Originally Posted by Don Capps
Proposition 13 was a huge mistake. Period.
The basic, underlying problem with the US education system in general is that it is based and run on a pseudo-business model and not an educational model.
The current Charter School/ School Reform / Education-for-Profit / School Voucher movement(s) is not only misguided, but doing far more harm than any good that could possibly ever result from their hocus pocus nonsense (nice to say bull$hit). That there are factors beyond even the best teachers seems irrelevant to these lunkheads. Like or not, there are many factors/variables outside the school and classroom that affect the educational process, most of which are beyond the control of the classroom teacher. Holding a classroom "accountable" for what she/he cannot control is crazy; that so many teachers do manage to encourage, inspire, believe in, and support their students is a continuing source of both pride and amazement to me. That the current policies tethered to the tyranny of standardized testing is actually a detriment to educational achievement for those needing it most is both an irony and a consequence of seriously flawed thinking. What incentive is there to teach in a school where despite your best efforts success is minimal at best, while someone who should not even be allowed near a classroom gets credit for having students who chose the right parents?
As the former lead at HQDA for Distance Learning (I was part of the team that developed and then implemented the Army Distance Learing Plan (ADLP) that created the Army Digital Library (ADL)), I am quite aware of the pluses and minuses of on-line/distributed learning. However, DL only goes so far in and of itself. Take a look at the Two Sigma Problem that Bloom observed; we also observed the Two Sigma with the combination of a live instructor with DL or CA (computer-assisted) courseware.
There is a tendency to blame the teachers for everything under the sun in education. The glut of administrative personnel is a result of the pseudo-business model under which education operates. This results in the self-licking ice cream cone where more administrators means that they need to supervise/administer more, therefore, teachers find themselves burdened with more and more time spent dealing with the bureaucracy, time that would ordinarily be devoted to tasks related to the actual teaching of students.
One would ask just what sort of students where involved in your online courses: that is, for starters, where did they fall regarding the poverty line or educational level in the household, and so on. This would make the results better understood.
