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Diane Ravitch, a top public education advocate, reports via AlterNet:
This month, the Public Broadcasting System is broadcasting a "documentary" that tells a one-sided story, the story that [Trump's Secretary of Education] Betsy DeVos herself would tell, based on the work of free-market advocate Andrew Coulson. Author of "Market Education", Coulson narrates "School, Inc.", a three-hour program, which airs this month nationwide in three weekly broadcasts on PBS.
Uninformed viewers who see this slickly produced program will learn about the glories of unregulated schooling, for-profit schools, teachers selling their lessons to students on the Internet. They will learn about the "success" of the free market in schooling in Chile, Sweden, and New Orleans. They will hear about the miraculous charter schools across America, and how public school officials selfishly refuse to encourage the transfer of public funds to private institutions. They will see a glowing portrait of South Korea, where students compete to get the highest possible scores on a college entry test that will define the rest of their lives and where families gladly pay for after-school tutoring programs and online lessons to boost test scores. They will hear that the free market is more innovative than public schools.
What they will not see or hear is the other side of the story. They will not hear scholars discuss the high levels of social segregation in Chile, nor will they learn that the students protesting the free-market schools in the streets are not all "Communists", as Coulson suggests. They will not hear from scholars who blame Sweden's choice system for the collapse of its international test scores. They will not see any reference to Finland, which far outperforms any other European nation on international tests yet has neither vouchers nor charter schools. They may not notice the absence of any students in wheelchairs or any other evidence of students with disabilities in the highly regarded KIPP charter schools. They will not learn that the acclaimed American Indian Model Charter Schools in Oakland does not enroll any American Indians, but has a student body that is 60 percent Asian American in a city where that group is 12.8 percent of the student population. Nor will they see any evidence of greater innovation in voucher schools or charter schools than in properly funded public schools.
[...] This program is paid propaganda. It does not search for the truth. It does not present opposing points of view. It is an advertisement for the demolition of public education and for an unregulated free market in education. PBS might have aired a program that debates these issues, but "School Inc." does not.
It is puzzling that PBS would accept millions of dollars for this lavish and one-sided production from a group of foundations with a singular devotion to the privatization of public services. The decision to air this series is even stranger when you stop to consider that these kinds of anti-government political foundations are likely to advocate for the elimination of public funding for PBS. After all, in a free market of television, where there are so many choices available, why should the federal government pay for a television channel?
(Score: 0, Interesting) by Anonymous Coward on Monday June 19 2017, @05:31AM (1 child)
You have got to be kidding me.
The teacher:student ratio is not proven, beyond the most broken examples, to be a key thing. To offer my own anecdotal experience, I graduated from a high school with fantastic results (measured nationally), where the typical class was well over 30, with some in the 40s. It had a lot more to do with good teachers, strict discipline, and a strong academic community that valued education.
But sure, what the hell, let's close our eyes, cherry-pick evidence and swallow uncritically the idea that what we need is MOAR TEECHRZ. Immediately we run into several problems. The first is that hiring teachers is tough. The pay sucks, the qualifications required for advancement are a weird combination of silly and demanding, the theoretical hours required are easy, but the functionally expected additional hours range from long to punishing, the career track is micromanaged by union, and the working environment is straitjacketed. The cream of the crop laugh hysterically, then go off to design electronics, do kidney surgery or trade stocks. Or something, anything else. You're then left with a vanishingly small minority of people who are truly devoted educators, and a vast majority of time-servers who had few realistic alternatives. If you want to hire more, you'll have to offer massively higher pay - and then you'll have to pay all the incumbents more so that they don't get butthurt. This on top of the fact that the USA has the most expensive pre-tertiary educational system per capita in the entire world. (OK, if you cherry-pick your numbers and add certain kinds of vocational training and so on you can make Switzerland look more expensive. I'm sure that will make it easier to pay for MOAR TEECHRZ.)
But let's pretend you have all the cash. Money is no object. You can, and will, pay enough to tempt quants off Wall Street to train the next generation's genius mathematicians. No class is over 10 students. What now? Have you filled every kid with a hunger for learning? Excuse me while I laugh so hard I wet myself, because that's not even a trick question. Wait, wait, here's another good one: have you instilled a decent disciplinary regime in the school, or are we still caught between the detention, suspension and expulsion (and arrest! Yay school cops!) anti-educational choices? Hahaha, I know, crazy, right? Never happen. Let's see, have you filled all the parents with zeal for their kids' educations and future? Man, I kill me!
Real talk: There is such a thing as throwing good money after bad, and doubling down on a failing system that already has such rich resources thrown at it makes no sense at all. Betsy de Vos could be wrong, wrong, wrong on every conceivable level and at least she would be trying to get us out of this terrible hole we're in. Your recommendation looks a lot like: "Shit, we're in a hole. Dig, boys, dig for your lives!"
It's worth pointing out that despite all the money poured into our educational system, teachers don't make all that much. This isn't because we have so many teachers, proportionally, but because we have a terribly wasteful administrative system. This has been covered on Soylent before, but it also bears a surprising resemblance to the story we had recently about the US being bad at infrastructure. Death by bureaucracy. Or, at least, bankruptcy by bureaucracy.
What's your solution for that?
(Score: 3, Interesting) by Phoenix666 on Monday June 19 2017, @10:58AM
It's more than just bureaucracy, though I agree that's execrable. Broken schools are an excellent way to squeeze more money out of overworked parents. "Our schools are failing! The future is in jeopardy. Won't someone please think of the children!" So the taxpayers acquiesce to another levy to raise billions of dollars to "fix" the broken education system. Strangely, however, the billions are never spent on upgrading the schools or improving education. It gets quietly siphoned away in a thousand ways, or sits in escrow collecting interest that gets quietly siphoned away. If the parents continue to yell loudly enough, a few cents on those dollars get spent to put something new and shiny into a few schools. Where the white kids go. The immigrants and poors get nothing.
And so it goes, for decades. Everyone, Republican and Democrat, is in on it. So, yeah, teacher unions don't help at all, but they're the cladding on a rotten core.
Washington DC delenda est.