Money Is Not the Issue, Part 2

It is starting to cause me physical pain to see people bickering about education funding.  It has come up again because President Obama wants a lot of the money in the stimulus package dedicated to public schools.

Spend more money.  Spend all the money you want.  Public schools, charter schools, vouchers... spend spend spend.  Forget the fact that we, as a nation, already spend more per pupil than every other country in the world on education save one (I think it's Norway) and dump dollars into the system.  It won't help.  The other side will continue to howl that parents don't value education enough, but that ignores the fact that there are plenty of things within the system that we do control and can change to make it work better.  

Our school system is set on a destructive foundation that dehumanizes all involved, and until it changes, all the money in the world won't help.  Until students are treated as something more than products turned out on an assembly line, they will continue to fail.  Until we treat their minds as something more than receptacles for facts that the teachers insert, they will fail.  Until teachers are no longer burdened with the responsibility of forcing or coercing students to learn, turning them into entertainers, babysitters, or tyrants, they will continue to fail.  Throw all the money you want at the problem, but our educational house is built on sand.  Until we restore healthy and proper relationships to a central place in our system, students will continue to learn to hate learning, equating it with the dehumanizing practices of the current system.  Teachers will continue to burn out and turn over.  We will continue to lag behind the rest of the world in test scores, as if that were what this were about.  Until the governing philosophy is changed, we will fail entire generations of children.

More Signs of a Screwed Up System

I sat in a meeting the other day. We were deciding to allow a student to be on a home-based program for health reasons. I know that the area coordinator from the TPS Education Service Center, if she noticed me at all, might have thought I was angry. If I were, it wasn't at her personally.

They decided that the student could "keep up" by completing a computer-based curriculum that, I am sure, is filled with a lot of context-free facts (if it's anything like the computer-based curriculum that we use here). Multiple-choice fun! It's great for training someone to play "Who Wants to be a Millionaire." It's not so great if you want someone to get an education. But it serves as a suitable hoop for our students to jump through, so our school district is content with it.

Then came the kicker for me. If the student has questions or problems understanding what they are "learning," they are to contact strangers at the ECS, not our teachers here, who the student already knows.

This student needs to be at home.  They need to get better.  But our conventions and our laws say the student has to be in school.  Obviously, we have such a low view of learning that we don't think anyone is capable of doing it unless they are either in a school or being overseen by a school.  But the real insanity of this is that the two primary ingredients for learning to take place, those being good ideas and healthy relationships, are not just absent, but REMOVED from the process!  "Here, kid... go sit in front of a computer and play a multiple choice version of Trivial Pursuit.  If you have problems, ask this total stranger who probably cares less about this subject than you do, and see what you can learn from them."

You should have seen the way I was ignored when I voiced my single objection during the meeting:  This is far from how this should be.  The road we are on has brought people to do things that simply don't make sense anymore.