A School Engineered for Failure

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.