Addendum to my "John Stossel is an idiot" post

posted by The Vidiot @ 9:01 AM Permalink

Seems that a few folks think I'm wrong with my earlier post that called out John Stossel's "journalistic" report on public schools as being retarded. After a long talk with Mr. Vidiot who REALLY understands the system, please allow me to reiterate and expound.

I reiterate, John Stossel is an idiot because:

He took wholly unrelated issues, manufactured false conclusions, relied on on hyperbole and rhetoric to support his overall conclusion that public schools need competition in order to succeed. His techniques were little more than cheap, emotional ploys used to manipulate the viewer in order to make them feel enough outrage and frustration so that when the conclusion was presented, they had no choice but to agree with it and think it was logical.

Now, I'm going to expound:

What's wrong with the schools is NOT that they don't have competition. The ENTIRE system is dysfunctional. The entire system must be destroyed. But, since that's not going to happen, here are some conservative ideas that WILL work.

One of the major problems in the public schools is that the teachers have no power whatsoever. They have retarded administrators telling them what to do and the retarded administrators have retarded bureaucrats telling THEM what to do. For the most part, administrators and bureaucrats have no experience in education. Many of them have never even been in a classroom. Some have, sure. But they worked as a teacher until they were promoted out of the classroom. So think about that for a moment; if you're good at what you do, they PROMOTE you and take you OUT of the classroom. Stupid, right? It's all upside down. Teachers should be at the top, administrators below and bureaucrats even lower.

As the system stands now, teachers are completely demoralized. They're told they have to 'punch in' and if they arrive even one minute late, they are told they'll get a 'letter in their permanent record.' If they have a free period, they are not allowed to leave the building. I've even heard of a teacher being arrested the day after she left work early (she didn't have a last period class) and was charged with 'theft of time.' The administrators abuse them, the students abuse them, and the parents abuse them because everybody knows that a teacher is nothing but a bug in the system and the smallest, most vulnerable bug at that. So, of course you have teachers who behave badly. They're like abused animals and children. Treat someone like crap long enough and you'll be left with a shell of a human being. And don't give me the "what about the sexual predator teachers" because frankly, it's not that big of a problem. It just garners a lot of media attention so you THINK there's lots of it going around. If what I suggest below is instituted, your sexual predator teacher problem will almost completely disappear. (I say almost only because there's always going to be one bad apple.)

The demoralization of teachers needs to stop. And here are a few suggestions on how to do that:

• Teaching should be a discipline, like sociology or physics or anything else.
• Teachers should come up with a curriculum. At present, they do not. Curriculum is decided upon by the State.
• Teachers should decide how students are taught and administrators should be there to merely facilitate that. It's quite the opposite now.
• Like any discipline, teachers should have a long tenure track where they must participate in committees, publish, be active in school functions, basically take criticism from their peers, coaching from their peers, and finally, evaluation by their peers and maybe acceptance by their peers.
• Teachers must themselves decide what they can best teach, not an administrator, as is done now. (Trust me, there are English majors teaching math out there.)
• Teachers must police themselves. If a sociologist writes a bad paper or supports a bad theory, his peers will tear him to shreds and he's either shamed and leaves the discipline or rethinks, relearns and tries again, thereby becoming a better sociologist.
• Teachers must be paid more than administrators and bureaucrats. Right now, the retarded administrator who can't even arrange to have pencils handy during state-ordered standardized tests gets paid 30-40 thousand more than a long-time teacher.

How does one accomplish turning teachers from just a job to a discipline? For one thing, you have to fire EVERYBODY; teachers, administrators and bureaucrats. Then, rehire almost everyone with the new hierarchy and procedures mentioned above. For another thing, the schools that teach education have to change their focus from methods to theory and criticism. Additionally, teachers, like any other discipline, have to write and publish on education. Right now, most of the theory and criticism comes out of sociology and psychology departments, people who probably haven't even been in a public school during their entire lives.

Most of all, the State has to get out of education. Leave it alone. It should not be an institution they even touch. Does the state dictate what physicists study and teach? No. Physicists research and move their discipline in the direction they see fit. The State doesn't tell them to study string theory over quantum theory. Of course not. It should be the same in public schools, (which, frankly, should just be called 'free schools'). Moreover, the teachers should decide how best to serve their community. Right now, the 'one curriculum fits all' system is trying to teach poor working class kids white, bourgeois ideas. Of course they're not going to pay attention or want to learn that. They want to rebel against that because it doesn't relate to them, the don't feel any connection to it, they feel they're repressed by it and they resent having it thrust in their faces.

I have no problem with competition between schools; Yale competes with Harvard competes with Boston University, etc. But the Stossel report presented competition like it was the ONLY thing that was wrong with the public school system. That everything else being the same, competition was the only thing that needed to change in order to make it all work. That's wrong, it's stupid, it's reductionist, it's overly simplistic, it's completely retarded and it's disingenous to think that one little thing like competition will cure what ails the system. THAT'S why I called him an idiot.

Now, I hope I've made myself clear.

Update: A few more things that popped into my head after another jolt of caffeine:

1. Some might say "I know a teacher or two who REALLY shouldn't be allowed to police themselves." Well, under the system proposed here, those teachers would never get tenure and would be drummed out of the discipline early in their careers.
2. What about standards? How would we know our 'childrens is learning'? Under the above system, reputation is VERY important. Standardized tests would be unneccessary. If kids are coming out of a school and not being able to do simple multiplication, word would spread and those teaches would be ostracized and removed by the community. Think of a college that has physics majors that can't explain simple quantum theory. That department would fold, be replaced and they'd try again.

I'm not saying what I (and Mr. Vidiot) have come up with there is 100% perfect but MY GOD it's a far sight better than what we have now.

Update 2: See? I'm not the only one who gets it. In response to this article stating that Rupert Murdoch thinks Obama should kill the teachers union to save education, Mike Rivero of whatreallyhappened.com got it right:

"The real problem is that our educational system, besides being crippled by a union that turned the teaching profession into the teaching trade, has dropped education in favor of indoctrination."

Labels: corporate owned media, Education