution? I know myself now here in college, and in lecture classes (i.e spam-crams) i just pull out my laptop for "notetaking" and play tetris while updating blogger or facebook, useful. And unless I'm much mistaken, 18 year old me wasn't any more ambitious or trustworthy with such things (thankyou mp3 players, you broke highschool boredom). That's strike two.
Strike three: the new plan proposes to cut aroun 874 teaching positions-not "school faculty," but teachers. Those same rediculously overqualified and underpaid public servants that we all entrust to pave the way for a better tomorrow-we want to gut them. I personally have an issue with this because basically everyone I am friends with are planning on becoming educators of some sort, and the threat of them not being able to find a job and make a difference in people's lives is disturbing to me.
The cycle will remain as it is now, that students of today will get a stupid education. They will live stupid lives in ignorance and assume that education is not neccessary (or as the colloquialism around here is, "a waste of time"), and they will reproduce (more likely than not with more than three kids since this is a rural state) and pass the values that a good education has little value to their offspring. How wonderful. So in 20years, Idaho will be controlled by a bunch of idiots who still prefer their roads to the state of their society, remaining in blissful ignorence of the world's problems.
Education is not a buisiness, trying to run it as such will run it into the ground. It isn't just on a wide scale that this happens (no child left behind does a good job screwing the pooch nationally, certain elected officials in this state keep "streamlining" the education machine, and at my local university certain higher officials keep trying to do backhanded financial deals) which is why certain ideas can be used in a multitude of ways.
-Invest in your educators-higher qualified people have more options available to them, so make it worth their while to be part of your institution.
-Keep buildings and materials up to date. This is going to be the "upkeep" and second most expensive portion of a school system's budget. New books, new gym equipment, building expansions/constructions, etc... Without these things up to date, learning will quickly diminish in its value.
-Don't ever sell yourselves for personal gain. I know, a politician that isn't crooked is as real as the tooth fairy, but sometimes they take throwbacks from sources unrelated (and non-interferring) to their office. When you let a third party invest in people you technically have no say over, the results are tumultuous at best.
-Students are not a product, their education will set the stage of the world decades from now. There is a vast repitoryof studies done on how a person's primary education experiences directly correlate with how they will behave within society as well as a person later on in life. This is not coincidence considering we are creatures of habit, and therefor, what we start with is usually what we want to end with even if we don't like it. So don't nickle and dime them like they were a used car, they will be controlling your life someday, whether you like the thought of it or not.
That's a rant that I've been wanting to put down for a few days now. So it goes.
You are right about all of this, to be sure. I just wish there was a way to make the people who can actually make a difference listen.
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