There are a thousand hacking at the branches of evil to one who is striking at the root.
–Henry D. Thoreau
A School Engineered for Failure
Exceprt:
Then, he shared something that I wish was broadcast on every talk radio program in America. The gist of it was that our students never tested well and that assessing their education was useless because they never improved. It was his belief that, through her de-emphasis of instruction which of course could have been gauged statistically, Sparkle had accomplished great things during her tenure. He claimed that we were building characters as opposed to knowledge bases—even though few believed that our students’ characters markedly improved under our care.
It reminded me of that scene in “My Own Private Idaho” where a house plummets from the sky and crashes into the earth. I could not believe what I was hearing. What he outlined defeated the entire purpose of why taxpayers fund the public schools.
And later:
Mention me the next time you hear someone say that small budgets are the biggest reason the public schools fail. Inform them that our schools are congealed by bureaucracy and that some of the bureaucrats, whose salaries match many CEOs, do everything in their power to see that the least threatening changes are the ones they implement. Certainly mine is only one example but, taken together, humanity itself is a summation of six billion examples like mine.
